Lightspeed Retail POS X‑Series

We've been using Vend for well over a year and the system is ok if you just have a bricks and mortar shop. Unfortunately if you do anything else, Vend are very unhelpful. We are a multichannel retailer and link Vend to our website with Shopify, and then both link to Xero for finance. Because Vend won't accommodate even the simplest request (even with a year's notice) we have to manually close down the online register every night at midnight 365 days a year. Any other system would have automated this, but not Vend. And when you speak to support they just say it's up the product dept (who you can't communicate with). We are left with no option, but to move to another system. Shame really as if they just listened to their customers and modified the system to fit the demands of modern day businesses, it could be a great system.

Update 11/9/2016: 1 Star: Another day, another integration issue that makes me wish I never started with Vend. Be aware that any discount codes you issue in Vend will not be reflected properly in Vend. They say "this only impacts how the sales display in the history page and the totals in reports". That means, you have no idea how much money you took in (how do you balance your drawer???) and the report you use to pay your sales tax is INCORRECT, thus you are paying money to the government that you didn't even take in. Sadly, Vend has some super cool features that I love but they repeatedly let me down when it comes to super important stuff from a business owner's perspective.

Update 11/6/2016: 2 Stars: After a ton of work and waiting, I am happy to report that the csv upload and Shopify sync is now working properly! I also feel like their support is getting better. Stay tuned....

Update: 10/20/2016: 1 Star: Things are still bad. They now are telling me that when you update your inventory by uploading a csv file, that does not trigger an update of the items in Shopify. So, our replenishment that gets done 2x/week never gets pushed to our website. Not good. More frustrating is that I have gone 21 days without an update.

Vend is neither capable, nor interested in being capable, of working with Shopify. If you have multiple retail stores and a website, they are not the solution for you. If you are interested in disappointing customers on the regular, give them a shot. They don't care about inventory accuracy. WHATTTTT? Yes. You read that correctly. But, never fear, they always end an email in "Cheers", which is like rubbing coarse salt in your fresh wounds. Their support is HORRID. If I wasn't already in too deep, I would change services for my POS.

We left the pretty scathing review below of VEND two years ago and since then we've hung in there - limited the functionality we used and let other customers help them break in their software ... to be fair they gave us one of those two years free subscription and being fellow kiwis we wanted to continue using them.

But two years is a long time in app land and we've finally made the call that other apps and Shopify core functionality have kind of overtaken VEND at a fraction of the price. Stitch Labs have a more complete and less buggy multi-channel inventory platform and Shopify POS is well ... free!

Maybe if you were using VEND for absolutely everything - as a platform not an app - it might be cost effective but they're not there yet and why have an average everything when you can pick a range of outstanding apps that have really nailed what they do, where they play in your functional landscape and most importantly - reliably integrate with each other so that you don't have to worry if it's going to work or not - it just does.

We had over 20 technical support tickets with VEND which were all around reliability of integration and core inventory functionality not working - over a long period of time. This cost us money and time. We've never had that with any other app.

Here is the review we left a couple of years ago....

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I wouldn't recommend anyone uses vend until they sort out their major inventory issues. 90% of our stock has been inaccurate for a month now due on constant issues that vend has been having. It seems to be a problem of a company growing to fast and not being able to keep up. It so frustrating as when its works it is a fantastic product. Unfortunately at the moment it doesn't work.
Their customer feedback rating has dropped by 10% in the last month and we know at least 48 other businesses that have been having major issues.
Vend has been unable to fix multiple system errors for a month now our support ticket goes on for pages. They just keep passing us on form person to person.

Unfortunately Vend fails to live up to it's simple promise of managing your inventory. This shortcoming results in selling items shopify knows you don't have in stock. 0 counts become -1 as customers are allowed to purchase sold out items. Disappointed customers and time consuming service issues because of inventory shortage are not good.

Admittedly, Vend is unable to sync consistently with shopify. This results in poor communication between Vend and your Shopify inventory. It took over 30 sessions of trouble shooting, 50+ emails back and forth, I even had to pay for "premium support" so Vend would communicate with me openly about the syncing issues. The positive thing is every individual is willing to help. However, none would admit the company secret, vend can't properly manage your inventory because the system knowingly sells your products into the negative. Yes, this even happens when you have inventory tracking in shopify and when you're set to "not accept back orders." Finally after 1 year back and forth vend executives finally admitted the flaw and offered one month credit. Well that's a fraction of the losses and disappointed customers. In short, if you're looking for kind people that "care" to help vend is cool. If you want a system that works and tech teams that don't spend their days making excuses for faulty execution I recommend skuvault.com the pricing is similar, it is many times more robust and importantly ACTUALLY DOES IT's JOB! Consider this a warning. DO NOT USE VEND IF YOU NEED ACCURATE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT. If you are not concerned with accurate inventory by all means, this might work for you and your business.

Been using it as it seems to be the only thing on the market. just waiting for shopify pos app that integrates with Xero. please hurry!

Finding more and more issues with Vend not syncing well with Shopify - particularly when receiving orders for items that have variants. If this continues we will be looking to switch to another POS

As has been mentioned by a couple of other reviewers Vend has some major inventory issues that have completely buggered us up. As a result the integration with Shopify and Xero are all but useless. Vend's customer support is declining and they frequently pass you from person to person, or on to their 'Knowledgebase' with no fix.

Unfortunately, it appears Vend is trying to do too much too soon, or is woefully understaffed to handle their growth. We like the interface but are shopping for a new POS provider.

As a basic POS it's adequate but as to it's integration and inventory claims forget about it - the stuff of nightmares!!!

We would leave less than one star if possible...after 2 months of their tech guys trying to get Vend to communicate with our shopify database, the Vend system literally destroyed our entire store inventory of over 4000 items, costing us thousands of dollars of time to repair the damage they did...and to top it off they refused to refund any money we spent on implementing their system despite the fact that their product did not work as advertised, and we could never use Vend. We will be reporting them to the ACCC in Australia and anyone thinking about choosing Vend is welcome to contact us so we can warn them of the imminent damage to their online inventory. Vend admin was not helpful in the least. Beware throwing money away on an inferior product that only leaves you with a giant mess to clean up, I am not sure we will ever recover from this debacle!

2 months using Vend now and I have to say that it's been a horrible experience. Products get deleted out of nowhere. I have to recheck inventory every 3 days because products quantitiy changes, variants deleted. It's a total mess and we are not satisfied with it at all. I do want it to work becasue it seems like it could be a great software however this is a downer for us. We reallly like the interface but it is worthless if the CORE's not strong.