Lightspeed Retail vs SimpleConsign: Which is a better fit?

Steve J.: Hi, I'm Steve. I'm a business owner, and I give Lightspeed Retail five out of five stars. For more reviews, click below. Before our Lightspeed Retail, we had EMSI, which didn't work for us, because we were looking for a cloud-based solution, something that was a little bit more flexible that we could take offsite and use easier. Lightspeed fills that need very well. For us, Lightspeed offers the flexibility of working offsite or onsite. It offers 24-hour tech support, and it's constantly adding new features and responding to suggestions from its customer base. The onboarding process for Lightspeed was easy, straight ahead. As long as you're familiar with exporting documents through an Excel sheet, you can upload them right there and into your new system. If you're considering Lightspeed Retail, make sure that all your data is organized and effective. That way you can make an easier transition into the new system.

Beau: Hi, my name is Beau. I'm a consultant and I'm reviewing SimpleConsign. I give it a review of four out of five. For more reviews see below. Before we had SimpleConsign, we had a system that was written by one of our members. There were several problems. One is the member had left the organization so we had no one to maintain it. The other problem was it was missing a bunch of features that we found in SimpleConsign to help us out. We chose SimpleConsign because we needed a system which was maintained by a professional organization. We also needed several features that SimpleConsign had such as the ability to integrate with a computer and with a point of sales station. We needed someone that would give us the capabilities to have multiple users. And we needed a system that was simple to use. It was difficult getting started with SimpleConsign because we had had this home brewed system before. Once we understood how SimpleConsign worked, it was easy to set up, and we found it now very functionally valuable for us. The recommendation I have for anyone considering SimpleConsign is make sure you've written out your requirements and really understand what you're looking for before you jump into it. This is a big step for anyone. Some of the things that we didn't find in SimpleConsign that we'd love to have are an ability to link to Etsy and to eBay. The history reports that come out of SimpleConsign are not terribly valuable to the consigner. We'd like to see an email going to the consigner on a periodic basis on how well their sales have done. The user's manual was good, but it wasn't great. We've ended up rewriting the user's manual. And finally, if you are in an environment like ours, where we have four to five large sales for our arts and crafts organization per year, it's impossible in SimpleConsign to keep items in inventory from one sale to the other and be able to separate them out at that sale. Other than that, we found it a very powerful system. We have neophyte end users that are operating the system, and they're very successful with it. The time to get started is five or six minutes at most. And we found it to be a very good system. Their customer support is excellent. They answer their calls. They take them on weekends, and we've been very happy with SimpleConsign. We've had it for four or five years now. It's been a very good system for us.