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.