Technical Backgrounder

LightSpeed

LightSpeed by Xsilva Systems Inc. provides users with a visually stunning and comprehensive suite of retail tools tailored to the Mac platform. Its clean, customizable design can add a distinctive elegance to retailers’ front-counter point of sale, their back-office functions, and their online retail presence through the addition of LightSpeed Web Store.

LightSpeed’s tools make it as easy as click, drag and drop to operate and track all aspects of a retail business. Its front counter point of sale solution features a stunning interface ideal for high-speed scanner-driven retail with a Cover Flow technology that helps reduce errors and incidents of fraud by allowing users to browse customers and products graphically. Back office functions are supported by a robust SQL database inspired by the look and feel made popular by Apple’s iTunes. LightSpeed features USB hardware support for standard cash drawers, card readers and barcode readers that are operated by LightSpeed as one integrated solution. LightSpeed Web Store, sold separately, allows retailers to generate and manage a fully customizable PHP- and CSS-based e-commerce site from their LightSpeed database.

With LightSpeed, all aspects of a retail operation are browsed as quickly and easily as playlists in iTunes. Users can access LightSpeed’s sales, service, tracking and purchasing tools with a single, streamlined interface.

LightSpeed’s features include:

  • A visual database of customers and products that is easily built by capturing images on the fly with an iSight camera, or by dragging and dropping images from the desktop or the web.

  • Professional quotes and invoices that include product images for visual confirmation.
  • Comprehensive customer tracking that includes history, contact information, addresses, photos and powerful search tools for marketing activities such as mass mailings and creating mailing labels, as well as VoIP calling with a single click.
  • Support for credit-card processing gateway standards like Authorize.net and HPS POS Gateway. Streamlined integration with the invoice and POS screens, as well as support for card swipes, guarantees a seamless and quick purchasing experience for customers.
  • A size-and-color matrix ideal for clothing and apparel businesses to adjust inventory levels and build purchase orders, invoices and other documents.
  • A versatile gift-card system.
  • A size-and-color matrix ideal for clothing and apparel-based businesses to adjust inventory levels and build purchase orders, invoices and other documents.
  • A myriad of tracking and calculation features for accurate, real-time inventory control and monitoring. Features include label design and printing, preset reorder points to ensure items remain in stock, inventory counts, and virtual warehousing that allows particular items to be kept in the system but removed from the stock available for sale.
  • Drag-and-drop purchasing orders, single-click purchasing actions and easy management of multiple suppliers, all of which dramatically reduces the time spent by sales staff processing order requests and purchase orders.
  • Multi-store features that allow retailers to track inventory levels and keep tabs on what’s going on at other store locations, as well as transferring and tracking inventory between locations.
  • Extensive reporting capabilities that can generate more than 300 different reports in more than two-dozen categories.
  • The power to export to popular accounting software packages from Intuit and MYOB for Mac and Windows, as well as seamless integration with Intuit’s QuickBooks 2009 for Mac.
  • A jobs and timesheets tool for tracking employee hours.
  • A service repair order tool that can print claim checks and service labels.

    • LightSpeed Web Store

    The power of LightSpeed can be extended to an online retail presence with the purchase of Web Store, which allows retailers to generate and maintain a fully customizable PHP- and CSS-based e-commerce site from their LightSpeed database. Products are set up in web categories with special web descriptions, prices (if desired), and assigned searchable keywords.

    Web Store’s features include:

    • Tight integration with the LightSpeed database.
    • Easy order processing. A single click to download web orders to be processed, using LightSpeed’s built-in credit-card-processing capability. Shoppers are matched with customer records in the database and automatically receive an email to alert them that their order has been received.
    • A SQL server back end that allows for individual customer accounts and secure customer logins. Customers can create and manage their own accounts and easily track their history.
    • A matrix system that enables each size and color combination to have its own picture, description and price, and maintains updated counts of what’s in stock.
    • Support for cross-selling related products and multiple images.
    • On-screen tax calculations.
    • Real-time credit-card processing.
    • Real-time shipping calculations for UPS, FedEx and USPS.
    • Wish lists.
    • Professionally designed templates that can be customized by the individual retailer.
    • An administrative panel built right into the LightSpeed application.
    • Search-engine-optimized (SEO) pages.
    • Service repair order (SRO) lookups.