Moving from Lightspeed to CirclePOS - A Review
Claire van den Broek - Huxley & Hiro
Huxley and Hiro is an independent bookstore in Wilmington, Delaware. Named after the owners’ Maine Coon cat Huxley and Shiba Inu dog Hiro.
The move
The move to CirclePOS came after using a modified version of Lightspeed for some time. Quite a few reasons for our move:
Lightspeed is similar to Square: fantastic interface, easy to learn, etc but not intended for books and therefore cannot pull information by ISBN for example. We were wasting massive amounts of time modifying spreadsheets from Edelweiss, trying to get as much data as possible, and if a price increased over time (happening a lot now with inflation), the system wouldn't know.
The more our inventory grew, the more Lightspeed's ‘promised’ analytics started to fail. POS systems, like Lightspeed and Square aren't really meant for stores with inventories 10K+, they're for smaller stores, like coffee shops with maybe 50 items, or clothing stores with maybe 1,000.
Re-ordering books with CirclePOS is a game-changer
Re-ordering was a huge pain. I had to pull spreadsheets, sift through them, eliminate titles that didn't need re-ordering, then upload them to PubEasy. From there, it was a puzzle, figuring out what came from where and what had to be ordered elsewhere, and so on. With CirclePOS, I just open the tab for sales from the last week, click what I want, and it goes straight in the cart, ready to order with a click! We're saving 5 hours a week on that alone as a store that does around $400K/year in sales. I'm also now finally thinking about delegating the re-orders (not seasonal) to an employee, since it's so much simpler now.
CirclePOS outshines Lightspeed in sales data and reporting
I can now instantly see in the system what I've sold in the past, how recently, whether I already have an order on the way, and whether I have custom orders. Pretty much none of that was possible in Lightspeed (it would be prohibitively time consuming feeding the correct data in with spreadsheets for every single order in Lightspeed, and Ingram doesn't even produce spreadsheets!).
No more spreadsheets!
We are now successfully tracking customer orders. Previously we used a spreadsheet and it was a failure-prone step. Employees would miss things at check-in, customers wouldn't be notified, employees would forget to mark things off the sheet. With CirclePOS it’s fully automated, with an email notification going straight to the customer when a book is checked in.
A website is included at no extra cost
Our inventory is now visible online at no extra cost ( this would have been an extra subscription through Lightspeed). If a book is brought to the counter or shows up in the mail, and it's not yet in our inventory, I just scan the ISBN and hit 'Load stock', and all the info is right there. Previously, we would have to fill out a long form to manually add a book, typing in the title, press, author, price, and so on. It was time consuming and super stressful, especially for my neurodivergent staff if a customer was standing there waiting.
CirclePOS Analytics is bookshop-focused
The analytics I get from CirclePOS are far more comprehensive and accurate than what we had with even the most expensive version of Lightspeed. Plus, features like loyalty programs are included — not treated as another add-on or upcharge like they were with Lightspeed. I imagine Square’s the same!
Why we chose CirclePOS over other Bookstore Software Systems
One of the main reasons we chose CirclePOS over the big-name bookstore POS systems? The others looked TERRIBLE — clunky interfaces, and many didn’t even support basic things like using a mouse. I can't even imagine the nightmare of training a Gen Z (people born roughly between 1997 and 2012) employee on those. My Gen Z employees are fast with apps that have good UX design, but they are very far behind millennials in my experience when it comes to understanding what's actually happening behind the interface, nor can they repair hardware. They really struggle with any technology that does not have a user-friendly interface, and things like Bookmanager are an MSDos nightmare.
Does CirclePOS look as good as Lightspeed or Square? No, but functionally it's close to equivalent, and they're actively working on improving the interface. I do need more training for my employees to use CirclePOS than Lightspeed, no doubt. But nowhere near as much as the nightmarish looking MSDOS bookstore POSes out there.
Downsides so far (mostly in the process of being solved!):
More training time but that initial investment is already paying off — errors with custom orders have dropped significantly, and I’m saving a huge amount of time on ordering.
Relatively new to the US. The system is still in the process of being adapted to the US, so info that would normally pop up we're still having to enter, like assigning a distributor to a specific American imprint that the system doesn't know. But after two weeks or so of filling in anything missing while I order, it's now almost done (which also means that it will be done for everyone else as CirclePOS shares these connections).
