Shopify POS Pro vs Lightspeed Retail for 2–10 Stores

The Quick Verdict

Searching “Shopify vs ShopKeep”? ShopKeep now runs as a Lightspeed product; the Lightspeed prices below are for Lightspeed Retail X-Series with Lightspeed Payments, in US dollars, as of September 2026.

If one row describes you, the rest of this page is the evidence under it. Every price here is US dollars, read on the vendors' own pages in September 2026, and every Lightspeed figure is labeled with the pricing term it assumes, because Shopify's POS Pro and Lightspeed's entry plan share the number $89 for two different things.

Is ShopKeep Still a Separate System From Lightspeed?

If you searched for Shopify vs ShopKeep, you were comparing Shopify with a product that now carries Lightspeed's name. ShopKeep's own marketing page gives the sequence: ShopKeep has been helping business owners since 2008, and in 2020 it joined Lightspeed and became ShopKeep by Lightspeed.

The support site for former ShopKeep customers goes one step further and names the product those accounts run on today:

What Does Each System Cost Per Store?

This page compares two systems for a chain. If Square is also on your shortlist, our three-way register comparison of Shopify POS, Square and Lightspeed covers it; everything below stays on the two products that decide a multi-store rollout.

Both vendors price per location, but not the same bundle, which is why their headline numbers do not line up directly. Shopify adds POS Pro per location on top of a Shopify plan; Lightspeed prices a plan that includes one location and one register, then adds each extra location at that plan's price.

Shopify: POS Pro prices from Shopify's POS cost guide and POS Pro yearly page, location limits from the Help Center, read September 12–13, 2026. Lightspeed: its Retail pricing page (US pricing, USD, shown with Lightspeed Payments) and features page, read September 12–13, 2026. Lightspeed's page adds that prices can vary and additional service fees may apply depending on the business and industry.

On Shopify, POS Pro is $89 a month per location, or $67 a month per location on a 12-month term for retailers new to POS Pro. For a five-store chain below Shopify Plus, POS Pro alone therefore comes to $445 a month, or $335 a month on the 12-month term, before the Shopify subscription itself, hardware and card processing.

Two separate limits apply on the Shopify side, and they come in order. The first decides whether a store can be added at all: Basic, Grow and Advanced each allow 10 active locations, and Shopify Plus allows 200, so an eleventh active location means Plus. This ceiling is a real Shopify constraint that Lightspeed does not frame the same way — its features page promises the ability to "manage 2 stores or dozens" — and it sits with Shopify's other staff and location limits.

The second limit is POS Pro itself, which decides what each admitted store can do. On Shopify Plus, the first 20 POS Pro locations are included; past that, the POS Pro fee is waived up to 200 retail locations only while Shopify Payments is the primary payment provider for your retail locations.

Lightspeed's price for extra stores

Each of Lightspeed's three plans includes one location and one register. Enter more than one location in the pricing page's calculator, and in its US pricing with Lightspeed Payments each extra location costs the plan's own price — $89 Basic, $149 Core or $289 Plus a month on annual pricing, $109, $179 or $339 on monthly pricing — and each register beyond one per location is $59 a month. For multi-location retailers, the same page adds:

Ask for a written quote in the shape Lightspeed's own price breakdown already uses — Base plan cost, Extra locations and Additional registers, per month — so each line can sit next to Shopify's per-location POS Pro price. The same page notes that its prices "can vary and additional service fees may apply depending on the nature of the business and the industry", so get the fees that apply to you named in writing too.

The card-present rate question

Shopify's side is published. In the US, Shopify Payments charges 2.6% + 10¢ on Basic, 2.5% + 10¢ on Grow and 2.4% + 10¢ on Advanced for in-person payments, per Shopify's guide to card processing fees read in September 2026. What that works out to on a real month of counter sales is laid out in our breakdown of in-person running costs.

