Vend by Lightspeed Reviews 442

They will take your money without permission, refuse to return it, fob you off and the software doesn't even do as they claim, avoid!

Warning. Do your full homework first and don’t just take their sales teams word for it. We signed up after being told by two sales people it would fully integrate with woocommerce however this is incorrect. Their system cannot handle sales prices from woocommerce so if you’re running a normal / simple woocommerce site this point of sale is no good! They refunded half our $356 saying we had use of their system which is untrue. We contacted our sales guy within 48 hours pointing out multiple issues that arose when we tried to use it. Now their account people are saying they have done everything they can and to talk to our sales person, but he has not replied to multiple emails.

Run away! Did my homework and signed up. It is my belief that the majority of the positive reviews are fake. No training just a series of YouTube videos. When I used these to start, the first thing the system told me was I needed to upgrade (they knew exactly what I needed) for 3x what I paid. Called the 24/7 customer support online (on line text kept disappearing and reappearing, I have a new MacBook Pro) and by phone no one contacted me for over 6 hours. When they finally talked to me they said sorry, they had huge outages. Outages mean their system isn’t working. I canceled immediately, several days after I asked they later sent an email that I would get my refund. Great! Several days later still No refund.

Don`t be surprised when your next annual bill comes with more than 72% price increase and lame explanation. I guess this is because it takes ages to configure all the products, options, outlets and VEND knows that they can get away with that.

I genuinely hate writing this review especially since I've been a long time stock holder of Lightspeed and I believe in the company strongly.

I was previously a customer of Lightspeed for 8 years. I absolutely loved the product and it helped grow our business. However when COVID hit we had to get online and chose Shopify to handle our ecom side.

To save costs we switched to Shopify POS but realized it had a lot of shortcomings compared to Lightspeed POS.

In August 2022 we decided since Lightspeed said they had a quality integration now with Shopify ( which they didn't previously) we would attempt to switch back to Lightspeed for our 8 Brick & Mortar locations and continue to use Shopify for our eCom side. Thinking this would give us the best strengths of both worlds (Brick & Mortar & eCom) we made the switch. The difference is since we previously used Lightspeed, they acquired Vend and have made that their Lightspeed X series which is for retailers and the previous version of Lightspeed we used now called R series I believe is strictly for restaurants.

We spent months working through scenarios and trying to make sure everything would work right before making the switch for our 100 employees. Once we made the switch the retail side worked pretty good. The checkout is nice and smooth for the customer, however the back of house and integrations are an absolute joke. We've been on Lightspeed X series for a few months now and still can't run a basic report for how much inventory our company has. It errors out every time.

We've contacted support dozens of times are are continually told they're looking into it, but never hear anything back. That's just 1 of a dozen related issues. The auto ordering product, which was amazing in the old Lightspeed and saved us hours ordering every week is non functional and never works in the new Vend/Lightspeed. Every ticket we submit has never been resolved.

I'm a fairly technical person, I was in IT and sold POS systems for 20 years before starting my own retail company. I've owned/operated and sold 4 companies and have been on the Inc. 5000 for the last 4 years in a row with my existing business. We now have 8 locations and about 12,000 skus and rely on a POS to make transfers and ordering efficient.

Vend is not a product for a multi location chain that also sells online. IF you are a business with 1 location and a few hundred products I could see this working for you. We need to make changes to hundreds of products at a time and search products by any field we want including or excluding tags and other relevant data.

We need to be able to create products quickly and send them to shopify and to turn on or off the website easily depending on stock. None of this is possible with Lightspeed/Vend. None of the reports we've asked for work, Auto ordering from vendors if it's over 50 items on a PO doesn't work, tech support is about as basic as it gets and really doesn't know much more then their own help articles, you will be transferred around 5-6 times to different people in the course of a ticket chat.

We haven't had 1 ticket out of about 50-60 successfully resolved.

When you unpublished a product in lightspeed it will remove it from Shopify online store but no other channels such as Instagram, Google, Amazon, etc... IF an order comes into Shopify from another channel other then Online Store, such as Google, Instagram Amazon, etc... it won't come over to Lightspeed.

Even though lightspeed tells you it will be master of inventory it isn't designed to do this properly. If an order comes in online and needs to be fulfilled by a location other then the default fulfillment location Lightspeed will adjust your inventory incorrectly. For example if your default location in Lightspeed is Warehouse and an order comes in for Store 1 online because it's the only store that has it, Lightspeed will keep the inventory of Store 1 the same and create a -1 in Warehouse causing a nightmare of issues for the next order online or keeping product counts accurate.

