Run Your Store And Restaurant Inventory, Gift Cards And Orders With Lightspeed Commerce

If you run a shop or a restaurant, the point-of-sale system is where the day happens, but it is rarely the only system you use. Your products live in a spreadsheet, your online store needs the same catalog, your accountant wants sales, and somebody has to keep gift cards straight. Copying all of that by hand is where the hours go. Lightspeed Commerce exposes its point-of-sale and e-commerce platforms through APIs, which means other software, or an AI assistant acting for you, can read and update your products, orders and gift cards directly.

What Lightspeed Commerce does

Lightspeed is an omnichannel commerce platform, which simply means one system for selling in the store, at the table and online. It offers cloud-based point-of-sale for retailers and restaurateurs, with APIs for sales, inventory, customers, orders, payments and loyalty programs across several product lines, including Retail X-Series, Retail R-Series, Restaurant K-Series and eCom. Several of those lines came from companies Lightspeed acquired, such as the Ecwid storefront and the Kounta hospitality point-of-sale.

What you can get done

Item Master Data Management

Your product catalog is the master list everything else depends on: names, prices, SKUs and variants. Keeping it in one place and pushing it everywhere else is the single biggest time saver for most retailers.

• GET /products lists every product in your retail catalog.
• POST /products adds a new product with its price and SKU.
• GET /products/{product_id} fetches the full details of one product.
• DELETE /products/{product_id} removes a product, or just one of its variants.

Product Content Authoring Management

Shoppers buy from pictures and diners care about allergens. This capability covers the content that describes what you sell.

• PUT /product_images/{product_image_id} changes the order of a product’s images, so the best photo shows first.
• GET /product_images/{product_image_id} checks whether an uploaded image has finished processing.
• DELETE /product_images/{product_image_id} removes an image from a product.
• GET /i/allergens lists the allergens you can tag on a menu item.

Tender and Payment Acceptance Management

“Tender” is the way a customer pays. Gift cards are one of the most common, and one of the easiest to get wrong when they are tracked in more than one place.

• GET /gift_cards lists the gift cards your store has issued.
• POST /gift_cards issues and activates a new gift card with a starting balance.
• GET /gift_cards/by_id/{id} looks up a gift card and its transaction history.
• DELETE /gift_cards/by_id/{id} voids a gift card so its balance goes to zero.

Cart & Checkout

For restaurants, ordering depends on where people sit. These calls give an ordering app or kiosk the map of your venue before it places an order.

• GET /o/op/data/businesses lists the businesses and locations your access token can reach.
• GET /o/op/data/{businessLocationId}/floorplans lists the floorplans set up for a location.
• GET /o/op/data/{businessLocationId}/floorplans/{floorPlanId}/tables lists the tables on one floorplan.
• GET /o/op/data/account-profiles lists the active order profiles for a location.

Webhook & Event Subscription Management

A webhook is a message Lightspeed sends to your software the moment something happens, so you do not have to keep asking.

• POST /webhooks asks to be notified when a sale or a product changes.
• GET /webhooks lists the webhooks registered on your retail account.
• GET /webhooks/{webhookId} shows whether a webhook is active and which URL it calls.
• DELETE /webhooks/{webhookId} removes a webhook subscription.

Ask for it in plain language

Lightspeed has 52 phrasing overlays on APIs.io. A phrasing overlay maps plain questions to the operation that answers them, so an AI assistant knows which call to make. These are the kinds of questions they cover:

• How do I add a new product with a price and SKU?
• Which gift cards have been issued by my store?
• How do I sell a new gift card with a starting balance?
• Which tables are on a particular floorplan in my venue?
• How do I get notified when a sale or product changes?

The Lightspeed Brands API phrasing overlay is a good place to see how it works.

Getting started

Lightspeed is a paid, hosted service you call over the web. Plans are in the pricing section of its APIs.io profile; as one example, Retail Basic is listed at 89 USD/mo. Developers can register here, then read the Retail documentation, the eCom documentation and the Retail authentication overview.

The Lightspeed Commerce profile on APIs.io lists every API, including the Retail R-Series API, the eCom API and the Restaurant O-Series API. If you automate one thing first, make it your product catalog, because everything else reads from it.