Lightspeed to Shopify: Connect Point of Sale to E-Commerce
Written by
Shon Taylor
As the world becomes increasingly connected, there’s a growing demand for the convenience of online shopping. But for many retailers, creating and maintaining a separate online store in addition to their brick-and-mortar location seems like an intimidating hassle. Fortunately, the process can be a lot smoother than it seems. You can achieve a complete retail experience, both in-store and online, with Lightspeed and Shopify.
Lightspeed
Lightspeed – headquartered in Montreal, Canada – sells a complete point of sale system. They offer everything from barcode scanners to label printers, letting you set up a local retail environment. Lightspeed is also a database for your inventory, helping you manage every product you sell.
Shopify
Shopify – another Canadian company – is an e-commerce giant. They offer a complete package allowing you to sell your products online. Their software is able to handle every part of hosting your own e-commerce website, from presenting your products in a slick layout, to taking orders and processing payments digitally.
The best of both worlds
Since each system has its own specialty, it seems only natural to combine them. In our recent work, BONE Creative has successfully connected the two to form a complete shopping experience.
With our system, you’re able to transfer all of your products online without painstakingly entering that data in two different places. Items sync automatically from Lightspeed to Shopify. There’s a constant transfer of information, so any time you update your inventory in Lightspeed, it gets updated online – although limitations in Lightspeed mean that new products may take up to 20 minutes to appear.
Familiar and fine-tuned
The same way you’re used to setting up products in your point of sale system naturally transfers online. This means matrixes in Lightspeed appear natively as products with variants in Shopify.
Naturally, you might not want every product you sell to be available for purchase online. Fortunately, controlling which products appear online is as easy as clicking a checkbox in Lightspeed. Anything marked Show on Web will be launched online, and anything unmarked will stay exclusive to your retail location.
If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer looking to expand into the realm of e-commerce, combining Lightspeed with Shopify is a no-brainer. With plenty of success using this system, BONE Creative can guide you through the process of bringing your store to the next level, selling your products online with a custom web design.