Manual - The function of Lightspeed and (email) marketing

What is Lightspeed?

Lightspeed is a CMS system in which you can easily manage and build your website. Lightspeed is known as an easy-to-manage website, with which you can easily add or remove content. That's why Lightspeed is known as a user-friendly system. Lightspeed is extremely suitable for E-commerce. From sales to advertising: everything is in Lightspeed. Think of integrations like Google Products, KiesKeurig or Marktplaats. Lightspeed also integrates with your social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Who is Lightspeed for?

Lightspeed is actually there for everyone. From large retailers to small retailers. The system is suitable for when you have an offline shop and an online shop. By easily connecting all your locations in Lightspeed, you maintain an efficient supply chain. A big advantage of Lightspeed is that you can have your products synchronised with a data feed, or add products yourself. The latter is very easy if you want to have your product online now and bypass your PIM system. Below you can see an example of how to add products in Lightspeed:

Besides the standard things you fill in here, you also have the option to add related articles to your product. These so-called 'recommendations' are then shown to the client when they have viewed this specific product. This easy product management system of Lightspeed also makes it very attractive for starting entrepreneurs to choose Lightspeed. So you can definitely say that Lightspeed is handy for offline shops. And online shops. And a combination of offline and online retail. Are you a starting entrepreneur? Then Lightspeed is definitely recommended. The customer support of Lightspeed is also very friendly and helpful.

What does Lightspeed cost?

That's a question you'll want to have answered. Lightspeed has no less than three packages, namely essential, advanced and professional.

• Essential. With the basic package, essential of € 49,- per month, you have no less than 250 different product variants. You have 1 user account, which is also fine if your shop is small. You have e-mail support and you get several training sessions. You can import and export what you want in Lightspeed and also have a nice reporting dashboard. You even get free SEO optimisation. The only thing that's not (yet) included is Lightspeed retail. You need Lightspeed Retail for your online sales. Lightspeed retail costs you € 79, - euro per month. For € 128 a month, you have a nice starter package for both an online and offline shop.
• Advanced. For advanced, Lightspeed's middle package, you only pay € 89 per month (excluding Lightspeed Retail). You get 5000 product variants. The package is therefore intended for the slightly larger web shops. You can also start with 3 user accounts. International sales are also included in this package (which you do not need as a starter with the 'essential' package). The support is slightly better with this package, you have the possibility to call and email. What you also get with advanced compared to essential are extensive blog capabilities, product filters (such as price, name etc.), an A/B test for your check-out, access to the API and HTML / CSS adjustments. An RMA (returns management) can also be arranged in Lightspeed itself with this package.
• Professional. Has your web shop been around longer and do you want to get it right the first time? Then I recommend the professional package at Lightspeed. Here you have all the possibilities to be in control. With the professional package, you have 15,000 product variants and no fewer than 10 user accounts. In addition to the functions of the advanced package, you have even more options here. For example, with the professional package you also have discount rules, product bundles and wholesale options. A real all-in-one package!

How does Lightspeed work?

1. Log in at Lightspeed

Are you just starting out with your web shop? Then you need a CMS (Content Management System) from Lightspeed. Have you started a Lightspeed webshop with your own domain? Then you can already access the CMS system by adding .webshopapp.com/admin to your URL. Before the dot, you put your domain name. This will get you into your CMS system: yourdomain.webshopapp.com/admin. Logged in? Great! Then you're now in your Lightspeed dashboard, which looks like this:

This is your overview of your shop. At least, your back side. On the left side you see a menu where you can set everything. On the right side you see information about your turnover, visitors, number of orders etc. Once your shop is running, you will see more extensive statistics here.

2. Choose your theme

Your next step is to create a theme for your webshop. With this theme you make your shop 'more beautiful and more fun' and it will eventually create recognition. There are several themes to choose from. Think about who your target group is and what you sell. You can find the theme on the left side of the menu under 'design':

As you can see in the screenshot, this takes you to the theme shop. With almost 200 themes to choose from, you're bound to find something you like. Do you like a theme? When you click on it, you can see more information about the specific theme:

Would you like to see the theme live? Then click on 'view demo'. This will open a new screen with a website that has the theme. This makes it possible to click around on each theme to see if you are happy with it. Have you found a suitable theme? Great! Then the 'front' of your website will look a lot more professional. Per theme you pay an average of € 15 - 20,- euro per month. When you scroll down to the theme store, you will also see one free theme.

