Lightspeed Retail POS and Magento Webstore Integration

We're finally getting to one of the main reasons we switched to Lightspeed Retail Point of Sale (POS): Integration with Magento web store.   Honestly, we're a little disappointed with how the two systems integrate.  Here are our thoughts on how the two systems work together.  Also see our article on the major pain points we have in-store using Lightspeed Retail POS.  Please correct any mistakes in the comments below.

Magento Integration is The Killer Feature

First off, Magento integration is a brilliant feature for a retail point of sale (POS), especially these days. Brick and mortar retailers really need to be able to showcase their items online to compete. It gives customers who want to shop local all the advantages of shopping online. Mainly, you can browse products in your underwear in bed, with a cup of coffee.  You can see what is in stock before you drive to the store, or you can have it delivered.

But Lightspeed's Integration Needs A Lot of Work

Unfortunately, the integration between Lightspeed (LS) and Magento appears to be very minimal, feature wise. To use Lightspeed to manage your inventory, you'll have to forgo many great Magento features. Most of this is because: 

1. Lightspeed (LS) doesn't support partial product updates on most attributes.  Want to change a group of products' categories?   The only automated way I see to do this, deletes all your Magento product product data, and reuploads from LS.
2. Lightspeed does not synchronize much of the data Magento uses.  Product reviews, tags, related items, and so on.

The combination of these two things hurts a great deal in production.  Product reviews, for example, is the reason many people shop on amazon.com.  Magento is great for accumulating product reviews, but as soon as you need to update something like a product photo or category in Lightspeed, you'll have to delete your product reviews, as Lightspeed does not remember them.  This is just the tip of the iceburg.

How It Should Work

Let me propose an idea of how this integration could work better.

1. Lightspeed becomes smart enough to update products without resetting them.
2. Lightspeed (LS) does a proper merge of changes from LS to Magento.  If it detects conflicts (things which were edited on the web and in LS), it presents a list to the user and allows them to resolve the conflicts, choosing which version of each change they want to keep.

I even offered to help implement this functionality.  We want it that bad. (Update November 7, the window on this offer is probably closing.)

Our Recommendation

Until these major issues are updated, we believe customers may be better served with another system.  Using Lightspeed's Web Store product (an alternative to Magento), is a poor solution in our opinion, as it does not have the rich features or proven ability to scale that Magento has.  (They just rewrote the thing from scratch.)  It also locks you into a very small ecosystem, compared to Magento.  You can find Magento developers and plugins anywhere.  Not the case for Lightspeed Web Store.

Before we switched from QuickBooks POS, we looked at a 3rd party Magento connector.  At the time we thought it looked half-baked or hacky, but now that we've seen the Lightspeed Magento connector as well, it is clear the former is much more full-featured.  Comparing the ratings for the eCC Quickbooks Magento connector and the Lightspeed Retail connector seems to validate this opinion.  Currently the Quickbooks connector has twice the downloads, and almost twice the rating.

Disclaimer

This information is based on my initial Magento deployment (as of Lightspeed 3.8.1.0 and Magento 1.7.x).  I could be wrong on some things, but the lack of documentation on the Lightspeed/Magento connector doesn't help.