CHMA  Lightspeed was a disaster for our retail business.

I've never met a point of sale program that was so difficult to use and so easy to make mistakes with. My true review would be thousands of words long to list all of the problems we had with this program. The short version: It is far to easy for people to make mistakes simply ringing up sales. Ringing up customers takes twice as long as other programs - many mouse clicks needed, no shortcut key for quantity (this was a huge time killer for us as customers buy a lot of little items at a time, with different quantities for each), I was surprised to have no way to hold receipts, no place to enter a coupon to discount the whole sale (must discount a specific item which affects your margins in reports, so we had to create a product called coupon and charge a negative quantity for it). Even the payment screen takes so many unnecessary steps - click here, select that, swipe card, move cursor to button to tell it to process the card, click process, click OK to acknowledge swipe was successful, then click print, then tell it how many copies, then click print again, etc. Streamline this process please! It's so easy to mis-swipe a credit card and then print out a complete receipt, giving you the illusion that someone has paid, but looking at the bottom it says paid zero. It's very easy to swipe a card twice for the same transaction - no warning given that you've already charged a customer for this sale. Very difficult to refund a customer back to their credit card. Even watched the tutorial while the poor customer stood there and was no help with our problem. If you scan a UPC that's not in the system it doesn't warn you, it just puts nothing on the receipt, so when ringing up multiple items it's super easy to miss an item. If you click save before going to payment screen, the system removes all the items on that receipt from inventory (instead of removing them when sale is complete). If a customer changes their mind on an item before paying it is a very difficult process to put the item back into inventory and very easy for inventory numbers to be inaccurate. They need to make payment screens much more streamlined and help us to make sure it's not so easy for employees to make mistakes when ringing people up. We lost a lot of money in inventory sent out the door. We spent hours renaming all of our 3000 or so inventory items to make them searchable in the invoice screen (invoice screen only searches for product description, so had to add the manufacturer, color size, etc to every product description in case it had to be searched for when ringing up.)

Ordering process was also a nightmare - We do loads of ordering every day from over 300 vendors, 5 or 6 of which are big distributors that we order from - each carry up to 600 items that we have to choose from. I have to be able to see what's available from each and choose from that list - the only way to do that is to open products, view the ones where my distributor is the supplier, then drag items into an open PO. Very difficult to fit both of these windows onto the same screen, so lots of switching back and forth.Very very easy to make mistakes (carefully dragging an item down frequently resulted in the wrong item showing up! The one I dragged wasn't the one that made it onto the order, so have to drag, click on the PO window to make sure the right item made it on, then mouse click the quantity to change it, go back to the product screen, etc. With my old 6 year old software it took us about 45 minutes to order from one of those distributors. With lightspeed it was an hour and a half. With my new Quickbooks point of sale program, I can pull up a screen that has an empty row next to my inventory numbers for that distributor, I type in the quantities using my down arrow and my quantitiy shortcut key, and click enter at the end, which populates a PO with everything I chose. Ordering now takes me about 15 minutes. Receiving a PO is overly complicated as well, with too many clicks and saves, no place to put very simple things like freight charges, or discounts from a supplier (again we had to create new products called freight and supplier discounts, and then the system is fussy about the fact that they have no product codes or suppliers for freight, which caused us to set up a new vendors for it, etc. Am I the only retailer that has to pay freight for a delivery?) Changing a price as you receive an item doesn't update the costs for that product, so separate cost adjustments have to be made for each item, etc. Time wasters.

Learning lightspeed is very difficult process. It's surprisingly non-intuitive, especially for a MAC product. The tutorials are very incomplete, support takes 24 hours to get back to you, and the solutions they suggest invariably cause new problems. It's a frustrating, time wasting, bloated piece of software that seems like no one ever tried to use it in a retail situation before putting it on the market. It can do so many things, but for a retail situation where we essentially just need a program to help us keep track of inventory, ring up and keep track of customers easily, and order and receive products quickly. We did almost 1000 sales items in the first few weeks, and still we felt like it was getting no easier. I think Lightspeed has a lot of work to do to make this program fit what you think a Mac program should be - easy to use, easy to learn. This is neither, and it costs a bundle.

  
(Version 2.8.6)

ALBERTP  anyone should be warned before purchasing this xsilva webstore program. the program itself is on the expensive side but this is not the issue. it is the hours and hours of IT and programming that is incurred to get this program to work. the customer service is TERRIBLE!!

you will be paying an hourly rate (my IT person is $125 an hour to sit and wait for HOURS ..and many times not get a call back until the next day. your issues never get resolved but customer service is unreliable and you spend THOUSANDS of dollars and not get anywhere. THIS IS A RECESSION. i have found xsilva to be unreliable, unaccountable. you do not want to spending money today or really ever on such a product. there are only 2 customer service technicians to help 200 customers and each call is approximately an hour. this is not an user friendly product and is marketed as such. i have had a XSILVA TRAINED IT PERSON AND A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER WHO CANNOT FIGURE THIS OUT. your $125 an hour IT person who has been trained by xsilva needs to contact xsilva to solve the issues. please whoever is thinking of purchasing this product BEWARE.   
(Version 2.8.3)

MATTHEW.MATHIS  I do think Lightspeed is good software, but it is not working out well for my company. I do not have a storefront, but Lightspeed looked like it would handle quoting and invoicing with ease. I am only listing the things that this software does not do and items that have frustrated me. All of the following comments are complaints on a piece of software that is OK at many of the things I need it for. It could be better though, and here is why:

Contacts: I truly do not understand why software that costs $10 dollars can integrate directly with the Apple Address Book and why Lightspeed does not. I have to drag vCards into Lightspeed to add a customer. Any info changed in Address Book or Lightspeed does not sync. I was told that this program included a CRM. It absolutely does not! I can log my calls. THATS IT!! How is that a CRM? It does not track email, do email campaigns, link contacts to businesses or each other or track sales progress.