I've never seen an integration with Shopify that is so poorly designed. We've used Accumula and other 3rd party integrations previously with Lightspeed, We've used Dear Systems, CIN7 and others all which had far better integrations with Shopify then Vend does.

It's like they don't understand how a retail business functions and with the new X series product are focussed more on trying to make things pretty then functional.

All this to say now we're going into the 4th quarter and are stuck, but hopefully we can make it through this season and then move back to Shopify POS I guess and deal with the issues we have there but knowing that atleast our inventory is accurate and we can actually see how much inventory and other simple basic reporting functions we need to stay in business and make proper decisions.

The system cant seem to handle different retails prices that link through to product price barcodes. We are an outlet store for various brands and so we quite often have skus well below RRP. I would think many retailers would be in a similar position? They have been looking at an update for it for the last few years ie it isnot a priority apparently.

Before it was acquired by Lightspeed, Vend was a great platform despite a couple of faults but recently it has just got worse and worse.

A major issue is the platform removing information from Shopify and the lack of functionality for disabling what product elements synchronise to Shopify. You can't add all the required information in Vend to sync to Shopify such as product image but you have to add the product description in Vend otherwise it can occasionally remove all the product information and get your product removed from platforms such as Google Shopping. Vend have zero interest in adding additional functionality to these integrations. Useful information such as cost price does not sync across to Shopify. Essentially it makes setting up new products on Shopify a admin heavy job by updating information across two platforms.

Some of the reporting is useful however I wouldn't recommend using it to accurately track your margin for products that regularly change price as it takes an average over a period and not from the period the cost price changed. This also has an effect if someone makes an error as it logs this and calculates an average cost which can throw out your margins.

Support aren't interested in trying to help, they just provide a lot of steps for you to carry out and links to their help articles which do not offer advice in these circumstances.

When we originally chose Vend we were looking at integrating into our accounting software however I'm happy we did not do this given the lack of support for our Shopify integration and the fact that it skews all margins with an average cost price that doesn't resemble true margins.

These are the main faults there are other bugs that crop up from time to time which I can only imagine are due to changes being made in the back end. Today we're having an issue updating our stock manually. When attempting to change stock level of a product to zero it does not save and keeps the original figure. Such a simple thing is then really difficult and means that we are showing stock on our website when we do not have any. We also had an issue with tax being removed from a sale price of a 0 rated product for no reason. My advice to Lightspeed would be to communicated planned changes to the system and allow users to opt-in to a preview version before publishing changes to a live environment which has an impact on customers when these changes are not managed correctly. It's a basic part of the software development cycle which seems to be missing at Vend/Lightspeed.

If you're looking for a new EPOS system I'd trial this carefully and definitely look at others in the market as you may find yourself full of regret. We are currently seeking alternatives to move away from Vend by Lightspeed.

When it works, it seems like a fairly simple, tidy POS. But when things don't go quite right - it's near impossible to get help (after years of using it, I pretty much expect a 'we can't do that' to even the most simple/intuitive of request or reporting you'd expect from a software company).

In the latest example, we have a serious stock issue caused by an integration (don't even get me started on integrations.. they take zero responsibility for helping with those at all). They couldn't give me a log of the stock movements during that time, they couldn't tell me which transactions had caused duplicate stock movements (which was the issue which caused us to 'lose' about 10k items overnight). Support's suggestion was to stock count our 30k items to get back to what it should be. I pointed out that I could just run an inventory report for the day before - not ideal as we had a lot of movement in that 24hours but better than their suggestion. Except.. then the CSV wouldn't work and it turns out the upload was ignoring lines because of the 'ID' column ... except I had downloaded all the data including that column (which is system generated) directly from Vend. The only thing I'd changed was the quantity. After pulling my hair out for hours, I went back to support to ask them to just help but they insisted on combing over the files I'd created instead of just helping me to do it.

It's been hours and I'm onto my third chat support person. Meanwhile, we're now nearly two days away from the quantities we're trying to upload. Every minute they refuse/can't just help me do it is making the mess harder for me to untangle (with sales, inter store transfers and more going on). And the likelihood over overselling or missing sales online is huge right now.

To reiterate, I'm just trying to revert my stock quanties to an earlier date. I'm getting those figures from a Vend report and using their product list. It's all at their fingertips - I don't get why I'm still here hours later explaining it to the third person, instead of spending Saturday with my family!

Edit: 5.5 hours later we solved it ourselves through trial an error (the system didn't want a whole bunch of rows and columns that it originally exported to be imported back in.. naturally) and the chat person was still telling me it's 'not their usual workflow so bear with them'. That pretty much sums it up.

