If you are interested in how a cash register works, then you should be interested in Lightspeed. Lightspeed describes themselves as an “all-in-one Cloud EPOS system”. Their website is lightspeedhq.co.uk. Here, they advertise that they are being used by Five Guys; the Museum of London; the London wine bar chain, Humble Grape; the apparel company Arc’teryx; and CPRESS, a company that produce juices.
The logo of Lightspeed is a thick red line which has been bended into a shape. The shape looks like a red flame and is perhaps intended to be an “L”, standing for Lightspeed. From a distance, it is a red diamond.
The formal title on the stock market is Lightspeed Commerce Inc. The market in question is the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Lightspeed has its headquarters in Montreal. This city in Canada is home to William Shatner and Leonard Cohen. Montreal is within Quebec. Famous landmarks here include the Notre-Dame Basilica, the masterpiece of Gothic-revival architecture, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. French is the official language of Montreal. Sixty percent of the population speak both Enlish and French fluently (Census 2016).
Dax Dasilva founded Lightspeed in 2005. Dasilva says that he “worked in the Apple ecosystem” in his early 20s and that this gave him a helpful background:
Working in the Apple ecosystem during my 20s allowed me to develop my coding skills. It gave me the thirst to create and design software that is efficient and simple to use.
Who are Lightspeed’s competitors? Well, it provides solutions to companies worldwide. There are, however, some other Candian business that do this.
Ottawa-based Shopify Inc. and San Francisco-based Block Inc
It is believed that Lightspeed aims to differentiate itself from its competitors by selling to higher-end businesses such as Michelin-starred restaurants.
In August 2023, it was reported that Lightspeed had made an impressive revenue. It was up by nearly 20% compared with the previous year. The reason this result was significant is that the company is loss-making. For example, in the quarter to Aug 2023, they made a net loss of $49bn. But the Aug 2023 result was good: it looks like Lightspeed will soon be profitable.
In 2019, Barbara Krasnoff wrote a review of the Lightspeed POS system. Writing in PC Mag, she specifically reviewed the Lightspeed Retail POS, a product that costs $99 per month for a business to use. Some interesting facts are that Lightspeed does not offer its own credit card processing system. Instead, it works through third party partners (Cayan and Vantage).
Krasnoff points out some interesting subtleties. Lightspeed does not use a category and sub-category system to organize products. (Products like Revel Systems POS do this.) Instead, there seems to be a separate icon for each variation. If you choose to use the Lightspeed software, you are offered hardware from Silveredge. With Dasilva’s familiarly with Apple, it is not surprising that Lightspeed uses iPads. If you opt for the Silveredge hardware, you are provided with a cash drawer, receipt printer, iPad Pro, iPad stand, label printer, and barcode scanner. Ultimately, Krasnoff thinks that Square POS is superior to Lightspeed POS. Krasnoff thinks that the Lightspeed User Interface (UI) is too “busy”.