Lightspeed is the point-of-sale and e-commerce platform known in the Netherlands as SEOshop. A store costs 68 to 259 euros a month, with the till on top. Strong for a shopkeeper: one stock count for shop and web. Below are the real costs, the limits you feel once the webshop becomes your main channel, and when switching pays off.
What exactly is Lightspeed?
Lightspeed is not one product but two sold side by side: a point-of-sale system for shops and hospitality, and an e-commerce platform. People searching for "Lightspeed" usually mean the first. This guide is about the second, and about the place where the two meet, because that connection is exactly why so many Dutch retailers are on it.
The e-commerce side has Dutch roots. SEOshop from Amsterdam was the Dutch webshop software for years and served over 8,000 European stores when Canadian Lightspeed POS from Montreal acquired it in November 2015. From January 2016 it continued as Lightspeed eCom, and Amsterdam became the European headquarters. If you have been running a store for a while and started out on SEOshop, you are on Lightspeed today without ever having moved.
According to platform tracker Storeleads, just over 18,000 active stores run on the platform as of mid 2026. That is small next to Shopify or WooCommerce, but the distribution says a lot: 15 percent of all Lightspeed stores sit on a .nl domain, roughly 2,800 shops. For this platform the Netherlands is not a side market but a core one, which is why you find a Lightspeed till in almost every Dutch high street.
What does Lightspeed cost?
The prices below come from the Lightspeed pricing page and were checked in August 2026. When comparing, watch the variants column above all, because that is the limit you hit first:
| Plan | Per month | Variants | Key difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | € 68 | 250 | One user, one language, email support |
| Advanced | € 120 | 5,000 | Three users, three languages, theme editor, blog and filters |
| Professional | € 259 | 15,000 | Unlimited users, seven languages, discount rules, bundles and B2B |
| Enterprise | On request | 65,000 products | More categories, extra API keys and higher API limits |
That variants column is not a detail. A plan counts variants, not products, and a T-shirt in four sizes and three colours is twelve of them at once. On Essential a few dozen garments will use up your 250. So do not count your products: count products times sizes times colours, and only then look at which plan you need.
Budget for the till separately if you have a physical shop. Lightspeed Retail starts at 99 euros a month for Basic, with Essential at 149 and Plus at 229, each including one register. Shop plus webshop means two subscriptions side by side. Something honest stands against that: the platform takes no percentage of your revenue, and the plans are cancellable monthly.
What Lightspeed is good at
An honest review starts with what is right, and on one point Lightspeed is simply better than the rest:
One stock count for shop and web
Sell a jumper at the till and it drops by one online immediately. No integration that can break, no overnight sync, no double administration. For a retailer with a webshop alongside, this is the argument, and it is a real one.
Dutch roots and Dutch support
The software grew out of SEOshop in Amsterdam, the documentation is in Dutch and you get phone support from the Advanced plan up. For many owners that weighs more than a bigger ecosystem in English.
Built for shops with variants
Clothing, footwear, sport: categories where every product comes in sizes and colours are built into the system rather than bolted on. You notice it in the daily handling behind the scenes.
Live quickly without technical skills
Hosting, updates and security are part of the subscription. You pick a theme, add your products and sell. No developer is needed to get started.
No revenue cut
Your subscription is your subscription. Lightspeed takes no percentage per order, and the plans are cancellable monthly instead of locked into an annual contract.
Do you have a physical shop, does your webshop run on a modest range, and is the till your main system? Then you are in the right place and this article is mostly reassurance.
Where it starts to strain as you grow
The limits of Lightspeed are not hidden defects. They belong to a platform built around the shop, and you only feel them once the webshop becomes the centre of gravity instead of the window display next to it:
The variant ceiling grows with you, in price
250, 5,000 and 15,000 variants are hard limits per plan. A growing range therefore means not just a bigger plan but a jump in the monthly price, from 68 to 120 to 259 euros. Above 15,000 variants you end up at Enterprise, where no public price is listed.
The app ecosystem is small
There is an App Store, but its range compares to Shopify's the way a village shop compares to a shopping centre. Every integration that is missing becomes custom work or manual work: retyping orders into the bookkeeping, keeping stock in two systems, exports someone has to run every week.
