← All comparisons
Lightspeed runs the counter. UpChannels runs what happens after the customer leaves with nothing in their hands.
If your business ends at the counter — a bike shop, a gift shop, an apparel or garden store where the customer carries it out and never sees you again — Lightspeed Retail Core at $149/mo is the stronger product, and it is not close: deeper retail inventory, a built-in online store, a wholesale catalog and reporting we do not match. UpChannels Pro is also $149/mo per store, and it is built for the other kind of shop: the one that schedules a delivery day, routes a truck, captures a signature at the door, sends a technician back out under warranty, and has to close the month afterwards. Watch the two price tags carefully, because they are not the same shape — Lightspeed prices by register and location and does not publish what a second register costs, while we price per store with two users included and charge separately for the delivery, portal, payments and bank-reconciliation add-ons.
Comparing UpChannels Pro ($149/mo per store) with Lightspeed Retail Core ($149/mo, billed monthly). Every fact about Lightspeed Retail below was read from their own published pages on . Prices change — check theirs before you decide.
Side by side
| What you need | UpChannels | Lightspeed Retail |
|---|---|---|
| What does one store actually pay a month? | Pro is $149/mo per store, month-to-month, two users included. Delivery Routing & Dispatch, the Customer Portal, Bank Reconciliation and integrated card payments are optional paid add-ons on top of that, enabled per store and priced on request. | Published on their pricing page as Basic $89, Core $149, Plus $289 per month, with annual billing advertised as "save up to 18%" (checked 2026-09-14). The same page notes prices "reflect Lightspeed Retail (X-Series)" and that "additional service fees may apply depending on the nature of the business and the industry". |
| What does it cost to add one more person? | Two users are in the $149. Each additional user is $29/mo, with no cap on how many you add. | The pricing page sizes a plan by number of locations and number of registers, not by user, and no per-user price appears on it (checked 2026-09-14). Custom user roles are listed as a feature; what a seat costs is not stated. |
| What if I need a second till, or a second store? | There is no register licence — it runs in a browser, so a second till is just another signed-in user. A second store is a second subscription, listed on our own pricing page at the same per-store rate. | Every plan says "1 included" register. The pricing page carries "Extra locations" and "Additional registers" as line items and publishes no price for either (checked 2026-09-14). |
| Can it hold my stock properly — serials, POs, counts? | Stock per location, bulk quantities and serialized units side by side, with a condition and price per individual unit. Receiving, transfers, cycle counts, label printing, and an append-only movement ledger behind it all. | Documented in depth and this is their strength: "Identify inventory with unique serial numbers in any of your locations from a single search", "Create purchase orders in seconds, directly from your POS", "Set reorder points and get low-stock alerts before you run out", transfer tracking, and "landed cost calculations, to help ensure your cost of goods sold (COGS) is always accurate" (checked 2026-09-14). |
| Can I sell online from the same catalogue? | No. There is no web store inside UpChannels — online here means a payment link and the customer’s own order page, not a shopfront. Our services team builds storefronts as a separate, quoted engagement. | "Built-in Lightspeed eCommerce" is listed on Core and Plus; the Basic row is qualified as "Built-in Lightspeed eCommerce (Basic)". In-store and online loyalty is listed alongside it, and their wholesale catalog lets you "browse thousands of brands" for product creation (checked 2026-09-14). This is a real advantage over us. |
| Can it schedule a delivery day, route the truck, and prove the delivery happened? | Deliveries land on a driver-grouped day board, one click arranges the stops into an optimized route, and the driver gets it as a texted link with no app to install. At the door: signature, signer name, photos, GPS and timestamp, partial quantities, and inventory that settles to exactly what came off the truck. This is Delivery Routing & Dispatch, an optional paid add-on enabled per store. | Delivery scheduling, route optimization and proof of delivery are not documented on their retail, inventory, service-orders or pricing pages (checked 2026-09-14). The inventory page describes "Pick, pack and ship online orders with barcode scanning and mobile-friendly workflows". |