• Lightspeed's pricing page lists a Lightspeed Payments card-present rate of 2.6% + 10¢ on all three plans in its United States pricing data, read on September 13, 2026; the 1.5% in the same page's data is its Australian rate.
• A Lightspeed blog post last updated April 29, 2026 says Lightspeed Payments customers pay 2.6% for card-present transactions, with no fixed fee named, and 2.9% for card-not-present ones, in Lightspeed's guide to accepting card transactions.
• Another Lightspeed blog post, published October 2, 2025, says Lightspeed "charges a small flat rate of 1.5% per card-present (CP) transaction amount" without naming a country for that rate.

Get the card-present rate written into the quote alongside extra locations and registers, and compare it with the Shopify rate for the plan you would actually run.

Stock, Purchase Orders and Reports Across Stores

A second store is where a point of sale stops being a till and starts being an inventory system. The four jobs below are the ones both vendors document, so each row compares like with like.

Shopify Help Center (inventory by location, transfers, purchase orders, POS Pro) and Lightspeed's Retail features page and X-Series support center, read September 12–13, 2026. Quoted cells are Lightspeed's own wording.

On Shopify, each store is a location, and every product's stock is counted per location. Shopify Academy's two-minute overview shows how locations are set up and why they give you visibility across the business:

Receiving supplier deliveries: where Lightspeed documents more depth

The purchase-order row of the table is the one to test with your own suppliers. On Shopify, once a purchase order is marked Ordered, you can create a linked inventory transfer from it that tracks the shipment and receives the stock at the destination location you select; stock received at a central location moves on to each store by a further transfer. For how the two records split the job, see purchase order vs inventory transfer.

Lightspeed documents the same job as one flow. Its guide to sending and receiving purchase orders for multiple locations opens with "Streamline your ordering workflow with multi-location ordering" and receives stock on a Receive and distribute delivery page. Its features page also claims to "handle complex product variations with ease" — Lightspeed's wording, without a published variant limit to compare.

If central receiving or reorder planning is a daily job for your team, walk one real delivery through both systems, and check how Shopify handles reorder planning natively in our multi-location inventory guide before you decide.

What POS Pro switches on at each store

For a chain, the staff rules are usually the first thing that changes. Shopify's staff guide is explicit that roles are a POS Pro feature: "If your POS locations are on the POS Pro subscription, then POS staff access can be customized using POS roles." Without it: "All admin users with POS access use their PIN to access POS Lite locations, with full access, because POS roles don't apply."

Whether every one of your stores needs those features — and why the answer tends to change once a second store opens — is the question our POS Pro guide answers in where Pro becomes mandatory for multi-location retail.

What Changes When Stores and Online Run on Different Systems?

With Shopify POS there is no second catalog to connect. Shopify's POS troubleshooting guide describes the register picking up admin changes directly: "The Shopify POS app should automatically sync to display any changes you make in your Shopify admin when you open the app."

Lightspeed's Shopify integration works from the other end, with Lightspeed as the place your team edits products:

The same page says "Lightspeed instantly syncs product updates to Shopify, so your online store updates in real-time." The connector is listed on the Shopify App Store as Lightspeed Retail POS X-Series, whose listing reads "Sell in-store and online seamlessly with one POS."

Hardware and Offline: What Carries Over

Hardware and offline behavior are the two places a switch costs money on the first day, not the first month. For the full Shopify side — device setup, supported readers and daily offline use — see our Shopify POS app guide; below is what matters for choosing between the two systems.

Which devices each system runs on

Start with the register itself, because it is the one piece of hardware that cannot be swapped for a cable. Shopify states the device rule in two sentences:

If any counter in your chain runs its register on a computer, that counter needs a tablet or phone before it can run Shopify POS. Around the device, Shopify's supported hardware list is organized into these categories:

• Card readers and cash drawers
• Barcode scanners
• Receipt printers, mPOP printers and label printers
• Device stands and retail accessories

Lightspeed sells its own kit, including a Smart Terminal and a Lightspeed Stand with Payments, through its hardware store. Shopify Academy's walkthrough shows how the Shopify side fits together at a retail counter:

What each system documents for offline selling

Shopify's offline features page splits into what keeps working and what stops. What keeps working: "You can still accept payments by cash and manual payments set up as custom payment methods."

