2020. 2. 7. 23:29ㆍ카테고리 없음
Hi there, I’m a new Lightspeed user, from England (UK), Installed the demo and have been playing with it for a while now. I just thought I would write about my POS journey, possibly blog about how I get on, hopefully this post (and any follow ups) will be of use/mildly interesting to some people who stumble upon it. I’m sorry if this is more of a ramble than a short and sweet post, but hey, im a techy, not a writer A bit about our company: I work for a company called, We are a specialist sugarcraft retailer in the UK, We currently have one retail outlet, and we sell online (shipping internationally), you can find out more about us at url=Website/url We are growing year on year, and are currently in our 15th year of trading, growing from two blokes in a small industrial unit to a company with 25 employees spread over two buildings, with plans to expand furthur still this year!
A bit about my POS journey so far So far here at DAC, as the shop and website has grown, the till point has been ignored. Even when we moved to bigger premises the till was ignored. We’ve been selling in store for 15 years, and we’ve went through a couple of tills, but they have all been roughly like this: Some form of Casio electronic cash register. The only programming the till has had was to program our receipt to have our address on it, and to have a VAT and nonVAT categories.
UniCenta oPOS is a branch of Openbravo POS point-of-sale and is capable of running on displays from 800x600 upwards. Most known Openbravo POS bugs have been fixed. Free Open Source Mac Windows Linux. Xsilva Systems has announced the release of LightSpeed Web Store, an e-commerce module designed to integrate with LightSpeed 2, their point of sale (POS) system for Mac OS X. It costs $899.
Pretty basic stuff I’m sure you can agree! It’s done for 15 years, but now with a shop selling over 5000 products, and with the website selling another 2500 products on top of that, it’s about time we got some form of stock control, and gained some real sales stats from what we sell. So, I was tasked to look for an EPOS system that would give us the ability to sell stock through the till quickly, efficiently and most importantly, give us some real data back to show what we are selling in store (currently all of our sales stats come from our website, sales in the shop are a bit of an enigma!) I started off, naturally being a PC user, looking at PC based systems. I contacted some “pre built” system suppliers, who were going to charge us up to £10,000 per till unit (we are looking at having two, ideally). Alot of them would also charge very high yearly fees on top of this too. Making this a very very costly endeavour, and not giving us very much control at all over the resulting product. After this I decided I would look for a system I could build myself, after looking at systems that would cost £10k+ each and ONLY function as a till, I decided that I would look at the complete other end of the scale, and go for the cheapest build I could get, I started to source second hand pieces of equipment, built a cheap PC unit for £100, and tried out using the Ubuntu operating system to keep costs even lower (its a free operating system).
Here is where I met my first set of problems, and I’m very glad that I did. I started to find that second hand equipment is usually second hand for a reason, and that reason is generally that it doesn’t work very well. Or, is very near the end of its life.
I wasn’t really trying to be “cheap”, and didn’t expect this stuff to work in my final system, the second hand equipment was more that I was experimenting, and I didn’t want to pile money into an experiment that could possibly come to nothing. The Things I found from this were, Ubuntu, while a fantastic operating system in it self, has very little support for POS systems, the software is few and far between, and is either wildly expensive (which is rediculous seeing as it’s built for an open source operating system), or it simply didn’t have any features at all, and was written by people who have no clue about what shops need even as basic features.
So, I moved onto Windows. Initially I wanted to stay clear of these systems, as, I felt that paying for an operating system that was an expensive part of the build was unnessasary, Windows also has many versions which are currently available. Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, these all also come in both 32bit and 64 bit versions. Most POS systems built for windows are built for windows XP, which, I found has no support any more from microsoft (extended support is ending in 2014). Vista, was a horrible operating system which I wouldn’t touch with a shi.ahem. so, windows 7, while being the most current OS available, is not supported by many of the POS systems available, and while some may work, others do not, This problem is compounded when you start looking at the 32bit and 64 bit versions of the software. Again, moving back to hardware now, I realised that in our office we have around 8 PC’s each one is completely different.
Different specifications, manufacturers, not one component is the same over all these machines. This could prove a problem when building a till system, while the initial purchase might be easy enough to buy multiple units that are the same, we are planning on expanding the business very soon, even in 6 months time it maybe impossible to buy units which are the same, never mind if a unit fails and needs to be replaced. Which may cause problems with compatibility with ancillary units (scanners, receipt printers etc), in a small company we simply don’t have the time nor money to spend testing many different products before actually using them “live”.
This then led me to look at a mac based system (finally I hear you cry!), Looking at the releases of macs over the years, the releases have ahd a natural progression, each year (or couple of years) new macs have been released, but they seem to be very similar in terms of compatibility, and you know where you are with a mac. Also, the platform seems to very stable. While being mainly a PC user (and i use linux as well as windows based systems), I also use macs, and very very rarely hear of one failing, they just. This is a major selling point to me.
The less time I have to spend fixing tiny little problems the better, and with Mac support being so readily available, and, being so GOOD, if anything does go wrong, a system can be back up and running very very quickly, with very little fuss. So, I started looking at Mac software. As we are all mac users here, its no surprise to say that we are in the minority when it comes to releases of software, although over the years as macs become more mainstream this gap is narrowing, and we are getting more and more software available to use.
