LightSpeed Retail Acquires MerchantOS, Rebrands as LightSpeed Cloud

LightSpeed, makers of LightSpeed Retail Point of Sale (POS), today announced that they've acquired the web-based POS company MerchantOS, and will be selling their solution under the new name LightSpeed Cloud.

The news that LightSpeed was launching a new and separate POS product was met with some skepticism from existing LightSpeed Retail (now LightSpeed Pro) customers who have been asking for some critical missing features for years now.  However, the fact that LightSpeed acquired its new cloud offering by acquiring MerchantOS, and not by diverting existing resources, is good news.   It appears that the reason for the acquisition was the desire for a cloud POS offering, that features the "any device, anywhere" deployment and trades off a large up-front cost for a startup-friendly monthly fee.

The fact that the two POS offerings do not interoperate is a negative, and hopefully they will at least offer a data migration path between the two in the future.

The re-branded Lightspeed Cloud has an attractive new look and feel, compared to the existing MerchantOS. Experienced retailers who have dealt with Internet or website downtime, however, may be shy to depend on a web-only solution.  I could not find any mention of an offline mode to the web interface.  Presumably, if your Internet connection or their servers go down, you are out of business.  With the existing Mac-based LightSpeed Pro, however, you could continue to run cash sales and manual credit card slips until your Internet comes back.  We've had at least ten instances of Internet downtime in the last 9 months, and switching between the two Internet providers in the area hasn't helped.  If we were on MerchantOS we would have been pretty unhappy.

While we are passionate about the need for better point of sale software, and support LightSpeed's efforts to fill the gaps in the market, we believe they should focus more on fixing the existing POS software's major issues, and less on flashy new products.

When creating software, the last 5% of bug fixes and features take 50% of the effort.  It takes tremendous discipline to finish the job and ship a complete and robust package.  Here's hoping they make the changes necessary to become an organization that can accomplish this.  They are pretty close.

Major Pain Points for LightSpeed Retail POS

We recently deployed LightSpeed Retail POS in our brick-and-mortar store.  We have about 1500 different items, and sell many things in bulk.  This post lists some of the major issues we are running into with LightSpeed Retail POS (currently version 3.8.1.0).

Update: We are currently experiencing data corruption with Lighspeed POS.  Updates posted here.  

 No Fractional Cents for Product Costs

When you enter the cost of an item, you are not allowed to enter a cost with fractional cents.  For example, for a bulk foods section, assume you buy your Wheat Flour in 50 pound bags with a supplier cost of 41.92 per bag.  You should enter a product called "Wheat Flour Bulk per lb" with a supplier cost of 1.19275.  When you order from your supplier, you order qty 50 for each bag, and the PO cost would be correct.

In LightSpeed, however, you are not allowed to enter more than two decimal places of cost.  You are forced to enter a supplier cost of 1.19.  This means your POs are all wrong.  You may think about using build/break apart as a workaround, and creating an additional item called "50 lb bag, wheat flour", but this is a horrible solution for many reasons.  (Staff has to exit point of sale, do break aparts, receiving is complicated, searches are complicated, inventory is screwed up, errors are multiplied, etc.).

Because of this issue, we basically cannot use ordering from LightSpeed for many of our suppliers.  It is a huge headache.  Many other people have complained about this for years now.

Inventory Count Tools Are Near Useless

With 1500 different products, the existing inventory counting tools in LightSpeed Retail POS (version 3.8.1.0) are useless.  They give you one tool, "Count Inventory", which requires that you enter a count for every one of your items.  Your are expected to do this in one small window.  The interface bogs down very badly with this many items.  It doesn't support any sane model of inventory counting, where you count one department (LightSpeed Class or Family) at a time.

What we need is a transactional document for each inventory adjustment.  This inventory adjustment needs to be given a reason and a date, and that reason needs to be passed through to the accounting (General Ledger or GL) system as a memo.  This allows for proper accounting due to theft (very important after a shoplifting event), and also end of year inventory.

You can export all your items to a spreadsheet, then filter by department (class / family), then enter a new column with your counts, then re-import the spreadsheet, but this is impossible for retail staff to do. It requires an IT consultant.  Our retail staff should not need to know how to manipulate .csv files or have the privilege to do mass product imports which can easily nuke all your data.

Magento Web Store Integration Is Half Baked

Also take a look at our article on the promise and shortcomings of Lightspeed Retail POS integration with Magento web store.  It is clear this functionality is not quite ready for enterprise use.