Shopify's optional offline payments feature also lets staff with the Accept offline credit and debit payments permission take card payments on compatible readers, once it is activated in the Shopify admin and the POS app is version 9.14.0 or later. Swiped cards, Tap to Pay on iPhone or Android and manual card entry aren't supported offline; card payments are captured after the device reconnects, and the feature isn't available for retail locations in France.

What stops until the connection returns, in Shopify's own words:

• "You can't search for, edit, or create a customer when you're offline"
• "You can't accept tips when you're offline"
• "You can't process exchanges, returns, or voids when you're offline"

That list is a Shopify limitation a store manager will meet on a busy Saturday, so brief it before the first outage rather than after. Lightspeed's offline documentation is about payments, and it comes with a condition of its own.

Which Route Fits Your Stores?

The verdict at the top answers by profile. This quiz answers by combination: where your catalog lives today, how many stores you will run, how they are restocked, how much online and in-store sales share, and what retraining would cost. Five questions, four equally valid routes.

Moving a Multi-Store Chain From Lightspeed to Shopify

A chain's move has two halves: the data, which Shopify documents step by step, and the store setup, which is where most of the work actually sits. The three parts below take them in that order.

The export-import path Shopify documents

The products half starts on the Lightspeed side, with a menu path Shopify's own migration guide spells out:

The product and customer export files both need editing before they can be imported in Shopify admin: Shopify's guide says to match each one to Shopify's product or customer CSV template, and notes there is no data mapping support for customer CSV imports.

Two apps sit around that path. Shopify's Store Migration app lists Lightspeed R/X (Vend) among the platforms it imports product and customer data from, as of September 2026 — Shopify's guide says the app is in early access, available only on Lightspeed Retail X-Series or R-Series for certain stores and only on desktop devices — and Matrixify handles bulk imports, exports and updates once the first load is in.

What a CSV move does not carry across — and how to plan for it — is covered in our retail guide's section on migrating from Square, Lightspeed or Clover.

What Shopify's POS Pro yearly offer covers for switchers

If you are leaving Lightspeed for POS Pro, Shopify's POS Pro yearly page — the source of the 12-month rate cited in the price section — attaches a set of switching terms to that rate. These are the terms as of September 2026:

• Who qualifies: retailers new to POS Pro — not yet on Shopify POS, on the in-person selling included with a paid plan, or on a POS Pro trial. Merchants already on POS Pro are not eligible.
• The commitment: fees are paid monthly for a 12-month term that auto-renews, including the 25% discount, and you can make changes before renewal; cancel early and you pay the months remaining, unless you upgrade to Shopify Plus.
• Migration support: extraction and transfer of "products, images, inventory, customers, and optional loyalty data", with the page noting that historical data migration is not included.
• If a partner runs your migration: the page says you "may be eligible for a credit to offset these costs instead."
• Hardware: the page says you are eligible to receive a POS Terminal for every store location you subscribe to POS Pro yearly within 7 days of adding your first Pro location.

Read the term against your own plans before signing. A 12-month commitment is an easy yes for a chain that has decided; for one still waiting on Lightspeed's quote, it is the step to take after the comparison, not during it.

Switching checklist for a multi-store chain

If you later leave Shopify for Lightspeed

The exit starts with Shopify's product export: in Shopify admin, go to Products, click Export, then Export products. An export of all products is emailed to you as a CSV file, and a current-page or selected-products export is emailed too if any single product has more than 100 variants. The import format on the other side is Lightspeed's to specify, so confirm it with Lightspeed's onboarding team before you export.

The Bottom Line

Both vendors publish per-location prices as of September 2026: Shopify for POS Pro, and Lightspeed in its US pricing calculator; Lightspeed's pricing page also offers a custom plan. That makes the comparison possible, not finished — get Lightspeed's figure, registers and card rate in a written quote before you commit to anything.

Frequently Asked Questions