Your theme is editable up to a point
There is a theme editor from Advanced up, and it gets you a long way. But full control over the code, the kind an open theme gives you, is not on the table. If you want a store that does not look like a Lightspeed store, sooner or later you meet the edge of what the theme allows.
Selling internationally is tied to your plan
One language on Essential, three on Advanced, seven on Professional. Going across borders seriously means moving up a plan, and even then translation is only part of it: local payment methods, currencies, shipping rules and taxes per country ask for more than a translated store. What that does look like is in our article on selling internationally with Shopify Markets.
B2B only starts at the top
Business functionality sits in the Professional plan, so you pay 259 euros a month before you can even touch it. And what wholesalers actually ask for goes further: price lists per buyer, quote requests, payment on account with credit limits and an ERP integration. What a full B2B store needs does not sit comfortably in this plan.
The roadmap points elsewhere
Lightspeed completed a strategic review in 2025 in which a sale of the business was on the table. What came out of it is a narrower course: North American retail and European hospitality. E-commerce in the Benelux is no longer the heart of where the attention goes, and that is exactly the corner your store sits in.
The pool of specialists is shrinking
There are good Lightspeed partners, but there are not going to be more of them. Anyone with an unusual requirement notices it in the lead time and in what it costs to find someone who genuinely knows the platform.
How is the platform doing?
Two things are true at once, and you deserve to know both. Lightspeed is a listed company that keeps developing and selling its product; there has been no announcement of any kind about stopping with e-commerce, and with nearly 2,800 Dutch stores the base here is solid.
At the same time the store count has been falling for a few years. Storeleads counts just over 18,000 active stores as of mid 2026, eight percent fewer than a year earlier and almost a quarter below the peak of late 2023. Put that next to the 2025 strategic review and the picture sharpens: the company is choosing tills in North American shops and European hospitality, and the Benelux webshop does not play the lead in that. For you as a retailer that is no reason to panic. It is a direction to weigh, because new features from payment providers, marketplaces and AI tools land first on the platforms that are growing.
Lightspeed or Shopify?
The question is not which platform is better, but where the centre of gravity of your selling sits. Side by side:
| Lightspeed | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Store subscription | € 68 to € 259 p/m | € 21 to € 289 p/m, Plus from € 2,100 |
| Products | 250 to 15,000 variants, per plan | Unlimited on every plan |
| Transaction fees | No revenue percentage | 0.2 to 2% with an external payment provider |
| Apps and integrations | Own App Store, small range | Thousands of apps |
| Themes | Theme editor from Advanced | Full control over the code |
| B2B | From Professional | Built in on Plus, with custom work below it too |
| International | One to seven languages, per plan | Markets, currencies and languages built in |
| Till in the shop | Own POS, one stock count with the store | Shopify POS or an integration |
| Contract | Cancellable monthly | Cancellable monthly |
Where Lightspeed wins: the till and the webshop on one stock count, Dutch-language support and a system that understands retailers. Where Shopify wins: no product ceiling, thousands of integrations, full control over your theme, and international and B2B without a jump in plan.
When comparing, look past the monthly price. A Professional plan at 259 euros plus the manual work you do because an integration is missing is often more expensive over a year than a cheaper subscription where that work is automated. The question is not what the subscription costs but what the system costs you in hours.
Stay or switch: how to decide
Stay on Lightspeed if your physical shop is the heart of your revenue and the webshop sits neatly around it, if one stock count for till and web saves you daily work, and if your range fits comfortably within your plan's variant ceiling. A migration costs 8,000 to 20,000 euros with us, and that investment has to solve a problem you actually have. Without that problem, switching is a waste of money, however much we would like you as a client.
Switching becomes logical as soon as one of these situations sounds familiar:
- The webshop has become your main channel and the shop is the extension, rather than the other way around.
- You are pressed against the variant ceiling or have just jumped over it, and now pay for a plan that brings you nothing else.
- You work around the platform: retyping orders, keeping stock in two systems, weekly exports someone runs by hand.
- Your business customers ask for customer-specific pricing, quotes or payment on account, and you notice you cannot fit that in properly.
- You want to sell across borders seriously, with local payment methods and currencies per market instead of a translated store.
What moves with you, and what does not?
The question behind every migration is what you lose. The honest answer: less than you fear, but not nothing.
Products and variants move
Including prices, stock levels, images and copy. Categories become collections, and the variant ceiling you ran into does not exist on the other side.
