Vend by Lightspeed Reviews 442

- Way over priced - we pay almost $500 a month for two locations, and 4 registers.

- Limited functionalities

- Poor support - It takes few days to get reply from support team. The least they can do at this price point is offer better support.

- Outages - Frequent outages. The last outage was on a Saturday. It lasted over 5 hours, and costed us tens of thousands of lost sates. On top of that there no one to speak to or get any update.

Tech Support non-existent
We adopted vend at the start of the year and things went pretty well. The Shopify sync works very well. Xero integration not so great - quite buggy and sends rounding errors to Xero so receipts usually dont match.
Their support has taken a massive turn for the worst though. They quietly removed the 24 hour phone support and rely on a chat function. Reply times are over a day at the moment and get longer every time I try and communicate. Their entire system went down on Saturday 3rd October and it took over 2 hours before they even acknowledged it on their status page and a further 3 hours to fix meaning most shops with vend had to close their doors, if they rely on it for their pdq machines too. The only communication available was on their twitter page with other retailers suggesting fixes, workarounds and potential other POS systems. If you need a POS you can rely on as a vendor, stay away from Vend and look at another system that can provide quick support when there is an issue as they have made a conscience decision to scale back their support to boost their bottom line. If you are looking into other POS systems, check out Vend's twitter account where all their other grumpy customers are suggesting alternatives to move to.

Update: online support has decreased since my last post, it now takes about 5 working days for a reply.

Vend Is an OK POS in itself. Decent reports and data tracking. It doesn't work well for grocery though. I also sell CBD that we manufacture in-house. My sales person said VEND is the best CBD platform and there will be no issues with payment processing. Sales person also said I get 2 free months after paying the first month. So I signed up.
The credit card processor they put me in contact with said they don't have a way of integrating with VEND for CBD sales. Then the next month I was charged a subscription fee. When I asked them about it they said they'd give me another free month. When I asked for a refund my store magically no longer existed and I had no way to access any of my data. All my customer and sales information is lost. I have no way to track my tax info or income. If having a working POS and your data is important to you do NOT use vend.

They do everything they say they will on the tin but that's inconsequential if you get locked out of your store mid workday without warning or reason.

The customer service bot says they'll take a few hours to have a human review the problem which leaves me stranded without a way to take payment or issue receipts. Our inventory, accounting, and customer management are completely offline. Even my online store is nonfunctional as it runs through vend.

Ultimately, their slow response time has created a huge amount of work for me. It's going to be a headache to recover from.

This is my second year with vend and the first time I've had this big a problem. Although I've had issues before, none have been this time sensitive. The longer I remain logged out, the more money and time I'll have to spend making up for it.

I renewed my annual subscription in September and have a receipt. I didn't get any emails informing me of any maintenance or account closures.

Vend is easy to use and let's me see at a glance how my store is doing. I love the fact that it integrates with my Accounting software, Xero.
The Vend team provide quick support for queries and consider enhancement requests favorably.

I’ve been using Vend for 5 years now. It’s the best tool I have in my retail chain. I love it. The service they provide is unmatched. I highly recommend Vend to all retailers.

This has been a horrible POS.
We have used it for over 2 years and have been pulling our hair out ever since. It is laggy, so we updated our internet, it's still laggy! We switched to UPC as our SKU to be able to scan (and you can only have one product number so you have to pick one or the other). But now we can't upload anything because the UPC isn't recognized by the system. What a joke!!! None of the features they say they offer work the way they should. The customer service is useless, they just point you in the direction of help articles that don't even address the issue.

Update: Vend reached out to me to 'fix' the problems. They said that after 2 years of complaining, they are finally adding the UPC and SKU feature....but as I told them, too little too late. Then, they suffered a SEVERE outage...and so we ran a soft drawer close to see how we would balance out (after running our sales offline in a Spreadsheet and later entering them, because we couldn't even operate it in offline mode!) and sure enough, the drawer was showing off! However, when I ran other reports, I showed a different total. So somehow they were showing a cash amount of around $24.91 higher than what the other report showed...so bogus info! Just totally unreliable...then it took them almost a week to follow up on that ticket! Again, TOO LITTLE TOO LATE...and then we received a sales call from them promoting a 3rd party they were partnering with...they are just completely out of touch with their customers!

