We've been working very hard to get our new web store launched for the holidays. We're currently blocked on a data corruption bug, where Lightspeed data for our products' Web Category assignments are totally wrong. They don't match what is set in Lightspeed.
The good news is that we have a software engineer available, who wrote a Magento script to show exactly how Lightspeed Retail POS is pushing the wrong data into Magento. The bad news is that Lightspeed is closed source, and our debugging stops there.
The output below is part of a diff (shows what changes) before and after we updated the web store from Lightspeed. As you can see, the last four items were not assigned a category [388, Straining Bags]. That category was incorrectly assigned to the wrong item instead [Product 102, ... Art of Making Wine].
-- oct20-data1.txt 2013-10-21 01:36:52.000000000 +0000 +++ oct20-data2b.txt 2013-10-21 01:46:42.000000000 +0000 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ Loading products... done. -Got 230 products.. Loading categories... +Got 245 products.. Loading categories... Got 187 categories. Product 62, 484, Cinnamon Sticks 1 oz organic: [424,Brewing Herbs], Product 63, 353, Sweet orange peel 1oz: [424,Brewing Herbs], @@ -42,18 +42,18 @@ Product 99, 260, Moonshine : [304,Other], Product 100, 639, Homebrewer's Companion: [300,Brewing Beer], Product 101, 200, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers : [300,Brewing Beer], -Product 102, 152, Art of Making Wine: [302,Wine / Cider / Mead], -Product 103, 331, Making the Best Apple Cider: [302,Wine / Cider / Mead], -Product 104, 155, Homemade Rootbeer, Soda & Pop: [304,Other], -Product 105, 969, Homemade Cheese: [301,Cheese Making], +Product 102, 152, Art of Making Wine: [302,Wine / Cider / Mead],[388,Straining Bags], +Product 103, 331, Making the Best Apple Cider: [302,Wine / Cider / Mead],[388,Straining Bags], +Product 104, 155, Homemade Rootbeer, Soda & Pop: [304,Other],[388,Straining Bags], +Product 105, 969, Homemade Cheese: [301,Cheese Making],[388,Straining Bags], +Product 292, 102, Sparging Bag 6.5 G: +Product 293, 103, Straining Bag Large Fine: +Product 294, 104, Muslin Hop Bag: +Product 295, 105, Nylon Hop Bag:
What this means, is that all the items on our web store are shuffled like a deck of cards into the wrong categories. Many are not categorized at all. It is a total mess, and we've been blocked on it for almost three weeks, with no hope of a fix. I hope Lightspeed comes through for us, so we can get back to writing positive reviews and migration guides for their software. If not, it is going to make for a very sad holiday story for our small business.
By now you may be noticing that this blog is changing from "Hey everybody, switch from Quickbooks POS to Lightspeed Retail, here's how" to "here are issues with Lightspeed". Ultimately, we want Lightspeed succeed. We try to give feedback and support tickets to them first, and give them time to respond. If we don't see any progress we feel the best way to help is to share our experiences publicly to create a case for change. In this case, we're in a difficult position and pretty nervous about our investment--our business is at stake.
UpdateDec 15, 2013. We just received a fix for this issue. Thanks to Lightspeed for working on this and getting us a build to fix it. We effectively missed our shopping season for the new webstore, but look forward to switching over in the next couple of days. Having integration with our point of sale will be awesome.