However, it doesn’t look like the POS market is quite there yet! That being said, it looks like the quality of the software available for macs is higher than that of the stone age varients available for the PC. I came across a piece called “checkout” which was initially looking very good, I found it on the apple website, and it came in a pack, very reasonably priced and included a receipt printer and scanner. I took a trip to my local apple store (Metrocentre, Gateshead), mainly as a recce (recon for you Americans.) mission to check out the mac mini, but I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that they actually had a copy pre-installed on a macbook air, and I could make an appointment to get a demo!
I found this absolutely incredible, it can’t be often that people need to purchase POS software, especially off the shelf in a retail store, so I was extatic to find that they had trained staff who were more than happy to help me out. I had a nice long chat with the gentleman who was trained on the software, and had some hands on time with it in the store, unfortunately it was lacking some vital features that we require. The search continued Luckily, when googling “checkout”, Lightspeed also pops up. So, after looking from afar, and doing some outside research I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the demo version of the Lightspeed package. I also purchased a few bits and pieces (which I will list further down the page), pretty much everything so far has just worked, straight out of the box, with minimal setup. I’ve been working with it for the past couple of weeks now, and can confidently say that I have found nearly every feature we need to use. With many I have yet to explore.
I’m pretty pleased with the software so far, it looks fantastic, and it works very well. The workflow is a little different to what I am used to, compared to other sales software, but this could be because it is primarily aimed at a US/Canadian market, where I am based in the UK. Still though, we’ve found workarounds for most things so far, and I am quite confident that we will be buying full versions of the software (along with some more shiny new hardware) very soon. Our Setup So far The current “test” machine, which is a fully functioning unit, running demo software is as follows.
Base unit:2011 Mac Mini. Monitor19″ widescreen monitor -connected via apple Display port to VGA adaptor(in live model will be a touchscreen). Keyboard:Apple wired Keyboard (with numeric keypad) – connected via USB. Mouse: Apple wired mouse – connected via USB. Receipt printer: Star Micronics TSP143 USB printer. Barcode Scanner: MS9520 Voyager Scanner – connected via USB. Cash Drawer: KAMI Cash Drawer – Black – Economy Range 24 Volt RJ11.
Optical drive: External DVD-RW usually not plugged in. Office printer: just our standard wireless printer, available over the network Problems so far So far I think I have only had one major problem, being the Cash drawer would not open. I have seen a few people asking about this who have had varying degrees of success with dealing with the issue. Bascially, The cash drawer in question is a cheap unit, purchased new, off ebay long before I was considering getting a mac based system, I had no idea how to use it, and it came with no instructions, it really is the simplist and most basic cash drawer ever. It plugs into a receipt printer via an RJ11 cable, however the receipt printer I had was broken (would sit doing nothing, then when asked to print, would start spewwing random characters continuously until the unit was turned off or ran out of paper.) The reason why it would not open, I have since found out is that when connecting a cash drawer via RJ11 cable to a receipt printer, the computer sets the cash drawer to “Do not open” as a default. This can be changed quite easily, if you know where to look. I first managed to get the drawer to open when turning on “print with dialog box”.
Ross Great read, Really interesting to see the snags and shortfalls. I was wondering whether the label on screen to print misalignment could be down to the printer not being the exact model Lightspeed expects. I’d be surprised if its that fussy, but could be.
I’m looking at purchasing it at the moment for our musical instrument retail business and my main concern is whether i’ll have to completely redesign the website. I’ve got the data already i suppose so it wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen but I’m intrigued to see how the eCommerce side of Lightspeed integrates and whether there’s many website back end management features.? Hi Benny, I actually left Design-a-cake a year ago, and we never got to the point where we had a production ready system. Honestly, it was the best POS system we found on the market in terms of its out of the box features compared with it’s price. However the “none discountable products” feature that was broken really was a deal breaker.
Not just because the feature was broken, but because of the service we got from Xsilva. We paid for a one year support licence (which wasn’t cheap!), the fact they’re in a time zone that’s quite a lot different to us was rather annoying, but still managable.
The issue we had was actually a broken feature in the software. Not a user error. So the support staff simply couldn’t help. All we got was “it’s in a que for a bug fix, we’ll let you know when it’s fixed”, after reporting it, and a whole year of ringing and emailing, it never got fixed. I’m 100% sure that this was because the feature worked in the US timezone, so they simply couldn’t care less about whether it worked outside their domestic market. I think Xsilva sees oversees sales as a bonus, not as an actual market they want to help and support.
Still though, I am not put off Lightspeed as a product. I still think it’s fantastic. Especially for the price. I just wish they would give us Brits some real support.
Xsilva Releases Lightspeed 2.7 Point Of Sale For Mac Download
If you want to see a Lightspeed install actually in-situ, I woudl highly recommend checking out Stormfront (find their stores here: ). While looking for a UK retailer of lightspeed I found those guys, who had a store local to me, They use lightspeed as their actual POS system.
When I went in, the very helpful staff showed me it in operation, and I got to talk to some of the staff who use it every day. Feel free to email me if you have any more questions. Although I’m not using the system all the time now I might still be able to help.