BUT THE GOOD NEWS is that we did find a very good replacement...it looks similar, it runs similar but it has all of the features that Vend is missing - more reporting, UPC/SKU fields, multiple vendors for one product (which Vend only allows for one vendor)...It's called HIKE! We can't wait to switch...the outage really threw us a curve ball but we should be able to switch over this week and finally we will be done with the headache that is Vend!

Terrible experience. Never available. Always have to wait hours for a response via live chat which never actually resolves the issue. Have had an ongoing issue for 3 months that no one can ever seem to help me with. Happy to continue to collect my my money each month as they will not delete the outlets I need removed and have been requesting to be done for months. I have jumped through every single hoop they have asked, removing users, removing transfers, removing sales, becoming the owner account and now their response is, are you using Chrome? Are you kidding? I cannot wait to be done with this whole system. Customer Service is beyond poor. Oh and be careful have credit notes and gift cards through their system because if you ever want to get them exported out of the system they can't. They can only provide you with the first 1000 customers. Meaning if there is anyone outside that with a Credit Note or Gift Card you will have to manually locate each of them some other way and figure it out one by one. There system is incapable of providing you with all the customer data that is your property. Very scary.

I had problems printing barcodes. Vend were great - sorted the problem and put me in touch with the hardware supplier in South Africa! Fabulous service and problems sorted. Very happy we moved from Sage to Vend which is customer orientated.

Easy to use and meeting our diverse needs to track sales and accounts.

Vend is an Excellent software that has helped us to grow in our business. It keeps improving every time with new features that make it more useful. I've been working with them for several years, and I recommend it, every time I can to any one who has a retail business.
The reason I give 4 stars instead of 5 is because, "nobody's perfect", and there are still some issues that could improve in managing data with many stores, but nothing to worry about that would jeopardize our operations. Other than that I'm very happy with it!

We are really happy with the Vend software and have been using it to grow our business in Mauritius since 2015

Vend has really helped our business move forward and see great growth. Its reliable and user friendly

We have been using Vend for some time now.

From the beginning with the initial launch we received excellent support from a really cool and dynamic team.

Enjoyed using the interface, great layout and overall functionality.

Its been a pleasure using Vend to this point.

Thank you Vend team.

It was a little hard for us to get the inventory right,but no fault of vend.

Support is a nightmare. If the product breaks no one gets back to you. At first support was fantastic, but now it is non-existent

Vend sales team smoothly made big promises and took money for onboarding, after a few months we found that they never had promised features. When I asked for the requested feature - they suggested workarounds.

Taken my business to another POS which is 50% cheaper and provides many features and excellent support. I would suggest doing your research before signing up for Vend. They have wasted my 4 months...

The product itself is decent but that's where it ends. Support is limited to emails only or some sort of chat that isn't chat (there is nobody there). Add to that their unwillingness to fix issues. If you want to upload csv's you need to use Open Office instead of Excel as they are unable to decode Excel csv's. Unbelievable.

I signed up to vend for a year and by the time i purchased the till,ipad,receipt printer and install gear it cost me close to 7,000 including the huge cost of subscription....anyways i wanted the best system i could get and i was told this would be the one....that is until i started to use all the differant features vends salesperson raved so much about and all i can say is what a huge dissapointment!

1. reporting is confusing and frankly a waste of time

2.intergration to shopify is a total joke with products not updating like they tell you it does.

3. constant problems with the system freezing while putting a sale through to eftpos.

4. images dont always upload after saving them with some images taking 2 to 3 times uploading before it actually works.

5. support 24/7 is actually a self help site with email that takes so long to get back to you that you end up fixing the issue yourself before anyone actually gets back to you.

6. you cant add images to variant products so then you cant sell them on shopify as the customer cannot see the product in a differant size/color/type.

7.the system makes things like stock take a massive ordeal that is just better off done by hand.

8.paying someones account is like trying to find your car keys in a couch.

9. you are completly at the mercy of vends servers so like 4 days ago when vends system totally crashed and we were without a pos system for afew hours causing us to shut the doors while they fixed the issue and losing us quite a number of potential customers.

10. installing products in the system is confusing and nearly requires a phd in computer science to use.

Im not trying to bag this company and everything they say it does it really does (just not to the performance they say it does)

im subscribed to their service until the end of the year and then i will be changing as soon as i can to a better pos system.

im not kidding if i could give them a lower rating than one star i would.

sorry vend but your salesmen are far better than your actual system.