| Can I book a service call and send a tech out? | A service catalog with prices and durations, jobs placed on a day against technician availability, and a dispatch list you print or text as a signed, expiring link. Actual start and end times, completion notes and a customer signature are recorded on the job. | They publish a Service Orders module — "Streamline your service offering, maximize sales per customer, and easily manage retail and service sales - all from your POS" — and you can "Schedule new services up to 14 days in advance when creating a service sale". Their page frames it as the repair counter for bike, sporting goods, jewelry and home-and-garden stores, says "The module can be added to each of our packages", publishes no price for it, and does not mention assigning a technician to a route, dispatch or field visits (checked 2026-09-14). |
| Does my customer get to see their own order without phoning me? | The Customer Portal gives each customer a login-free link to their order: live status, appointment, balance, online payment, and a delivery date they can request themselves. Optional paid add-on, enabled per store. | A customer-facing order status and self-scheduling portal is not documented on the pages we checked (2026-09-14). Their customer-facing surfaces are the online store and loyalty. |
| What does taking a card cost, exactly? | Card payments run through Stripe on your own Stripe account, so your store is the merchant of record. Stripe bills its processing fee to you directly and UpChannels deducts a platform fee — a percentage plus a flat amount per charge, shown read-only in Settings. Keep your existing processor instead and we charge nothing for payments. | Their pricing page publishes "Lightspeed Payments Card-present rate 1.5%" on all three plans. No keyed or online rate is published there; the Payments page itself says only that they offer "competitive rates" and that "the rate is always the same no matter what card your customer chooses to pay with", names a "$15 chargeback fee, should one even occur at all", and says funds "are typically deposited in your account within 2 business days" (checked 2026-09-14). Read the 1.5% together with the pricing-page footnote about additional service fees varying by business and industry. |
| Can I take a lease-to-own or third-party finance tender at the counter? | Yes — the tender list includes eight named lease-to-own and financing providers (Acima, Snap, Progressive, Katapult, FlexShopper, Okinus, American First and a generic Financing) alongside cash, check, cards, ACH, wallets, store credit, gift cards, loyalty points and trade-in, and one order can be split across several of them. | Lease-to-own or third-party consumer finance as a customer tender is not documented on their pricing, payments or retail pages (checked 2026-09-14). Lightspeed Capital appears in their line-up, but it is a cash advance to the merchant, not a tender a customer pays with. Worth saying plainly: STORIS does handle lender settlement for furniture and appliance dealers, and has for years — it is quote-only and built for mid-market chains, so the true statement is that no platform priced for a single-location independent documents this. |
| Is there a time clock for staff, and can I run payroll? | No to both, and this is our clearest gap. There is no punch clock, no weekly rota, no timesheet approval and no payroll in the shipped product. We record actual start and end times against a service job, which is not the same thing and should not be sold as if it were. | Yes, through a partner: "Enhanced workforce management from Lightspeed and Homebase", naming a time clock, employee scheduling, turning "timesheets into pay-ready hours and wages", and labor-cost and budget tracking, with payroll marked "For businesses based in the US only." The page advertises "exclusive pricing to access all that Homebase has to offer for less" without publishing a number (checked 2026-09-14). |
| Do my books close, or do I still hand it all to a bookkeeper? | A double-entry ledger with P&L and balance sheet inside the app on Pro and above, expenses and supplier bills, and a Bank Reconciliation add-on that connects the bank feed and matches deposits, card payouts net of processor fees, and refunds, then closes the period. | Lightspeed Accounting syncs to your accounting package: "Sales, payments, discounts or taxes, everything is transferred to the account of your choice in your accounting software", and it "works with leading accounting software like QuickBooks, Sage and more", producing "a daily sales receipt, a profit and losses report and more" in that package. A native general ledger, balance sheet or bank reconciliation inside Lightspeed is not documented on that page (checked 2026-09-14). |
| Does a human set it up, or do I do it myself? | Our team does the setup with you — locations, tax, staff, and getting your products and customers in — and stays on afterwards for the work that keeps running. It is scoped and quoted as a project rather than bundled. | The pricing page lists "Onboarding and professional service options", 24/7 chat support and 24/7 phone support (checked 2026-09-14). |
Choose Lightspeed Retail if
- Your business ends at the counter. If nothing leaves on a truck and nobody goes back out to fix it — apparel, gifts, jewelry, sporting goods, a garden centre selling over the counter — you would be paying us for a delivery and service engine you never open.
