Lightspeed → to Shopify

Lightspeed to Shopify: one platform for the shop floor and the website

Most Lightspeed migrations start with a retailer who runs Lightspeed Retail in the store and Lightspeed eCom online, and who is tired of the two halves not quite agreeing. Shopify with Shopify POS replaces both with one inventory, one customer list and one set of reports. This guide covers the eCom side, the POS side, and how to move them without a gap in trading.

Which Lightspeed do you have?

Lightspeed sells several products under one name, and the migration differs by product.

Product	What it is	Migration notes
Lightspeed eCom (C-Series)	The hosted webstore formerly known as SEOshop, common in Europe, Canada and Australia	Full product, order and customer exports plus an API. The most complete source.
Lightspeed eCom (E-Series)	The Ecwid-based webstore bundled with Retail X-Series	Ecwid exports products and orders as CSV. Simpler catalog model.
Lightspeed Retail (R-Series and X-Series)	The point of sale and inventory system	Items, customers and sales export or come via the API. Moves to Shopify POS with locations, staff and hardware set up fresh.

Why retailers leave Lightspeed

• Two systems that sync rather than one system that shares. Stock discrepancies between Retail and eCom are the most common complaint we hear.
• Cost. Retail plus eCom plus payments plus add-ons adds up, and Lightspeed has moved customers toward mandatory Lightspeed Payments.
• Online experience. The eCom themes and checkout are behind Shopify on speed, conversion and apps.
• Omnichannel features. Buy online pick up in store, ship from store, and unified customer profiles are native on Shopify POS Pro.

What migrates from Lightspeed to Shopify

Data	Source	Moves to Shopify?
Products, variants, SKUs, barcodes, prices, cost prices, stock per location, brands, categories, images	eCom export or Retail items export, plus API	Yes. Barcodes and cost prices carry over, which matters for POS scanning and margin reports. Multi-location stock maps to Shopify locations.
Online orders	eCom orders export or API	Yes, as real orders with original numbers and status.
In-store sales history	Retail sales export	Optional. Can be imported as orders tagged by location, or kept as a reporting archive. Most retailers import the last one to three years.
Customers, loyalty balances, consent	Customer export	Records, addresses and consent carry over. Loyalty points are recreated in a Shopify loyalty app from an exported balance.
Gift cards	Gift card report	Balances recreated as Shopify gift cards.
Suppliers and purchase orders	Retail	Suppliers as vendors. Open purchase orders recreated in Shopify’s stock transfers or an inventory app.
Passwords	Not exportable	No. Customers reset or use passwordless accounts.
Theme	eCom themes	No. Rebuilt on Shopify.

The POS cutover

The web store can be built alongside the old one for weeks. The tills cannot, so the POS cutover is a planned event. We stage Shopify POS on the new hardware or on the existing iPads, load products with barcodes and stock, train staff on a test store, then switch on a quiet day with Lightspeed Retail kept read-only for a week for lookups. Stock is counted at cutover so both systems agree on the starting numbers. Hardware that works with Shopify POS, including barcode scanners, receipt printers and the card reader, is confirmed in the audit.

Tools

Cart2Cart and LitExtension support Lightspeed eCom C-Series as a source, and the Ecwid-based E-Series exports clean CSVs that Matrixify handles well. Retail data usually comes through the API. As with every platform, the tools do not carry tracking numbers or per-location stock reliably, so we run those parts by script and reconcile every count.

How we run it

1. Audit of both products, locations, hardware, integrations and the export data, with a fixed-price scope.
2. Build in a free Shopify development store with locations, POS, theme, checkout, payments, shipping and taxes.
3. Sample import and sign-off.
4. Full catalog and customer run.
5. Web launch with redirects from the eCom URL structure, typically /product-slug.html and /category/, to Shopify’s.
6. POS cutover on the planned day with a stock count.
7. Order history imported silently in the background.
8. Audit report and 30 days of support.

Timeline and cost

A single-location retailer with a modest catalog is live in six to ten weeks. Multi-location retailers with large catalogs and integrations run twelve to sixteen. Web store migrations start at $2,500 for smaller catalogs and $3,500 for larger ones; POS setup is scoped by location. Fixed price after the audit, 50 percent to begin and 50 percent once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures, and you pay Shopify nothing until launch.

Retail data in detail

Lightspeed Retail holds the richest version of your catalog, and it is the source we prefer even when eCom has the same products, because it carries the fields the shop floor depends on.

