Lightspeed Inventory Management Review 2022 – Top 10 Inventory Management Services
When it comes to completing sales, POS systems are a necessity, but which provider you need depends on your company’s size and industry. There is a wide range of pricing options and advanced e-commerce and loyalty features to choose from, making Lightspeeds the best point-of-sale system for small to medium-sized retailers. All aspects of retail, including inventory management, customer relations, and employee management, can be handled by the platform’s point-of-sale software. Hundreds of integrations are available, along with the ability to generate sophisticated reports and select payment processors.
Lightspeed Inventory Management
You and your staff can take advantage of free training provided by the company to make the most of the software's capabilities across your organization. There are not many of Lightspeed's competitors offering a dedicated account manager with each plan. These services have been included to ensure a smooth implementation and onboarding process.
However, the platform is not suitable for the following;
New Businesses with Limited SKUs
If you have a small number of products, you may not require all of the company's functionality and may be better served by a more simplified mobile POS tool for new businesses.
Enterprises on a Budget
A free POS system may better serve small businesses on a budget if they don't want advanced inventory management features and the most economical solution.
Food-Based Retailers
While the service provider can handle a large amount of inventory, food-based retailers, such as supermarkets and convenience stores as well as cafes and coffee shops, demand features that can manage perishable items, ingredient-level monitoring, menu item creation, and native local delivery tools.
- Simple to Use
- The key advantages of the platform include its ability to streamline inventory management, provide analytical data, offer necessary POS capabilities, and give a smooth management system. Lightspeed Retail streamlines and accelerates inventory management procedures, including product movement, stock monitoring, and more. You can develop customized comprehensive data summaries and high-level sales projections to get useful information and insights based on which you may make wise business choices.
- It Has All the Tools Necessary for POS Operations
- One advantage we constantly point out in our assessments of the platform is that it's on-site and provides all the tools required to carry out POS operations, including estimating, billing, and ordering. You may use the app's capabilities to help your consumers at each sales cycle stage. The key advantages are the ability to create products, schedule meetings, and charge for time.
- Easy to Switch from Management to Sales
- Switching f
- Although the platform is a fantastic POS for shops, there are a few possible downsides to consider. It is more challenging to estimate the cost of the whole system since the website does not publish its pricing for POS hardware from third parties. Checking the list of eligible items and then doing your comparison shopping might take some time. Check out our assessment of Clover if you are seeking a POS solution with upfront hardware costs.
- Likewise, using the platform could require you to give up your present processor since it provides fewer options than some of its competitors. The internal processing service Lightspeed Payments is available in such a situation. However, other rivals provide you with greater latitude in selecting your payment processor.
- Is The Company Right for You?
- Yes. You may manage a successful online and in-person retail store with a POS system using the platform, which includes all the functionality you need. A big selling point is that each of its four retail
About Company
Founded in Montreal, Canada, Lightspeed Inventory Management provides POS and e-commerce software. Dax da Silva started the firm in 2005 and remained CEO until February 2022. Likewise, the company has offices in Ghent, Santa Cruz, Ottawa, Montreal, and New York City.
It is hard to beat Lightspeed’s powerful and detailed inventory management tools for keeping track of big volumes of inventory and tabs on the things coming in and going out of your store. In addition to giving a visual representation of the data, it also provides important takeaways and ideas, visuals, advice, and directions on how to analyze it.
Likewise, the platform provides an extensive online storefront that matches the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce. This allows you to manage all of your sales channels from a single interface and link your online shop with your POS system smoothly. The company excels in the following areas:
Large Inventory Management
Lightspeed, the premier retail POS inventory system, receives a higher rating in most POS inventory software solutions reviews. Product monitoring, bulk import, update facilities, and a customized matrix inventory are all available to retailers with many SKUs.
Multichannel Businesses
The platform provides a powerful ecommerce system with unified inventory management for brick-and-mortar companies with several branches or big product portfolios.
