Lightspeed Commerce Inc., the unified omnichannel platform powering ambitious businesses in over 100 countries, has officially announced the launch of significant new product advancements across its retail, hospitality, and golf solutions.
According to certain reports all these innovations arrive on the scene bearing an ability to help merchants access enhanced insights, streamlined operations, and improved customer experiences.
Talk about these innovations on a slightly deeper level, we begin from the ones focused on hospitality.
Here, Lightspeed has confirmed the introduction of Lightspeed Restaurant’s AI-powered benchmarks and trends. Bestowing upon restaurant owners a deeper understanding of their own performance and how they measure up against local competitors, these insights basically come in handy to boost revenue, streamline operations, as well as gain a competitive upper hand in a crowded dining market.
Next up, we have an upgraded Lightspeed Tableside coming into play. In case you weren’t aware, Tableside is a pocket-size, mobile POS which makes it possible for servers to take orders and payments directly at the table, on the terrace, or wherever guests are.
Moving forward, this solution will provide sleek new Mobile Tap device to merchants. Powered by Lightspeed Payments, the new innovation should be able to speed up service, increase table turnover, and keep staff moving less while selling more.
Another detail worth a mention relates to how Lightspeed Pulse, the company real-time reporting app, now offers deeper insights to help restaurateurs uncover sales trends. It basically delivers at your disposal a digestible brand of data to spot sales trends, top staff, and best-sellers.
Complementing that would be a new “yesterday” filter which makes it easy to check how the business performed at a glance, all from the convenience of a smartphone.
Then, we have updates springing up to streamline operations and kitchen performance for better order flow. These updates include a Kitchen Display System (KDS) focused on allowing users to directly access “Prep insights” for the purpose of analyzing kitchen performance.
Alongside that, these updates give merchants more control over item details and menu updates so to save time by reducing the need for manual updates in the Back Office.
Rounding up Lightspeed’s hospitality lineup would be the availability of new sales report and real-time hourly sales metrics that improve profitability to a dramatic degree. The stated report effectively consolidates all key sales insights into a single, clear and customizable view which makes it possible for restaurateurs to analyze sales drivers and identify trends.
For even better visibility, operators can get more granular by filtering and selecting what metrics they want to see hourly, or analyze performance focusing on specific shifts, e.g. breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. These new reports are designed to help businesses plan smarter shifts, cut costs, and boost revenue with real-time insights.
Turning our attention towards what Lightspeed’s innovations will do for wider retail space, the benefits include NuORDER’s bid to introduce “Order Trends”, and therefore, conceive greater insight into wholesale buying.
Such a feature can prove useful to surface aggregated, top-performing product data (category, size, color) at the brand level. In fact, early adopters of Order Trends have seen approximately 10% increase in average order value.
Beyond that, there is the prospect of enhanced inventory tracking and financial metrics. In this regard, there is the feature of Custom Inventory Adjustments that puts together detailed tracking of stock changes.
Lightspeed Insights now also includes Inventory Turns and GMROI (Gross Margin Return on Investment) so to provide crucial financial metrics, traditionally found only in ERPs, directly within Lightspeed to help retailers optimize profitability.
If we take a closer look at retailers who have received the initial access of this technology, they have, on average, seen a 25.4% higher GMROI compared to merchants without Insights.
“In today’s dynamic business landscape, merchants need more than just a point-of-sale system; they need a partner that provides intelligent tools to navigate complexity and seize opportunities,” said Dax Dasilva, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lightspeed. “Our Q1 product releases reflect our unwavering commitment to delivering solutions that directly address the evolving needs of retailers, restaurateurs, and golf course operators, helping them optimize every aspect of their business from inventory to customer engagement.”