Customers and order history move
Your customers find their details and past orders in the new store.
Passwords do not move
They are stored encrypted and cannot be transferred in any platform migration. Customers set a new password at their first login; we prepare that message together.
Your till does not have to move
The Lightspeed register in your shop can keep running while your webshop moves. If you want to replace the till later, Shopify POS is the route; if you do not, we sync stock between the two systems. This is the biggest choice in the project and we make it up front, not along the way.
Your rankings move, provided you arrange it
Every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new address, category and blog pages included. This is where migrations without a plan take the most damage, and with us it is a fixed part of the job.
Your theme deliberately does not move
A Lightspeed theme cannot be ported. That is not a loss but the moment to build a store that does not look like the platform it runs on.
Your content moves
Blog posts, content pages and the images that belong to them move to their Shopify equivalents, with their internal links intact.
The full approach, from data export to launch, is on our page about migrating from Lightspeed to Shopify.
What a switch costs and how it works
A migration is not a matter of an export button. We first map your range, your integrations and your URL structure, and determine the Shopify equivalent for each part. Then we build the store, migrate products, customers and orders, and give every old URL its 301 redirect. Your Lightspeed store keeps selling until launch day; you do not miss a day of revenue.
Expect 8,000 to 20,000 euros for a regular store, and up to 60,000 euros once B2B functionality, an ERP integration or a very large catalogue is involved. After the audit you get one fixed price. Our platform-by-platform approach is on the page about migrating your store to Shopify, and the complete story of this specific switch, with pricing and frequently asked questions, is on the page about the Lightspeed to Shopify migration.
Not sure your current store is the problem? Have it checked first, free of charge. Our free store analysis scans your store live for speed, SEO, accessibility, security and checkout, and works on any store, Lightspeed included. Within two minutes you have a report with concrete improvements.
Frequently asked questions about Lightspeed
The webshop costs 68 euros a month for Essential, 120 for Advanced and 259 for Professional; Enterprise is on request. If you also have a physical shop, the point-of-sale system comes on top, from 99 euros a month including one register. Lightspeed takes no percentage of your revenue and the plans are cancellable monthly.
It is the same platform under a different name. SEOshop from Amsterdam was acquired by Canadian Lightspeed POS in November 2015 and has been called Lightspeed eCom since January 2016. If you run an older Dutch store, chances are you started on SEOshop and ended up on Lightspeed without ever moving.
The ceiling counts variants, not products: 250 on Essential, 5,000 on Advanced and 15,000 on Professional, with Enterprise up to 65,000 products. A T-shirt in four sizes and three colours therefore counts as twelve. Multiply sizes by colours before you pick a plan, because that is the limit most stores hit first.
It comes from the same company but they are two products with separate subscriptions: Lightspeed Retail for the till in your shop and Lightspeed eCom for your webshop. They do share one stock count, and for many retailers that connection is exactly the reason to take both.
According to platform tracker Storeleads, just over 18,000 active stores worldwide as of mid 2026, 15 percent of them on a .nl domain, roughly 2,800 Dutch shops. The number is falling though: eight percent fewer than a year earlier and almost a quarter below the peak of late 2023.
There has been no announcement of any kind, and the platform is still sold and developed. Lightspeed did complete a strategic review in 2025 and chose a narrower course afterwards: North American retail and European hospitality. E-commerce in the Benelux is therefore not at the centre of attention, which is worth weighing if your webshop is your main channel.
Up to roughly 15,000 variants on the Dutch market: yes. Above that you start to feel the limits, and not only the ceiling itself. The small app range, the limited control over your theme and multilingual support tied to your plan are exactly the points where a large store needs something else.
Lightspeed is built around the shop: till and webshop on one stock count, Dutch-language support, with a product ceiling per plan. Shopify is built around the webshop: no product ceiling, thousands of apps, full control over your theme and international selling built in. If you have a shop with a webshop alongside, much speaks for Lightspeed. If the webshop is your main channel, much speaks for Shopify.
To a limited extent, and it depends on your plan: one language on Essential, three on Advanced and seven on Professional. Translation is only part of selling internationally anyway. Local payment methods, multiple currencies, shipping rules and taxes per country ask for more, and that is the point where platforms with built-in markets take over.
