Leaving Lightspeed Retail: what to check before you cancel

Write down every job Lightspeed does in a normal week. Start with these four.

• Label printing. Price and barcode labels printed from your item list.
• Inventory. Your item list, counts, and the barcodes you scan at the register.
• The online store connection. A Lightspeed eCom store, or a connector that keeps another store's stock in step.
• Reports and customer records. Sales history, customers, gift cards and loyalty.

Each one needs a new home, or an export you've saved, before the account closes.

Label printing had always been part of Lightspeed, so the new setup needed its own label software. The new POS works with its own list of label printers, and the one it certifies would have been a new purchase.

The answer was to separate labels from the register. A UPC barcode label has no tie to any POS, because the register scans any barcode, whichever printer made it. The shop kept the Brother label printer it already owned, and we pointed it to Brother's P-touch Editor, which is free for Windows and Mac (Mac App Store). P-touch Editor imports a CSV file and merges a column into a barcode, including UPC and EAN (Brother support), so the labels print from an export of the new POS's item list.

Check the label size before you buy rolls. Lightspeed Retail prints three standard label sizes, 2.25 x 1.25, 2.00 x 1.00 and 1.25 x 1.00 inches, plus a 2.20 x 0.50 inch jewelry label (Lightspeed: Printing labels). A standard UPC-A barcode at GS1's smallest allowed size needs about 30 mm (about 1.2 inches) of width, including the blank margins on each side that scanners need. For the shop's printer, we recommended a roll wide enough for a standard UPC-A barcode.

Run these from your Lightspeed Retail (R-Series) account and save the files somewhere you control.

• Items. The Items page has an Export button that downloads your inventory as a CSV (Lightspeed: Importing and updating items).
• Customers. Export a CSV from the Customers page. If you have a Lightspeed eCom store, export its customers from the eCom store too, and ask any connected partner for their data directly (Lightspeed: Managing customer data).
• Sales history. Lightspeed's reports export as CSV (Lightspeed: About reports). Run your sales report across the full date range you'll need for taxes and buying.
• Inventory value. The historical asset report exports your inventory value on a chosen date, and it downloads only on the device that ran it (Lightspeed: Historical asset report).
• Gift cards. Check for outstanding gift card balances, and export them from Customers > Gift cards (Lightspeed: Managing customer data). A customer holding a Lightspeed gift card still expects it to work at your register.
• Loyalty. Loyalty customers export separately from your main customer list.

Find out whether your online store is a Lightspeed eCom store or a separate platform. If it's Lightspeed eCom, it's a Lightspeed product too, so confirm with Lightspeed what happens to it when your Retail account closes, and have the new store and a redirect map ready first.

The shop's online store ran on its own platform, apart from the register. We moved it to WooCommerce, mapped the old store's addresses to the new pages (see ecommerce SEO for how), and set up a job that reads the new POS's inventory every morning at 6am. That build is on Quantic POS and WooCommerce.

If you're staying on Lightspeed Retail and adding WooCommerce, the Lightspeed POS for WooCommerce extension syncs stock both ways, for both R-Series and X-Series. It doesn't work with Lightspeed eCom, and it connects one Lightspeed store per WooCommerce site (WooCommerce Marketplace).

1. List every job Lightspeed does for you, using the four above.
2. Set up label printing outside the POS, and print a test label that scans at the new register.
3. Move inventory to the new POS, with a real barcode on every item you sell online.
4. Run every export and check the gift card balances.
5. Move or reconnect the online store, with redirects from the old addresses.
6. Cancel Lightspeed.

For how registers and websites connect in general, see POS website integration.