Retail field	Shopify destination	Why it matters
Item, system ID, custom SKU, manufacturer SKU, UPC or EAN	Product, SKU, barcode, and the Lightspeed ID in a metafield	Barcodes make POS scanning work on day one and the ID keeps a join key for later reconciliation.
Matrix items with attributes	Products with options and variants	Size and color matrices map directly. Matrices with more than three attributes are restructured.
Default cost, average cost	Cost per item on the variant	Margin reports in Shopify need it.
Price levels (default, MSRP, online, wholesale)	Price and compare-at price, with wholesale levels as B2B price lists or tags	Keeps retail and wholesale pricing separate.
Quantity on hand per shop	Inventory per Shopify location	Multi-location stock is native.
Categories, brands, tags, seasons	Collections, vendor, tags	Drives navigation and filtering online.
Vendors and vendor item costs	Vendor field, and purchase order data in Shopify’s stock transfers or an inventory app	Reordering continues without a gap.
Customers with loyalty balances and notes	Customers with tags, notes, and loyalty balances loaded into a loyalty app	Regulars keep their points and staff keep their notes.

Hardware and the cutover runbook

Shopify POS runs on iPads and iPhones, and on Android, with the Shopify card reader, the POS Go handheld, or tap to pay on the phone itself. Most receipt printers, cash drawers and barcode scanners that worked with Lightspeed on iPad work with Shopify POS, and the audit confirms each model. The cutover day runs to a script:

1. Close the last Lightspeed day and take the closing stock count, by scanning where possible.
2. Import the counted quantities to Shopify so the two systems agree at the moment of switch.
3. Log the tills into Shopify POS, confirm the reader, printer and drawer, and run one test sale and one test refund.
4. Switch Lightspeed Retail to read-only for lookups and keep it for a week.
5. Staff sell on Shopify POS from opening. We are on call for the first two days.

Staff training happens the week before on a test store with the real catalog, so the first real customer is not the first time anyone has used the system.

Common mistakes in Lightspeed migrations

• Migrating from eCom instead of Retail and losing barcodes, cost prices and per-location stock.
• Skipping the stock count at cutover and inheriting every discrepancy the old system had.
• Assuming the card reader carries over. Payments on Shopify POS use Shopify’s hardware.
• Leaving loyalty balances behind, which is the single fastest way to lose regulars.
• Launching the web store and the tills on the same day. Web first, then POS, is calmer.

Lightspeed eCom C-Series specifics

If your web store is C-Series, the former SEOshop platform, the export lives under Settings, and it produces product, variant, customer and order CSVs plus a separate content export for pages and the blog. URLs follow /product-slug.html for products, /category/subcategory/ for categories and /blogs/blog/post-slug.html for articles, all of which are mapped to Shopify’s structure and tested. Multi-language C-Series shops become Shopify Markets with translations imported per language. Custom template code does not transfer, and the apps that C-Series stores typically use, such as Sendcloud, MyParcel or Mailchimp, all have Shopify equivalents or the same app on Shopify. E-Series stores, which run on Ecwid, export products and orders from the Ecwid control panel and follow the same process with a simpler catalog model.

What you gain on the omnichannel side

The reason most retailers make this move is not the web store on its own but what one system makes possible.

• Buy online, pick up in store with per-location inventory and a pickup notification flow that works out of the box.
• Ship from store, so an online order can be fulfilled from whichever location has the stock.
• One customer profile across web and till, so a regular’s online orders and in-store purchases appear together and loyalty applies to both.
• Gift cards that work everywhere. A card bought online is redeemable at the till and vice versa.
• Exchanges and returns at POS for online orders, with the refund going back to the original payment.
• Staff permissions and reporting by location on POS Pro, which is $89 a month per location.

Lightspeed offers versions of most of these, but they depend on the eCom and Retail sync behaving, and in our experience that sync is where the discrepancies come from. On Shopify there is nothing to sync.

A retail migration, worked through

A two-location specialty retailer with around 4,000 items, 11,000 customers and a C-Series web store is the typical shape. Discovery takes a week: exports from Retail and eCom, hardware inventory, a look at the loyalty program and the supplier list. The web store is built over three weeks while the catalog is loaded from Retail with barcodes, costs and per-location stock, and the customers come across with their loyalty balances staged in the loyalty app. Week five is the web launch: redirects from the C-Series URLs, Search Console, and the old web store switched off. Weeks six and seven are POS: staff training on the test store, hardware confirmed, and a Sunday-evening cutover with a stock count at each location. The order history from both channels imports in the background during week seven and the audit report lands in week eight. Total elapsed time is eight weeks, with the tills down for no trading hours at all.

What you get at handover

A reconciliation ledger for items, stock by location, customers and orders; the stock count sheets from cutover day; the loyalty balance transfer log; the redirect verification list; a hardware and register configuration sheet per location; and a recorded walkthrough for both the admin and the POS app.

Questions we settle in the survey

• Which Lightspeed products you run: eCom C-Series, E-Series, Retail R-Series or X-Series.
• How many locations and registers, and which hardware is at each.
• Whether the loyalty program continues, and on which app.
• How far back the in-store sales history should go.
• Whether suppliers and open purchase orders need to move on day one.

Frequently asked questions

Tell us which Lightspeed products you run on the migration survey. Our Shopify POS implementation page covers the retail side in more depth.