Enterprises Searching For an iPad POS
The service provider is a cloud-based POS system that runs on any computer, making it perfect for retailers. The software also comes with an iPad app and a mobile credit card reader that can be used on the sales floor or at the customer’s doorstep to process orders.
Specialty Retailers
Those in the jewelry, repair, bicycle, and electrical industries and other businesses that cater to specific customer needs like custom orders or maintenance will find that the platform’s work order management features are a perfect match. Because of its age-verification features, Light speed retail is our preferred solution for vape stores.
Services
Retailers of various stripes may benefit from the adaptability of the company’s point of sale system. With Lightspeed, small and medium-sized businesses can take advantage of everything they need to grow and compete with chain stores. It features a solid online marketplace with incorporated marketing tools and an omnichannel customer loyalty program, but its key selling points are its robust inventory and analytics capabilities. Here are the services you will get;
- Register Checkout
Barcode scanning and a product search capability are available on the checkout page in Lightspeed. There are several ways in which you may find what you are looking for on the site, including checking by name, product code, or keyword. When you begin a transaction, the cursor will immediately go to the item field, so if you begin scanning or entering items, the products will be included in the sale, which is not the case with previous POS systems.
One of the best features of the checkout system is that you may quit the transaction and then return to it at any moment to finish the sale, whether you are looking at your inventory log or customer list. With Lightspeed’s checkout procedure, you may also use gift cards, layaway, on-hold, cash, check, credit, debit, and NFC digital wallet transactions.
Likewise, the service provider allows you to tie a customer to the sale, establish customer profiles, and add custom comments to each transaction. Additionally, you may apply individual items and total sale discounts, but you can only pick from those that have already been specified in your preferences. Limiting the discount options available to your staff ensures that they only add legitimate discounts and avoid making promotional mistakes.
- Inventory Management
A little more expensive than the competitors, but the provider’s inventory capabilities are included in every plan making the POS system a good value. There is a valid explanation behind this. Its s extensive inventory management and reporting features set it apart from competing for point-of-sale systems. In contrast to Square and Shopify, the platform is designed to handle massive sales and order quantities while organizing and tracking huge amounts of inventory.
A wide range of inventory management features are built into the program, including real-time stock counts, customized reorder points, complete inventory catalogs with rich product descriptions, and the ability to categorize goods using tags and divisions. If you are interested in keeping tabs on the performance of bundled or kitted items, you may use serial numbers and SKUs. Lightspeed’s analytics page contains all of your inventory’s data and some helpful insights.
With larger inventory amounts and order management tools, Lightspeed’s distinguishing features truly come into action. Using the POS system, you may handle items bought in bulk but sold separately, such as water bottles or build-your-own six-packs. With its built-in buy order forms, order tracking, and linked supplier network directory, you can easily manage your inventory orders. The platform allows you to discover merchants, buy their items, and then arrange and manage those things all from a single dashboard—all without the involvement of any third parties.
- Reporting and Analytics
Although the platform’s comprehensive analytics tool (which we strongly suggest for organizations aiming to expand) is only accessible in the Advanced plan, Reporting is provided with all tiers and includes over 50 built-in reports for income, stock, and staff performance.
Lightspeed Inventory Management will not only show you how your business and inventory are doing in current and historical time, but the POS software can predict shopping patterns and notify you of impending supply shortages. This makes it easy to maintain the correct things in stock at the right moment. Similarly, you can detect outdated inventory that is depleting your cash flow, display your top-performing goods, and enable to run reports on individual inventory items and categories.
You may get more in-depth data and create bespoke reports for your organization using an advanced plan analytics tool. Sales and inventory, employee performance, and customers and marketing are the three distinct areas under which insights are divided on the analytics dashboard. Each category has its own insights page.
- Ecommerce
Lightspeed Inventory Management provides a strong online selling option for brick-and-mortar merchants that interacts easily with your POS system. However, it does not operate as an independent ecommerce platform like Shopify or BigCommerce.