3. Style the chosen theme

I have chosen a theme, Switch. I am now going to adjust the theme to my own wishes. I do this by going to 'design' and then clicking on 'theme editor':

By clicking on the big blue button with 'customise theme', I have some options for styling within the theme itself. When I click on that, I end up in another window where my website is loaded and I have a menu on the left to adjust various things:

For example, it is possible to customise my navigation (menu), enter my logo, enter a promotion bar at the top of my website, and style my header. When I click on 'pages' in the left-hand bar, I see the following:

This is where you set everything for your pages. Think about which banners you want to use, where they should be positioned, which categories you want to highlight and how you want your blog to look in style. Once you have this filled in, half your website is already done!

Think about what images you want to use and where. Fill this in under 'headlines'. In headlines you can set a slider, so when you land on the website, your visitor will see a slider first. The width is 1920 pixels. Keep in mind that each image has an equal size.

4. Add your catalogue to Lightspeed

Your shop is only complete when you have actually added products. This is easy to do with a CSV-import. Would you like to add your products manually? That's also an option! You'll need LightSpeed Retail for this. You put all your products, prices, images and categories in there. You then synchronize this with your LightSpeed Ecom environment. This is also a matter of filling it in and off you go. They can't make it any easier.

Is this your first time setting up a web shop? Think carefully about which categories, brands and products you have. Which categories are logical? And how do you divide the products between them? One product can appear in several categories, for example. Think about what your website visitors will find logical to put a product in. For example, you wouldn't put a deodorant under "animal care", but under the category "body" with a subcategory to "deodorant". Do you find it difficult to visualise this? Then draw it for yourself! And take a good look at what your competitors are doing.

5. Also important: setting up your check-out

You have designed your website and added your products. Now you have to get your customers to checkout in the webshop. When you click on 'check-out' in the menu, you will see the following screen:

As you can see, I may already upgrade to a new check-out, which works faster. On the bottom right you can see the configuration. What is important to know is that you can choose three different check-outs:

• One-step checkout: Your visitor checks out with the payment overview neatly arranged on one page. In this step, the information is displayed vertically on the page.
• One-Step Checkout: With this option, your visitor enters everything on 1 page. This checkout has a different page layout than the one-step checkout.
• Multi-step checkout: With this option, you divide your checkout into several steps. In this way, your visitor is guided through the process of placing an order at each step. Think of account information, payment options and shipping options.

Take a look at all three options and choose the one that suits your webshop best. Have you chosen a checkout that suits you? Then it's time to configure the checkout. You can do this by clicking on 'Configuration'. You will then be directed to a screen where you can configure which data you need in the checkout:

A nice feature of Lightspeed is that you can run an A/B test on your check-out. This means that your customers either see check-out A, or check-out B. LightSpeed then keeps track of which check-out works best and generates the most conversions. Do you find it difficult to make a choice in the check-outs? Then test which option works for your visitor!

6. Setting your payment methods

Now you have almost set up your entire webshop. But: how do your customers pay? It is important to set up your payment methods. An iDeal or a PayPal will not automatically appear in the check-out. So set them up! You can do this by going to 'settings'. You will see the following screen:

As you can see, under 'payment settings', I can set the payment providers, what additional costs you have and what tax rate you are going to charge (high or low). I go to 'payment providers' and press 'add payment provider'. You then have a huge choice of the following payment providers:

I click on the top one, Mollie 2, because I want to set up iDeal. In the next screen, this can be set up down to the last detail:

As you can see, I can add any option here (iDeal, Mastercard, PayPal, Maestro). In the additional settings, you can immediately determine what your tax percentage will be, what the minimum and maximum order amounts should be and whether there will be additional costs during checkout. You can also set whether the products should be displayed including or excluding VAT in both the shopping cart and the check-out. As said: everything can be arranged here down to the last detail.

7. Setting your shipping method

After paying with iDeal, a shipping method comes into play. You can set this in "settings" and then "shipping methods". You will see the following screen:

As you can see, this is not difficult to set up. You can create your own option or link a PostNL account. There are also several apps in the app store of Lightspeed which link a shipping provider by means of an API. Think for example of DHL. Chosen a shipping method? Your delivery times can also be set specifically. Go to "settings" and then to "delivery times". To add a delivery time, you need to fill in the following: name of the delivery time, determine the delivery time (between 1 and 2 days for example). And what the delivery time will be when a product is out of stock.

8. Setting up invoicing

Of course you want to look professional as a webshop. That's why it's possible to style your entire invoice in LightSpeed. Go to 'settings' and 'company'. You will now get a number of fields to fill in, like phone number, address, account holder, IBAN, Swift number, etc.:

9. Putting your webshop online

Yes! You have all the standard settings. Of course, you can always make your web shop prettier, better and faster. I will leave that for now. With these basic steps you have had all the steps to put a functional webshop live. Styling etc. Like for example connecting your socialmedia-accounts or linking a nice email-software package to it is a matter for later, when the web shop is live.