- You want the online store and the POS to be one product. Lightspeed publishes built-in eCommerce on Core; we have no web store at all, and that gap is real.
- Buying and merchandising is the hard part of your job. Their wholesale catalog, purchase orders straight from the POS, landed costs and reorder points are deeper than our inventory reporting, and their 1.5% published card-present rate is a clear number to compare against.
- You need a time clock, a rota and payroll. Lightspeed sells that through Homebase as an integrated partner product; we have none of it, and you would end up buying it separately anyway.
- You run several registers on one floor at busy hours. That is what their pricing is shaped around, and it is proven retail checkout software — though you will have to ask them what each extra register costs, because they do not publish it.
Choose UpChannels if
- Your sale is only the start: it has to be delivered on a day the customer agreed to, by a driver on a route, with a signature and photos on file. A furniture or garden store, a liquidation warehouse, an electronics dealer delivering big items.
- You both sell and service — an HVAC, plumbing, lawn-care or appliance-repair business, or a retailer whose own techs go back out under warranty. One system holds the product, the stock, the job and the customer.
- Customers financing purchases is normal for you, and you need the lease-to-own and store-credit tenders recorded and reconciled like cash rather than written on a sticky note.
- You want the month to close inside the same system that took the money — ledger, expenses, bank feed matched against card payouts — instead of syncing to a separate accounting package.
Common questions
Switching from Lightspeed Retail
Can I bring my products and customers over from Lightspeed?
Yes. Lightspeed lists API access on its plans and offers standard exports, so in practice you pull product, customer and sales history out as files. We import them for you as part of setup, including serial numbers and per-unit condition. Plan on running both systems for a few days over the changeover rather than flipping in one night.
Am I locked into a contract with either one?
UpChannels is month-to-month with a 14-day free trial and no credit card to start. Lightspeed publishes both monthly and annual billing, with annual advertised as saving up to 18% — we did not find published contract-length or early-termination terms on the pages we checked on 2026-09-14, so ask them directly before signing an annual term.
If I leave UpChannels later, can I get my data out?
Yes. Bulk CSV export is a Premium-plan feature ($199/mo); on Basic or Pro, ask us and we produce a full extract of your products, customers, orders and payments. There is no exit fee and we do not hold data back.
What actually breaks the day I switch?
Three things, honestly. You lose the built-in online store, so if you sell on Lightspeed eCommerce today you need a plan for it first. You lose the Homebase time clock and rota, and we have nothing to replace it with. And if you move card processing to Stripe through us, your statements, deposit timing and rates all change at once, so most stores move payments a week or two after the rest.
Who should not buy UpChannels?
A shop with high transaction counts and nothing after the counter. If you ring 300 small sales a day, never deliver, never dispatch a technician and never take a finance tender, a specialty retail POS like Lightspeed will serve you better than we will, and we would rather say so now.
Can I keep the card processor I already have?
Yes. Integrated payments is an optional add-on — leave it off, keep your current processor and terminal, and record those payments against the order as you do now, with no payment fee from us. If you do switch it on, the money settles into your own Stripe account with your store as merchant of record.
Where these figures came from
- Lightspeed Retail POS pricing — Basic $89 / Core $149 / Plus $289, "1 included" register per tier, 1.5% card-present rate, the eCommerce (Basic) row, and the X-Series footnote
- Lightspeed Retail POS — product overview
- Lightspeed Retail — inventory management (serial numbers, purchase orders from the POS, reorder points, landed costs, pick/pack/ship)
- Lightspeed Retail — Service Orders module (14 days ahead, "can be added to each of our packages", no price published)
- Lightspeed Retail — Accounting (syncs to QuickBooks, Sage and more)
- Lightspeed Retail — workforce management and payroll, from Lightspeed and Homebase, US-only payroll
- Lightspeed Payments (retail) — "competitive rates", $15 chargeback fee, funds typically deposited within 2 business days
Checked September 14, 2026. We re-check these every quarter, and we would rather be told we are out of date than leave a wrong number up — tell us.
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