Timesheets: Just an idea, but why not make time-sheets usable to people out in the field? If this product is to be marketed to sales and installers there needs to be a way for employees to log in and start/stop their time. One more reason for me to use yet another program.

Invoicing: What I really like is that you can attach pictures to each product for a better looking quote. The problem is that every other aspect of the quote is a pain. I am unable to make comments where I need to. There is no way to customize the look beyond changing your logo. Using Quotewerks and Microsoft Money I was able to make a line bold. This comes in really handy when I need to break the estimate into sections such as different rooms.

Accounting: Lightspeed does not track expenses in any way. It is a pain to use two different pieces of software to manage quoting/invoicing and accounting. I feel for the price that it should be included.

Other: The software itself can be quite a pain where most other software companies get it right. I cant stand not being able to add vendors/classes/colors on the fly while in an estimate. I have to close out everything that I am doing, then edit these items under the setup menu.

Mobile Interface: Not usable for me since I can only view a few items and cant make any changes. How about a true app for the app store that does much more?  
(Version 2.7.1)

MATTHEW GREEN  if the lightspeed website is offline and an admin logs in the application crashes, not sure if this is fixed in the latest version but it's proving to be quite annoying in 2.6.1  
(Version 2.6.2)

SCOTT.GARDNER  LightSpeed is an excellent solution with a solid track record and forward plan

LightSpeed 2.0 extends its lead in POS/inventory management software with new features and enhancements including a much improved back-end interface. Not that the pre-2.x interface was bad, but that's exactly the point I want to make. *There is no perfect software.* I feel what defines the relative value of an application can be broken down into 4 simple concepts:

1. Functionality

2. Interface

3. Developer

4. Tech support

Functionally, LightSpeed is highly-capable, well-organized, and stable. The interface is very handsome and Mac-like. These are justifiable reasons for downloading the free demo to try it for yourself as an A-B comparison with whatever other titles you are evaluating. That said, I can tell you from experience (I am a software consultant and have been working closely with Xsilva for over a year, and we also use LightSpeed to run our business), the people at Xsilva shine. They are genuinely interested in understanding and meeting the customer's needs (e.g., they host an active public blog), their tech support possesses a wonderful combination of expertise, patience, and courteousness, and the company's work ethic is epitomized by Dax Dasilva, the president and developer of LightSpeed.

In *every* application, there is room for improvement and addition of new features. The key questions to ask are:

1. Does the application offer solid functionality that I can use effectively today to run my business?

2. Does the company behind the application have a plan and commitment to continually develop the application?

In my experience, the answer to both questions of LightSpeed and Xsilva is, yes.  
(Version 2.0a)

MACGEEKVT  I researched Point of Sale solutions for the Mac for more than 5 years. Lightspeed is most certainly priced competitively. Its not the least expensive, but its far from the most expensive. I'd say you get what you pay for, but Lightspeed breaks that barrier by giving you far more than you pay for when compared to the alternatives. My business implemented Lightspeed 6 months ago and our workflow has been improved tremendously. The developer is very responsive and quickly resolves any issues. Given the complexity of the product, the ease of use and power is amazing!  
(Version 1.3.6)

FLYING ACE  Hah, I WANT to have my own business just so I can use this gorgeous piece of software!!  
(Version 1.3.5)

DUSTIN TEMPLETON  I work for an Apple Specialist that has been trying differnt business management and point of sale systems for years. We've gone through multiple FileMaker systems, etc. Finally with LightSpeed, we have a real system for the Mac. The developers are amazing when it comes to supporting and listening to your requests. This system gets better every day. We started looking into it about 1 year ago. It wasn't quite where we needed it to be at that time, but they listened. They've implemented our reqeuested features and then some. We have about 20 users hitting the db every day, and it works great! I expect only great things to come from this company.  
(Version 1.2.2)

SUPREDRY  We are a Mac retailer and service shop that has been running LightSpeed since 2005 and have found the software to be feature-rich, fast and reliable for our office of six (2 sales, 3 techs, 1 admin). The software is also developing rapidly which means we are continually gaining new functionality as our business grows.

We are big fans of the quoting and invoicing tools and rely on its SRO and GSX features in our service department....other features we love and need: Ingram Micro lookup (what a time saver!!!) as well as reporting functions, just to name a few. We use a Star Micronics TSP143U printer, and a voyager bar code scanner at our cash and it runs like a charm. Our experience with Xsilva has also been outstanding, anytime that we have questions regarding the software or questions about setting up up, they have responded quickly.

Overall we are very satisfied with the product, it is definitely moving forward at a pace well beyond expectation, and is maturing as it should.  
(Version 1.2.2)

YNOT  It may be beautiful, but its price makes it almost unaffordable by anyone other than a large business. My guess is that the price is due to OpenBase's outrageous pricing. $700 for a basic license puts it out of reach of anyone.  
(Version 1.2.2)