To put your shop live, go to 'settings' and then to 'domain names'. Add your domain name and press the button 'set as default'. Your domain is now live. Do not forget to request an SSL-certificate as well. This is the lock in your browser bar, which indicates that you are a secure website. Now you are ready to start bringing in conversions! Good luck!

Switch to Lightspeed

Is your webshop not on LightSpeed yet, but have you become enthusiastic? We can understand that! Switching to LightSpeed is actually not an exciting story at all. We hear more and more about clients who want to switch to Lightspeed. The most common reasons are:

• The webshop has grown enormously, so I want to tinker with my design myself
• Stock management is easier in LightSpeed
• Search engine friendly

Fortunately, LightSpeed makes switching very easy. You make an export with your current web shop supplier. And you paste the CSV file into the Lightspeed format. This way, it's possible to import the majority of your products into Lightspeed yourself. You also move all the URLs to LightSpeed, as it were. Would you prefer to take your design with you? That's no problem. LightSpeed makes that possible too. Although they also encourage you to immediately switch to a different design, since you're busy anyway. But, we leave that choice entirely up to you.

Experiences with Lightspeed

The experiences we have with Lightspeed are favourable. This is also because you can and may change a lot in Lightspeed itself. It is possible to adjust a number of things in the HTML and CSS code. Are you not very familiar with HTML and CSS? Then ask someone who knows about them. Most of our clients use LightSpeed and are very satisfied. They mention among other things:

• Support of LightSpeed is very good
• Webshop configuration in Lightspeed is easy
• The website is very fast
• Integrations with Lightspeed always work well

Lightspeed itself also has many customer cases in which you can read how their customers think about them. You can read the client cases of LightSpeed here.

Lightspeed and email marketing

Are you ready to start e-mail marketing with Lightspeed? There are various choices to make to set up e-mail marketing within or outside Lightspeed. We would like to take you through a number of options for Lightspeed and e-mail marketing.

LightSpeed and MailChimp

Are you ready to start e-mail marketing with LightSpeed? We notice that most clients start by integrating LightSpeed with MailChimp. With one click you connect your entire webshop with MailChimp. LightSpeed always makes it easy! For the integration with Lightspeed and MailChimp, you need a Retail or Lightspeed eCommerce account. Lightspeed then synchronizes with one Mailchimp audience at a time. That's something to take into account. Your abandoned shopping carts are available with Lightspeed Ecommerce, but not for Lightspeed Retail. Do you still want to connect your Lightspeed Retail as your e-commerce shop? Then you need two separate login IDs and passwords.

MailChimp easily integrates with Lightspeed. It works like this: all customers who have subscribed to the newsletter, MailChimp takes over as subscribed contacts. Customers who have chosen not to receive marketing emails appear as unsubscribed contacts. By the way, these contacts are eligible for transactional emails. Do you get new contacts in your newsletter list? Then you will see these customers almost immediately in MailChimp. MailChimp works with email lists in terms of price. You decide which email lists you have and which email addresses are in them. Do you have two lists which both contain the same e-mail address? Then you pay twice for this e-mail address.

We notice from our customers that, as they grow, MailChimp may no longer suit them. In that case, many customers turn to Reloadify. To take your email marketing to the next level, Reloadify might be a fit for you. With Reloadify you have an integration with MailChimp. This way it is possible to sync all your contacts from MailChimp to Reloadify with one click on the button. Also all tags your customer base has, will be taken over by Reloadify.

Lightspeed and Reloadify for email marketing

Lightspeed and Reloadify also go hand in hand. Lightspeed is good at providing insight into your abandoned shopping carts. This way it's still possible to get conversion from your abandoned shopping carts. Reloadify reinforces this by also loading these abandoned carts. This way, your customers can be approached with email marketing for the abandoned cart. Handy, in other words! To integrate Reloadify with Lightspeed, you only have to go to the Lightspeed app store and download the app. Okay, we'll make it easy for you. Download Reloadify for Lightspeed here. It only takes 24 hours to sync your data. That's because we download everything: order data, order history, customer data, but also your entire product catalogue is loaded in Reloadify. It is even possible to filter on category and brand level. By default, there are eight triggers ready for you to activate. A trigger is an automated email that is sent when your customer meets certain criteria. Think of the abandoned shopping cart, a birthday of your customer or a win-back campaign.

The convenient thing is, that the integration between Lightspeed and Reloadify speaks for itself. You don't have to link fields or other data. This is all done automatically for you. So it's just a matter of plug and play.

