Lightspeed eCom is a powerful multilingual, multi-currency eCommerce platform with built-in analytics and inventory management. Lightspeed has over 45,000 customers worldwide transacting $15 billion every year. At Interactivated, we appreciate the convenience and flexibility Lightspeed provides. We believe in it as a platform that can help connect businesses with customers and make the management of businesses active online easier. We work together with Lightspeed partners in the Netherlands for all their custom Lightspeed projects.

Lightspeed: The Basics

After acquiring eCommerce software developer SEOShop in 2015, Lightspeed has launched a new eCommerce platform for online retailers and brick-and-mortar businesses — Lightspeed eCom. In addition to integration with Lightspeed’s POS platform, the new solution comes with a wealth of new features that makes it one of the most exciting new platforms for businesses that want to run a beautiful and intuitive online shop. At the time of the purchase, SEOShop was the fastest growing eCommerce platform in Europe, providing its services to over 8,000 companies including Philips Lighting, Heineken, or National Geographic Netherlands.

Lightspeed eCom includes shop design, marketing, and sales tools that make it a one-stop solution for a business. All of these are available on the same dashboard, through which you can customize every aspect of your site, run a blog, plan and run email marketing campaigns, track site stats, and more. One of Lightspeed eCom’s selling points is its flexibility. With it, you can set up a store in just a couple of minutes. If you want to avoid all the coding and the technicalities of setting up a store and basically just choose a theme and add a logo, you can do that.

But at the same time, it also offers a depth of customization that rivals that provided by more established eCommerce marketing platforms. Every bit of code that goes into your store can be accessed through the Lightspeed eCom backend. Whether you want to play with the code yourself or have a web developer look at it, it’s always there and easy to access.

Lightspeed eCom comes with powerful multi-channel marketing tools. With it, you can do pretty much anything you need to increase the visibility of your shop online. You can create, plan, and run segmented email marketing campaigns for maximum efficiency. You can integrate customer reviews on your site and manage reviews. You can also easily integrate Facebook comments into your store and company blog, to encourage people to leave more comments on your product pages.

The Rise of mPOS

POS systems have changed the way businesses handle transactions, making life easier for both customers and employees. But traditional POS systems are expensive to implement and maintain, requiring hardware updates and replacements, and dedicated maintenance teams. It’s no wonder then that mobile point-of-sale systems (mPOS) are on the rise.

Handling POS transactions using tablets or smartphones is becoming more convenient for businesses big and small. mPOS is cheaper, easier to implement, and comes with simple subscription-based pricing plans that can be adapted to the volume of transactions each business needs to handle. More than that, the smartphones and tablets used in an mPOS system can be used by employees for other tasks as well.

One challenge that mPOS raises, however, is the synchronization of stock for stores that feature both a physical location and an online shopfront. If the same items are being sold both online and offline, the inventory has to be synced in the fastest and easiest way possible. That’s where Lightspeed eCom comes in.

While most eCommerce solutions available offer either an online shopping platform or a POS system, Lightspeed eCom offers both in a unified, fully-responsive platform. It integrates a cloud-based POS solution with an eCommerce platform to synchronize store inventory, sales data, and sales figures. With Lightspeed eCom it’s also possible to shift stock from one channel into another, allowing for an omnichannel approach to business with real-time visibility that saves store owners a lot of trouble.

In a world where 90 percent of consumers have a smartphone in hand while shopping online, many customers are relying on mobile devices to find and research products. In many cases, they do this in store. This often means they keep switching between the online and offline shopping experience on the go. For businesses, this calls for a readjustment of their approach to POS and their online shopping experience. Lightspeed eCom makes this readjustment easier.

Mobile Friendly

The solution Lightspeed eCom provides is fully mobile responsive. Going beyond providing a responsive web store, Lightspeed eCom has applied the principles of responsive design to its whole backend and customer touchpoints such as billing system and abandoned shopping cart email reminders. Lightspeed can be managed entirely from mobile, too. Lightspeed eCom also simplifies in-store checkouts by providing a mobile-friendly checkout solution that works with popular mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay.

Customer Profiles

Business managers who know the power of customer personas will be glad to hear that Lightspeed enables businesses to create customer profiles quickly so they can draw on purchase history or product preferences to target the right customers. And since in-store information is synced with e-store data, this can be used for personalized promotions and more next time customers shop online. A better understanding of their clients can help businesses not only send more effective personalized emails but also segment their customers more accurately and with less hassle.

Themes Marketplace

As you might expect, Lightspeed eCom features a theme marketplace where companies can choose from a wealth of options. While you shouldn’t expect the same theme variety as you may find for a content management system like WordPress, Lightspeed themes have the advantage of being all optimized for providing a high-quality shopping experience. All the features Lightspeed is capable of with or without extensions can be easily integrated into any theme. This means that regardless of which theme you choose, you won’t be facing any limitations in terms of functionality.

