Lightspeed to Shopify: what carries over, and what gets rebuilt

Most guides to a Lightspeed to Shopify migration treat it like a website project. For a lot of merchants, that framing misses the point. Lightspeed is retail-first. The till on your shop floor is usually the system of record, and the webstore hangs off it. So a real Lightspeed to Shopify migration is two migrations at once: the ecommerce store and the point of sale that rings up every in-store sale.

Get that part right and the rest follows. Miss it and you launch a pretty website that does not talk to your shop floor.

This guide covers the honest version. Why merchants move, the two-system reality, what carries over cleanly, what you rebuild by hand, and how to come out the other side with one catalogue, one inventory count, and one customer record.

First, know which Lightspeed you are on

Lightspeed sells more than one product, and the difference changes the whole project.

• Lightspeed Retail is the point of sale. It runs the register, the in-store inventory, and the back office for a physical shop. Lightspeed has shipped this under a few names over the years (you may see it called X-Series, R-Series, or older labels), but the job is the same: it is the till. In a connected setup, Retail is the source of truth for stock. As Lightspeed's own documentation puts it, "POS Retail is the source of truth for your inventory."
• Lightspeed eCom is the online storefront that sits alongside Retail and sells the same catalogue on the web.

Plenty of merchants run both. Many started in a physical shop, added the online store later, and now manage two back offices that only half agree with each other. That gap is often the reason people start looking at Shopify in the first place.

So before anything else, write down which products you actually use. A merchant who is eCom-only is doing a fairly standard store migration. A merchant whose register is the heart of the business is doing that plus a Shopify POS implementation, and the POS side is where the real work lives.

Why merchants move off Lightspeed

The trigger is rarely "we hate Lightspeed." It is usually one of these:

• Two systems that drift apart. Retail and eCom sync inventory, but the admin sides stay separate. Changes you make online do not flow back to the register, and the longer you run it, the more the two views of your business disagree.
• App and channel limits. Merchants who want a modern storefront, the larger app ecosystem, or to sell through new channels (including AI shopping assistants) find Shopify's ecosystem far deeper.
• One bill, one team, one platform. Running the shop floor and the webstore on the same platform means one place to train staff, one set of reports, and one source of truth for stock and customers.

Shopify's own pitch to retailers is exactly this consolidation. Their migration material frames the move as turning "a collection of parts into a single powerful engine" by unifying sales channels, inventory, and customer data in one place. That is the prize. The work is in getting your data there without losing the parts that matter.

What carries over cleanly

The good news first. The core of your catalogue and your customer list moves reliably, and Shopify has built first-party help for the common path.

According to Shopify's own guide to migrating from Lightspeed, these data types transfer:

• Products and variants. Titles, descriptions, images, options, and prices. One thing to plan for: Shopify supports up to three options per product (for example size, colour, and material). If a Lightspeed product uses more, you reshape it during the move.
• Inventory quantities by location. Your stock counts, mapped to the right store or warehouse.
• Customers. Names, contact details, and addresses.
• Historical orders that have already been fulfilled. Your past order records come across as history.

Shopify offers a first-party Store Migration app that pulls products and customers from Lightspeed straight into your Shopify admin, with a plain CSV export and import as the fallback for everything else. For a clean catalogue and a tidy customer list, this part of the project is well-trodden.

That is the half people expect. The other half is where projects quietly go wrong.

What gets rebuilt by hand

Some of the most valuable things in a retail business do not export. This is not a Shopify limitation so much as a fact of how the two platforms model their data, and Lightspeed is refreshingly blunt about it. In its own documentation on what cannot be imported, Lightspeed lists store credit, gift cards, outstanding customer balances, and past sales and purchase history as data that "can't be imported." Lightspeed also confirms that Retail POS gift cards do not sync to Shopify, and that Retail features like price books, promotions, and loyalty have no direct Shopify equivalent to slot into.