Stripe Integration
CirclePOS has recently integrated with Stripe, which we're very happy about because it has the best rates on the market in my opinion. It has a good backoffice dashboard where I can track transactions that actually went through the terminal, and since Lightspeed terminals are just a modified Stripe terminal, we were even able to keep all the terminals! The downside is that they're still working to improve the integration. Right now there's a long pause after a card is accepted and before it prints a receipt. We’ve had three or four errors we haven’t quite figured out yet, but usually when an error occurs, the payment goes through correctly. The POS just doesn’t finish processing, so we re-enter the order as cash to complete the sale.
Tech support
They're smaller so where Lightspeed and Square have options like "ask AI what to do", and tech support on call 24/7 (and way more “googleable answers from other users), it may take until the evening to reach someone at CirclePOS. While they’re a smaller team spread across different time zones, that also means you’re dealing directly with skilled, knowledgeable people who act quickly. You can easily talk to the people who own it, not just some clueless tech support hourly person. So when there's a small issue of "I didn't correctly understand this feature", the wait is longer to get an answer because there's no quick googling, AI, or chat support. But when there's a bigger problem, you have the right people working hard to fix it asap. All the CirclePOS staff stay connected through Discord, so if something urgent comes up, SOMEONE will likely see it quickly—whenever they’re awake in their time zone. (Rick’s in Europe, Warwick’s in New Zealand, and the developers are scattered around the world.)
Data Transfer
The transfer of data was fast, but there were some things we missed and therefore they caused some hiccups.
Supported Hardware
We didn't review the supported hardware (didn't really think about it!) and realized our label maker is not compatible so we'll need a new one now. But we can use the Dymo software for the old one for the time being, and we don't print a lot of labels. One concern is that their standard labels are a larger minimum size. We mainly use labels for really small products like the back of stickers, so they would not fit.
Gift Cards
We realized after some unsuccessful attempts to activate our gift cards that we had never given them a file of our existing physical gift cards which had been generated but not activated yet (so no balance). After speaking with developers we learned that they did not yet have that functionality because the CirclePOS system generates its own codes which you can then have printed. Since we had a couple hundred cards already printed, we asked them to add it. This ended up being a great example of where we could work with the developers, have them create that option in the system, and now other bookstores will be able to use this functionality in the future as well.We didn't give them our unused gift card file, so activating our physical gift cards has had some obstacles, but we can print digital gift cards - though we're still not sure how to best do that from the register, so we're figuring that out.
There are some features we need that are unique to the American market, but they've been working hard to implement them or find solutions. We need a "no expiration" to gift cards, but it currently allows 50 years so that's probably fine. Ingram doesn't let us order via email, so we need to find other ways to do that. (Right now I email the cart for Ingram to myself and then place the order.) But that's no slower than it was in Lightspeed. Faster actually since at least now it has all the data just from entering an ISBN. Our gift cards are one digit too long (the system allows 11, we have 12, and 16 is common in America). We can't notify via SMS yet, only email, in the system, because no provider is set up yet for that in America (but Lightspeed has no such function at all).
Conclusion
Overall, I think the issues that have slowed us down are ones that we are working together with CirclePOS to fix for future stores, as they adapt to the American market. And the time savings, improved accuracy, order tracking, etc. are huge. In fact, within three weeks of starting CirclePOS we discovered a book AND an entire BOX of Penguin books missing thanks to CirclePOS showing us it remained on order and should have arrived... Penguin credited us for it. We had no real way of tracking this in the past unless we spent hours pouring over invoices each month. We’re now tracking orders successfully, and it makes us wonder how many books we might have missed before, since Lightspeed didn’t track any of that.
So I would say despite some challenges we're working to fix, it's a massive improvement without the terrible interface of Bookmanager etc.
If a store does < $100,000 and has an inventory of under 4K books, systems like Square and Lightspeed are likely the easiest, fastest options, but for any store larger than that, we've realized a dedicated bookstore POS is necessary, no matter how cleverly you think you've adapted the other POS (my co-owner is very good with technology and made extensive adaptations, dynamic spreadsheets, etc., and it was still not enough in the end).
Claire van den Broek
Owner, Hukley & Hiro
Useful additional references
If you’re thinking about opening a bookstore have a read of this article How to Open a Bookstore for some great pointers. Visit our Testimonials page or Meet more of the stores using CirclePOS, and see what makes them tick
If you would like to learn more about CirclePOS, email sales@circlesoft.net or book a demo