Lightspeed eCom’s functionality is further expanded by an app store powered by partners and individual app developers. Apps can be used for a variety of purposes, including streamlining local transactions, improving transactions that involve currency conversions, providing shipping, customer support, accounting tools, marketing strategies, and more. New ads are being added all the time by a growing list of partners and developers.

Lightspeed allows any business owner to create an online shopping experience that customers will enjoy returning to. But for businesses that want a custom Lightspeed project, whether it’s an app, a unique website, or a complete custom project, personalized Lightspeed development services are a go-to solution. At Interactivated, Lightspeed is one of our specialties. We are proud to offer complete website, mobile, and app development for businesses of any size. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your idea, even if it’s only in the early stages. We can use our experience with Lightspeed to help you develop it.

Benefits of Lightspeed eCom

•    Fast setup – almost instant implementation. If you don’t have an online store already, you can create one that reflects your brand in less than an hour, by customizing any one of the many templates available for different types of stores.
•    Easy customization – every aspect of your online store experience can be customized from the backend without any need for coding. You don’t need to be a web developer or graphic designer to create a professional website with Lightspeed eCom.
•    Inventory management integration – built-in inventory control features enables you to manage stock and maintain optimal inventory levels. More advanced inventory features like product bundles are included, so you won’t be needing a separate inventory app to manage your store.
•    International payments and tax support – you can use Lightspeed to sell products and receive payments in all the major currencies. You don’t have to worry about international taxes, either, as they are calculated automatically. This is a great feature for specialty retail shops shipping products globally.
•    Marketing implementation – bundled into Lightspeed eCom is a marketing suite that includes social media integration (sharing, commenting), blogging, and SEO optimization. The ability to manage all of these in one place isn’t only convenient, but it can help you save time, as there’s less switching back and forth between apps.
•    Easy data export and import – with Lightspeed eCom you can easily import and export data for accounting, analysis, and other purposes whenever you need to. Easy .cvs importing means you can move your existing online shop to the Lightspeed ecosystem without losing any of your previous data.
•    Forecasts and Analysis – Lightspeed comes out of the box with essential sales and inventory performance forecasting and reporting capabilities, which can be further expanded with extensions. This saves you money on investing in a separate sales and forecasting solution and having to export data to it from your store management system.

Who Is Lightspeed For?

Almost any business that runs an online shop and a third-party POS system can benefit from Lightspeed. This platform is ideal for:

•    Businesses who are running a brick and mortar store and want to open an online shop, or vice versa
•    Restaurants, tea shops, and other businesses in the local services industry that sells products online
•    Any business that wants to integrate physical and online operations to improve customer experience
•    Shops which use an expensive or slow POS system and are looking for an upgrade
•    Startups that want to open an online shop with as little hassle as possible
•    Any business that wants to bring mobile optimization to their customer experience and make it as easy as possible for mobile users to order products

Lightspeed eCom is a powerful multilingual, multi-currency eCommerce platform with built-in analytics and inventory management.

The Disadvantages of Managing Separate Sales Channels

Not integrating multiple sales channels means you waste time managing separate channels. Your shopping experience is also limited to those who come to your store. Lightspeed makes possible omnichannel retail, a way to integrate online and in-store sales channels under a centralized management system — the Lightspeed dashboard. This helps you provide customers with a faster, more consistent shopping experience that spans channels and devices.

By centralizing operations, you not only improve efficiency but also are able to view all your sales data and reporting in one place. You will also be able to provide a consistent brand experience across all channels. For customers, the benefits include faster and easier searches, since they can go to their mobile devices whenever they can’t find an item in store, more flexibility in terms of when and where they shop, and a deeper awareness of your brand and products.

By eliminating distances between companies and customers, omnichannel retail can also make it easier for customers to order items when they don’t have the time to pick them up in your store.

Why Choose Us for Lightspeed Integration?

People’s reliance on mobile devices means your business can’t afford not to be visible online, or to offer a sub-par mobile shopping experience. But using a responsive theme is not necessarily enough, as it doesn’t solve the problem of sales channels integration. By using Lightspeed, your business can increase its online visibility and streamline transactions across locations. Add to that the powerful marketing, analysis, and inventory management features that Lightspeed offers, and you can have on your hands a more than reliable marketing platform that can help you improve customer satisfaction and reach more people without any massive investments.

We’ve been working with Lightspeed for many years and know the ins and outs of this powerful POS and eCommerce platform. We can help you create a great online shopping experience for your customers or link your brick and mortar and online shopping experiences together. We can handle all aspects of Lightspeed development for you, whether it’s a custom store, app, or something else.

Whether you sell a large catalog of products or a small one, Lightspeed is ultimately an easy to use and reliable shopping solution that can take your business to the next level. Call us now and we will make Lightspeed integration as easy as possible for you.