My company has been using VEND for the past few years. VEND works pretty well in most respects, but speaking to support always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And now a 2022 50% increase to retain the same features I had before under their new pricing structure. I am not a happy customer.

We have had no customer service when we have had issues. Vend seem totally disinterested even though we are a new customer. Getting hold of anyone is impossible. Vend deleted our data accidently and we have now been without a till for a week. I am resorting to a review as they do not respond.

Integration issues galore. Payments not syncing then when reapplied it double writes. Amounts from the accounting software are wrong in Vend, creating customer account imbalances. I waste hours every week dealing with integration issues.

* You cannot trust the integration with Shopify. It is incredibly unreliable at best and at worst, it lost me 6 months of internet sales because the 'link' with Vend kept screwing up the counts, for no trackable reason. I wish I had the energy to sue Vend for this loss.

* Barcodes! How can a dedicated retail system not handle barcodes properly? There is no specific data field for a barcode, you have to put it somewhere else in order to be able to scan your barcoded products. And then when you want to export your data, there is literally no way to include the barcodes in the export. Therefor Vend retains the data and in my case, I've had to manually copy-and-paste 6,000 product barcodes out of the Vend system. They say, put it in the UPC code field etc. but they are still unable to export that data field. Avoid at all costs if you value your product data and the time you took to build it.

* Every action at the back end is one-thing-at-a-time. A very slow process to edit anything. And tediously slow. You cannot complete the same action on a group of products at one time. So it's a complete waste of my time.

* If I think about the time I wasted moving to this service and then moving away from it, and the cost of that time, it curdles my stomach.

I'll start off by saying we switched to Vend from Lightspeed before the merge because Lightspeed constantly had problems with their credit card processor or the system would go down - not helpful in retail! Our backup credit card processor was becoming our main processor because it was not consistent.

Vend.. the user interface is more user friendly than Lightspeed. It was easier to input data and train employees. But I'm currently looking for another POS system again. Integration between Vend and Shopify is broken. If a product becomes "unlinked" you have no idea and they have no idea until the qty's no longer match and you are overselling online...Big problem for users that sell on Marketplaces like Amazon. Vend has buttons like "unpublish from shopify" that really do nothing just breaks the link between vend and shopify but doesn't actually un-publish anything from Shopify - it's misleading. Label printing is sub-par - only 1 template to choose from. No ability to print jewelry types labels or really any other labels other than 1 basic size. Do not have the ability to mass print labels by simply clicking on a product and it's variants - you must open or click print next to each of its variants or download a spreadsheet and upload to your label software...Who has time for this!
The inventory movements is so confusing - you can't look at the movements for 1 variant at a time - it has to be all or nothing. Vend does not support multiple tax rates which is a HUGE issue for people dealing with sales tax in the USA from online orders. Orders that come in from our ecommerce site - even if they don't have sales tax applied - vend charges sales taxes per the outlet which is causing overpayment on sales tax reports and it's so tedious trying to break out in store sales, which ones are taxed which ones aren't and what the sales tax rates are for each order. If you sell online, reside in the USA this system isn't for you or you'll need to get something else to get your numbers from each month. If you have a customer that wants to make an exchange and then return the exchange? Vend doesn't do it - your limited to the amount of returns/exchanges on the original receipt - of course there is a work around but I need it to be correctly tagged to the correct sale...Trying to find a transaction without a receipt? Start searching if you don't have a timeline or really specific info about the sale - my employees struggle finding the correct sale under inventory movements because we have to shift through all the variants. Keep is mind some of these suggestions have been submitted multiple times without any solutions.

Vend has some pros like their scanner app, inventory functions, counting qtys and some reports are very useful.

I really wanted to like this system but the limitations are outweighing the pros for us personally and it's time to start the search again.

Complete garbage, I have been having problems from NOVEMBER. Nothing has been done for months until I have escalated it to the Manager. When I have done so, it has felt like something is being sorted, BUT NO!

Carla Masangcay was supposed to take care of everything. Considering that Vend was not able to fix my account I have suggested that I can open a new one, and move everything manually - which I have done so. Carla was supposed to move my subscription over to the new account...
What a surprise - she did NOT! I was supposed to be credited for the months of the service that I have paid for and I have not used it as it did not work, and now my new account that I was told to open is out of trial, so my shop does not have a POS at all!
Great!

Vend started as a fairly enjoyable experience for us. The first year or two were a bit of a revelation having come from an old fashioned EPOS system that didn't allow us to access things remotely.

With this success, we then started the process of migrating our website to Shopify (as at the time, they were the people that integrated with Vend). All fairly smooth sailing with only a few teething issues related to the stock sync.