Choose from more than 50 well-designed, mobile-friendly styles that can be tailored to your shop to start developing your e-commerce website. Themes created expressly for clothing, bicycles, electronics, home decor, jewelry, athletic goods, and other specialty stores are available. Increase the level of depth on your product pages, upload high-definition pictures, and use meta descriptions, keyword tags, and page headers to improve the SEO of your product listings. Additionally, you may add features like a blog, customer reviews, sizing charts, and integrated videos.
Users may register profiles once the service is online to write product evaluations, initiate a return or exchange, see in-store inventory across all locations, and make wish lists. At the same time, your POS system will provide real-time data on all online orders, inventory levels, e-shop traffic, and overall business performance. From a single platform, you can receive information about your online shop, compare its effectiveness, handle your orders, and keep track of how your customer database expands across all of your sales channels.
- Loyalty, Customer Management, and Pricing
Each of Lightspeed’s subscriptions comes with a customer list where you can keep track of your customers’ details and see their past purchases. However, you will receive digital advertising tools like email marketing, blogging, and monitoring client behavior if you upgrade to the Standard package. Additionally, the Advanced plan gives you access to an omnichannel loyalty program based on grades that reward consumers for purchases made in any of your stores or through your website. It also provides automatic smart customer groups, classified awards, and one-time prizes like those for VIP clients or birthdays.
Plans and Pricing
The user can choose monthly, yearly, or multi-year payments. You will pay less if you sign a contract for a longer period. There are no installation or setup costs. If your company has many locations, get in touch with customer care support for a unique quotation. Like its rivals, the company provides a demo and a 14-day free trial.
They have many tiered solutions designed especially for stores, cafes, and golf companies rather than restricting you to just one or two POS plans. The provider gives one free POS register with each software package, and additional registers cost $29 per month, unlike other POS companies, who insist that you buy hardware and software independently. More plans include the capability to collect payments using Lightspeed Payments, the company’s in-house payment processor. The processing fees for payments are comparable to those in the market.
Retail POS
The company may provide you with a choice of four programs if you own a retail company, namely;
Lean Plan
If paid yearly, this plan costs $69 per month; if paid monthly, it costs $79 per month. One register, Lightspeed CRM Retail POS software, integrated payments, round-the-clock customer assistance, individualized onboarding and training, and a designated account manager are all included.
Standard Plan
The plan has a monthly cost of $139 when paid monthly or $119 when paid yearly. In addition to accounting and e-commerce connectivity, it incorporates everything from the Lean subscription.
Advanced Plan
This plan costs $239 if paid monthly or $199 yearly. Everything from the Standard package is available, including analytics and an omnichannel loyalty module.
Enterprise Plan
The cost of this package depends on your requirements. All of the Advanced plan features are included, along with individual onboarding and consultancy services, an outstanding customer experience manager and premium support staff, API counseling and help, and favorable Light speed Payments rates.
Restaurant POS
Lightspeed’s restaurant POS system is equally remarkable, even though we selected it as the best for retail firms. It has tableside purchasing, customer management capabilities, analytics, and connectors unique to restaurants, enabling an infinite number of users. Each registration has a monthly fee of $39. Its supplemental features, including gift cards, loyalty programs, and enhanced inventory and analytics, are comparable to those of other restaurant management systems.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Software Run on Computer?
There is a lot of room for debate here. Mac and Windows computers can run Lightspeed Retail. The POS app, on the other hand, is only compatible with iPads. The company’s retail help center may find a list of compatible devices.
Is it Possible to Use the Software in Conjunction with QuickBooks?
The platform can interface with QuickBooks Online so that you can keep track of your sales and money. They can automate the nightly synchronization of your sales data with QuickBooks Online after you have linked the two. This is a potential solution for you if you have a single shop or numerous locations.
Can I Use the Platform Offline?
As long as you and your customers are not affected, you do not have to worry. Lightspeed Restaurant may be used both on and off the internet. Everything will be in sync as soon as your connection is restored.
