How do I migrate from Lightspeed Retail (POS) to Shopify without disrupting in-store sales during the transition?

What can each Lightspeed Retail series export?

Both Lightspeed Retail series export customers as comma-separated values (CSV) files, and gift card codes with their balances. They differ on sales history and loyalty, so name your series first: "The product data export procedure depends on which Lightspeed series you use" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).

Row counts, not store counts, size the export work. Lightspeed's own articles disagree on sales. One says the export "is limited to 1000 sales" (Lightspeed, October 2026). The Sales history guide, updated 5 October 2026, offers "your last 10,000 sales" (Lightspeed). For 40,000 customers and 300,000 archived sales, that is 3 to 40 customer exports and 30 to 300 sales exports (Deploi arithmetic). Test both ceilings first.

What does Shopify's Store Migration app move from Lightspeed?

Shopify's free Store Migration app moves products and customers from Lightspeed Retail X-Series and R-Series (Shopify App Store, October 2026). It moves nothing that carries a balance. It skips orders, collections, menus, pages and reviews (Shopify blog, July 2026). Shopify calls it "best suited for smaller brands" and points multistore retailers to another migration path. Three documented limits bite in retail:

• Shopify notes that "products with more than 3 options won't have their options imported" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Apparel with size, colour, width and fit is a four-option product.
• Prices by location "aren't supported", so each product lands at "the product's highest price" (Shopify Help Center). Outlet pricing at one store becomes full price everywhere.
• The app "doesn't import inventory by location" (Shopify blog), so a multi-store count needs its own file.

In what order should a Lightspeed cutover run?

A Lightspeed cutover runs from the data that changes least to the registers that change most:

1. Locations and plan. Shopify allows 10 inventory locations on Basic, Grow and Advanced and 200 on Plus (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). A retailer with 14 stores on Advanced faces a plan decision first. Our store-opening playbook record draws that line at store eleven.
2. Catalog, imported into a store nobody sells from yet. Fix by hand what the Store Migration app drops: the options of any product with more than three, and prices by location (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
3. Inventory counts per location, through Shopify's inventory file: one row per variant per location, 15 megabytes at most (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
4. Customers, accepting what customer history does not survive the move.
5. Balances: gift cards, then store credit, then loyalty. None of them moves with the app, and Shopify's admin cannot import gift cards from a file (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). See moving gift card balances intact and where loyalty balances should land.
6. Tax settings, rebuilt rather than migrated, because the app does not import them (Shopify blog, July 2026).
7. Hardware, tested in one store out of hours against Shopify's supported hardware list (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). See which Lightspeed hardware carries over.
8. Registers last, one store at a time, piloting in a busy store that takes many payment types, not the quietest. Brief its cashiers on cash rounding.

Why do the registers move last?

Registers move last because the real disruption is the week when the stockroom, website and register counts disagree and nobody can say which is right. A two-minute pause at the till is not the risk.

The count risk is created by the overlap period, not by the cutover moment. The cutover moment is the safest part of the project, because everyone is watching. The dangerous window is the weeks before it, when the catalog is loading into Shopify while Lightspeed is still selling. Whether to run Lightspeed and Shopify side by side decides how long that window stays open. The register itself is a commodity you buy. On Shopify point of sale (POS), one inventory record comes with it, so there is no sync to maintain. Our POS vendor decision record scores Shopify POS BUY against Lightspeed Retail, and our record on keeping POS and ecommerce data in step says wait rather than buy or build a sync (both checked October 2026).

What does the rollback plan need before the first store moves?

The rollback plan needs Lightspeed kept live and read-only through one month-end close, a full export on cutover night and a numeric abort rule, all agreed before the pilot store moves. A Shopify point of sale (POS) cutover is not easily reversed, because transactions written after cutover exist only in Shopify. So the rollback is not "go back to Lightspeed." It is three commitments:

• Keep the Lightspeed subscription live and read-only through one full month-end close. Cancelling on cutover day saves one month of subscription and costs you the only copy of the data your accountant will ask for in week three.
• Take a final full export of every object on cutover night, not the week before, and store it somewhere that is not a POS vendor.
• Define the abort condition in advance and in numbers. Ours: if register-level cash variance exceeds the pre-migration baseline for three consecutive trading days at the pilot store, the rollout stops and the remaining stores stay on Lightspeed. Ask any agency leading the work for its own; it is one of six questions that screen a migration agency.

When should you not start a Lightspeed migration?

Do not start a Lightspeed cutover inside 10 weeks of your peak, midway through a catalog restructure, before finance owns the gift card liability, or when order history must come across: