Lightspeed Retail, the Accel Partners and iNovia Capital-backed startup that offers a retail commerce platform has added big data analytics to its tool set for “serious retailers”.
This morning the company announced “Advanced Reporting for LightSpeed Cloud,” giving retailers “real-time insight” into sales, inventory trends and customer preferences so they can make better decisions about their business.
The startup also noted in a release that 70 percent of new customers are opting for cloud, while revenue from this side of its business has increased 398 percent in the last 12 months. The company is also revealing that its 19,000 stores are processing $7.3 billion in annual transaction volume, up from $6 billion earlier this year.
It seems as though all is going well for the Montreal startup located on St. Urbain street.
The company said that independent brick-and-mortar retailers are turning to cloud-based technologies in the pursuit of highly personalized customer experiences, “once only possible online or to larger retailers with deeper pockets.”
According to Accenture, the retail cloud market is expected to reach more than $15.1 billion in 2015. When LightSpeed introduced its cloud POS in 2013, it enabled independent retailers to manage their business, engage customers, and check them out, all from a web browser or an iPad. Now the startup is giving retailers of any size data analytics, including “insight and predictive visibility” into sales, inventory levels, employee performance and customer preferences.
“Customer engagement, forecasting and inventory management technologies are only as good as the data that fuels them. This, coupled with more traditional retailers expanding online and bringing retail technologies into their stores, has made demand for cloud-based POS tools and data analytics soar,” said CEO Dax Dasilva. “With Advanced Analytics, we’re delivering to retailers the kind of data analysis normally associated with large-scale ERP or business intelligence solutions, but in an easy-to-use format and at a cloud price.”
Advanced Reporting for Cloud offers more than 40 reports that show information on product sales, profits and margins; customer preferences; employee performance; payment methods; and vendor-by-vendor analytics; across all stores and channels. A web and mobile-accessible dashboard gives a quick look at performance across all stores, while the new “Stats” panel shows best and worst performers across locations.
The company also said the tool will allow retailers to predict sales, inventory needs, and revenue based on historical trends and external factors like weather and holidays. Moreover, it’ll show customer preferences across online and offline channels, indicating purchase history, favorite items, and other customer insights that fuel successful loyalty programs.