Here is the honest breakdown of the hard parts.

• Gift card balances. Outstanding gift cards are real money your customers already paid you, and they do not transfer automatically. You export every active balance, issue matching gift cards in Shopify, and reconcile the totals so no one walks in with a card that no longer works. This is one of the most common things to get wrong, because it is invisible until an upset customer surfaces it at the counter.
• Store credit and customer balances. Same story. Credit a customer is owed has to be exported and reissued in Shopify, then checked against your old totals.
• Loyalty. Points and tiers do not move as data. You pick a Shopify loyalty app, recreate the program, and load member balances so regulars are not reset to zero on launch day.
• Detailed sales and purchase history. Fulfilled orders come across as records, but the granular transaction and purchasing history that Lightspeed keeps for reporting does not move cleanly. Decide early what you genuinely need in Shopify and what you archive as a read-only export from Lightspeed.
• Supplier and purchase-order data. Vendor records and open purchase orders usually need rebuilding or re-importing through Shopify's inventory tooling rather than a one-click transfer.
• Multi-location stock nuance. Counts transfer, but the rules around them (how each location behaves, what is sellable online, how transfers work) get set up fresh in Shopify.

If a single line sums it up: the catalogue and customers migrate, the money and the history get rebuilt. Budget your time and care accordingly. The risky work is almost never the product import.

The point of sale is the spine

For a retail-first merchant, the centre of the project is the register, not the homepage. Moving off Lightspeed means rebuilding the till on Shopify POS so the shop floor and the webstore run as one system: one catalogue, one inventory count, one customer record.

This is the whole reason the consolidation pays off. When a sale at the counter and a sale on the web draw down the same stock number, you stop overselling. When a regular's purchases show up whether they bought in person or online, your customer data is finally whole. When staff learn one system, training gets simpler and reporting gets honest.

Shopify POS comes in a free tier built into every plan and a paid tier that unlocks the retail features a busier shop tends to need, including buy-online-pickup-in-store, ship-from-store, and cross-location exchanges. Which tier fits depends on how your floor actually runs, so that is a setup decision, not an afterthought.

This is exactly the kind of work that spans both sides of the business. Muffet & Louisa, a long-running shop, did a full Lightspeed to Shopify migration across both their ecommerce store and their retail point of sale, so the website and the till run on one platform. That dual scope, ecommerce and POS together, is the shape most Lightspeed moves take when the shop floor matters.

Protect your data and your search rankings on the way

A migration changes your URLs, your templates, and the technical signals search engines read. Handled carelessly, that can cost you the organic traffic you already earned. Handled with discipline, the rankings hold.

The redirect map is the heart of it: every old URL points to its new Shopify home, and you test every redirect before launch. The same care applies to titles, meta descriptions, and structured data. This deserves its own checklist, and we wrote one: our guide to protecting your SEO rankings when migrating to Shopify walks through the audit, the redirect mapping, and the post-launch monitoring in detail. Read it alongside this one if your Lightspeed store has search traffic worth keeping.

A checklist you can act on

If you are weighing a Lightspeed to Shopify migration, start here:

1. Write down which Lightspeed products you use. Retail, eCom, or both. This decides whether you are doing a store migration, a POS implementation, or both at once.
2. List your hard data now. Active gift card balances, store credit, loyalty members and points, open purchase orders. Export them early. This is the work that surprises people.
3. Map your catalogue against Shopify's limits. Flag any product using more than three options so you can reshape it before import, not during.
4. Plan the till, not just the site. Decide how the shop floor runs on Shopify POS, which tier fits, and how stock and customers stay unified across channels.
5. Build and test the redirect map so your search rankings survive the move.
6. Reconcile after launch. Check gift card totals, credit balances, inventory counts, and customer records against your old system before you call it done.

The catalogue and the customers are the easy part. The money your customers already paid you, and a register that shares one truth with your website, are where a Lightspeed move is won or lost. Plan for those first.