Lightspeed Integration - payment flow

We often get asked how to deal with payment processing when using Lightspeed.

Here is what we recommend.

Please refer to this diagram:

Remember you have two parallel systems, one for retail and one for rental.

You may or may not have online booking for each (eComm / OBW).

You may or may not also use Stripe to store credit card details (online booking and / or back-office)

Let's look at some typical workflows:

1. take a walk-in rental.  Use the LS -> BRM workflow
2. take an advanced rental.  As above, but just don't bother taking payment yet.  (unless you do take advanced payment)
3. take an online rental.  Secure the booking by getting them to leave credit card details in stripe when they book.  This makes it likely they show up.  Then, when they show up & pay you get them to pay via Lightspeed*

* some notes about using stripe with Lightspeed

• even if you have card details stored in Stripe you can't 'get that data out' of Stripe.  You can charge the card via Stripe, but you can't extract the card data to process elsewhere.
• Please Note - you may want them to pay 50% or even 100% when they book online.  You can do this, but please beware that these payments will flow through your Stripe account, and cannot flow through Lightspeed, which is why we recommend if you're using Stripe you configure your OBW to take card details only when the book online, and full payment in-store using Lightspeed.  See option 1 here
• you only need to process payments through stripe under exceptional circumstances - like a no-show.  Or they break a bike during rental and refuse to pay.  All regular payments for rentals, extension, even damage would normally be taken in-store using Lightspeed.  So Stripe is acting like a free insurance policy for these exceptional circumstances.

Remember, if you route all your payments through Lightspeed, you can benefit from:

• one payment platform to reconcile payments (Lightspeed)
• one place to see all your transaction reporting (Lightspeed)
• (and it doesn't stop you securing online bookings with the help of stripe - by taking card details)

see also

favouring in-store payments for online