Then, after a year or two, the issues began. It started with minor inconveniences like sales not closing properly because Vend decided to add £0.01 on the sale for no reason. It was a bit of a pain for our accountant, but everything else was great and thus we carried on.

However, the issues started to increase in severity. It seems that with every new 'wonderful update', something gets straight up broken. Numerous tickets and phone calls generally solved most things, but there were plenty of issues we just learned to live with.

While this is particularly frustrating, it's made worse by a support team that consistently treat you like an idiot.

"Have you tried pressing the 'Add Product' button?" -

"No, random support agent, I didn't think of that one. I can't believe I forgot that, considering I was 4 steps past the point where you hit that very same button - as mentioned in my ticket."...

This all culminated in our latest (and most terminal) issue. Vend simply stopped working. The dashboard, the sell screen, the product pages - everything.

It took actual months to get any productive answer from the support team. They spent the first couple of months pretending it wasn't happening (it was intermittent, but would last hours at a time). It was only when their agents actually tried to use our account as the fault occurred that they realised it wasn't just us being stupid.

So, after these months, we finally had an answer. It was because Vend had rate-limited our account. Yes, that's right, it was literally them doing it. Months and months of stress, furious customers and more. How exactly did they manage to miss that? Who knows.

So, the simple solution would be to stop rate-limiting us, right? Wrong. No, we had to remove the offending app (a costly privately developed app that allowed us to sync to our 2 other Shopify websites).

Fine, we can do that as a temporary solution while we figure out a technical fix. So, how can we change the app so you don't rate-limit us? "We can't disclose that". What do you mean you can't disclose that? It's a pretty simple question.

If we're only allowed to make 3000 requests to the API per day before being limited, just tell us that. We can easily change the app so that is the case.

"No, we can't disclose that and we won't be offering any further clarity on the matter. Can we help with anything else?".

The mind-numbing stupidity of this stance really can't be overstated. It really is no skin of their back to provide us the answer - even a very rough guestimate would be enough. But no. That's not happening.

So, here we are. We're moving away from Vend. The first few years were great and it has been a gradual decline ever since. It has been getting noticeably worse since the Lightspeed takeover, so maybe that played a part.

My recommendation would be to find another EPOS with a better support team. You'll save yourself money, headaches and a whole lot of stress.

So vend has really disappointed me.
Simple things like a clear receipt and easy stock takes which the claim is possible with an app, simply don’t work. The app takes way to long to scan barcodes so it’s impossible to do stock takes.

My receipts print very unclearly. The text is not a solid print but mottled. Thus making it hard to read. They have not come back to me on a working solution. The labels are not easily format able so we have a large label with tiny text.

Labels and receipts and stock takes are really supposed to be the bare minimum the software is supposed to cope with.

Nothing but frustration from software that I am paying premium for as our South African rand is not worth much!

That’s besides all the other niggly things I cannot even get to.

We've just signed up with VEND and after using it for a few days realised that the features are very, very limited. I had expected to be able to view a simple stock report by either 'supplier' or 'brand' with my 'STANDARD' subscrition at £90 / month....but.....apparently that's advanced analytics so I'd have to pay another £40 per month to do that!

I hardly think that viewing a simple stock report is advanced analytics. How do companies run a business without being able to view basic data like that?

I'd hate to think how limited the basic subscription must be.

I'm going to look at other solutions as a £90/month subscription should allow me to check stock and product movements.

*******

In reply to your response:

1. Give me your contact details so that I can talk directly to you?

2. Show me how I run a simple report to show me how many items I have in stock from a chosen supplier along with a stock valuation. I don't mean show me how to download the data into a CSV file and then filter it. I just want a simple report.

3. I've reached out to 'support' and they have confirmed that it's not possible to get the report that I've asked for wihtout upgrading.

4. The sales person who sold me the software last month has left your company now so I can't go back to him, however, his replacement has also confirmed that this report is not available without upgrading.

5. I'm waiting for this 'confusion' to be rectified as you have termed it.

I see I am not the first to experience this, my annual renewal was due so I selected the same plan as we had before, paid the amount which incidentally has increased substantially.
Go back into the system and a number of key features like product reports and sales reports have been blocked and to be able to use these. Guess what, you will have to pay around another 50% on top each month for these to work as before. These are not what you might call reports you might like but are not essential, they are reports you will need to run your business.
I call that sneaky, underhand and moving the goalposts! Fair enough if the the price goes up, but to put the price up and then remove alot of what you had previously and need to use on a daily basis and then effectively double it to have the same basic functions is not ethical business practice.
So even though I recommended the system and company to people before I would urge anyone considering it think carefully, it is no longer good value and they will at some point clearly leave you with a bad taste..

its all good but its slow to respond to a command