With the simple drag and drop editor it is a matter of minutes before you have your template up and running. Your template can be created entirely in your own house style. No hassle with startup costs, template costs or other costs. At Reloadify, you only pay for the number of active customers. These active customers are divided in 2 groups: newsletter subscribers and non-letter subscribers. Newsletter subscribers are customers who have specifically subscribed to your newsletter. Non-newsletter subscribers are customers who recently ordered from you, but did not subscribe to the newsletter. You can approach these customers with cross- and upsell mails, as long as it is relevant. At Reloadify, 1 email address counts as 1 profile. This way, you never pay twice.

LightSpeed and own email marketing module

Lightspeed also has an e-mail marketing module (only for retail R-series). You should not expect too much from this. You can send your newsletter subscribers simple messages:

Which is fine if you don't have a large customer base yet. Would you like to add some more flair to your e-mail? You can! In that case, choose a built-in template or create your own. However, this is limited.

Compare Lightspeed

Good, now you've got a lot of information about Lightspeed. But, what's the essential difference with other big platforms, like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce? We'd like to make those differences clear for you. So you can make a well-considered choice which platform suits you and your webshop exactly. Which is great!

Lightspeed vs Shopify

Although Lightspeed and Shopify are both listed on the stock exchange and are active internationally, there are essential differences between these two players.

Shopify has its roots in e-commerce. That's how Shopify was once proportioned, which you can still see. Shopify focuses on starters. Dropshipping is something in which Shopify excels, but which is still in its infancy at Lightspeed. Integrations with Shopify are easy: from Instagram to Wordpress: checkout via an external party has never been easier.

Lightspeed has its roots in a POS solution. Lightspeed also focuses not on start-ups, but on mature retailers. Lightspeed is therefore known as an omni-channel channel in which you have both offline and online sales points. For example, it is ideal for a cafeteria that has both a pick-up point and a delivery point. Lightspeed is originally from Amsterdam and has therefore become much bigger and better known in the Netherlands earlier than Shopify. For example, Shopify only started actively recruiting in the Netherlands in 2019.

So; Lightspeed vs Shopify: each has its own target group and size. It's purely up to your business whether Lightspeed or Shopify suits you.

Lightspeed vs Magento 2

Lightspeed and Magento 2 are really two extremes of each other. The differences are enormous. This is because Magento is an open source platform. This means that everyone can, and may, develop for Magento. Want to change something you don't like? No problem, you can. Lightspeed, on the other hand, is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, which is the opposite of Open Source. In Lightspeed, it's not so easy to adjust specific things. Lightspeed must develop this itself (which is customization), and you can't do that yourself. Lightspeed is therefore also a subscription system, where Magento is free to use. Lightspeed does have an awful lot of integrations, however, to still be able to meet your wishes.

Is your webshop growing? And would you like to work in multiple languages? This is easy to set up in Magento. There you have 1 domain name, and 1 back-end, with different storeviews. Changing these is easy via a dropdown menu. Are you in Lightspeed? Then you need several separate shops with separate back-ends. Magento is set up in such a way that your assortment will also grow. Do you want to bundle different products (SKUs) together or do you just want to expand your range? That's no problem in Magento. With Lightspeed you can run into the problem that, when you exceed a certain amount of products, you have to purchase a more expensive subscription from them.

In Magento, you have a little more freedom when it comes to functionalities. As long as it can be built technically, it can be built. For example, in Magento you have the possibility, when you add a product to your webshop, to add an infinite number of fields (also called attributes). Think of 'suitable for', 'variants' or 'print on t-shirt'. Everything is possible! Within Lightspeed it is possible to create 3 extra fields. Then you are also slightly more limited in the filter options you have.

Lightspeed vs Woocommerce / Wordpress

Woocommerce, or Wordpress, is extremely popular for websites and web shops. This is mainly due to the wide range of plug-ins available (55,000 and counting). You may therefore assume that you are in good hands with WordPress. With Woocommerce, literally everything can be adjusted. Keep in mind that because everything is customisable, you need a lot of plug-ins. And not every plug-in works equally well together. Getting the right plug-ins together is therefore your first task when you get started with WooCommerce. Also, it is relatively speaking very cheap to start with Wordpress. WooCommerce is an Open Source platform. You just need to choose a hosting party and you are ready to go. The costs are therefore between € 5 and € 20 per month, depending on your chosen package. This is many times more expensive than Lightspeed. However, Lightspeed will do its work more easily. This is because Lightspeed is fully in control of how their integrations work together, where Woocommerce is not. The chance of a bug or error in your website is therefore much higher with Woocommerce. WooCommerce has no support either, as it is Open Source. Lightspeed is known for its excellent support.

No matter how you look at it, you have to decide if Lightspeed, Shopify or Woocommerce suits you. And, of course, also suits your webshop. And which e-mail marketing software is right for you. There is plenty of choice!