Square → to Shopify

Square to Shopify: moving the counter, the catalog and the customer list together

A Square to Shopify migration is mostly a retail project. The website is usually the easy part; the work is in the item library, the stock counts at each location, the customer directory with its loyalty balances, the gift cards customers are carrying in their wallets, and the morning the tills switch from Square to Shopify POS. This guide covers how we move Square for Retail and Square Point of Sale merchants to Shopify and Shopify POS without a gap in trading. If your concern is a Square Online or Weebly website and its URLs, our Weebly and Square Online guide covers that side in detail.

Why businesses leave Square

• Online selling has outgrown the store builder. Square Online works for a shop that also sells a little online. Retailers whose web sales are growing want Shopify’s themes, checkout, Shop Pay and app ecosystem.
• Pricing changed. On October 6, 2025 Square replaced its separate subscriptions with three plans (Square Free, Square Plus at $49 per location per month and Square Premium at $149), which changed the numbers for many sellers and is a common prompt to compare platforms.
• Processing is tied to the hardware. Square readers and Square Terminal take payments through Square. If you want a different processor or a single payments relationship for web and store, the hardware has to change too.
• One system, not two. Merchants who run Square at the counter and another platform online spend time reconciling stock. Shopify POS and the Shopify store share one inventory, one customer list and one set of reports.
• Catalog depth. Retailers with large variant ranges, wholesale pricing or multiple sales channels often find Shopify’s product model, B2B features and marketplace integrations a better fit.

Square is a capable POS, and plenty of businesses are well served by it. The move makes sense when the online side has become as important as the counter.

What migrates from Square to Shopify

Data	Source on Square	Moves to Shopify?
Items and variations with names, descriptions, SKUs, GTINs (barcodes), prices, unit costs, vendors, categories	Item library export (Excel or CSV) or the Catalog API	Yes. Variations become Shopify variants, GTINs become barcodes so scanning works on day one, and default unit cost becomes cost per item.
Option sets	Item library export (option name and value columns)	Yes, as Shopify options. Shopify allows three options per product, so items with more need a restructure.
Modifier sets	Item library export and Catalog API	Not directly. Shopify has no modifier equivalent; see the modifiers section below.
Stock on hand per location	Current Quantity columns in the export, or the Inventory API	Yes, to the matching Shopify location, then recounted at cutover.
Item images	Catalog API	Yes. Downloaded and rehosted on Shopify.
Customers with names, emails, phones, addresses, notes, groups	Customer directory export or the Customers API	Yes. Groups become tags, notes carry across, and email marketing consent is carried only where Square records it.
Loyalty points balances	Loyalty API (the Dashboard does not export them)	Yes, loaded into a Shopify loyalty app.
Gift card balances	Gift Cards API, plus the gift card report	Yes, recreated as Shopify gift cards.
Sales history, in-store and online	Orders API, transaction and sales report exports	Optional. Imported as orders tagged by location, or kept as a reporting archive.
Cards on file	Export on request from Square to a PCI DSS Level 1 compliant processor	Case by case. Most customers re-enter their card.
Staff, permissions, timecards	Team settings	Staff are set up fresh in Shopify POS. Timecard history stays in Square or your payroll tool.
Website design	Square Online	No. Rebuilt on Shopify.

Redirects and the website side

If you only sell at the counter, there is nothing to redirect. If you run Square Online, or an older Weebly store, the product and category URLs need 301 redirects to Shopify’s /products/ and /collections/ paths, and those URLs have to be harvested from the live site before it is switched off. We cover that procedure, the ID-based URL trap and the sales tax check in the Weebly and Square Online migration guide, and we follow it on every Square migration that has a web store.

Tools

Shopify’s own Store Migration app, in early access at the time of writing, lists Square as a supported source and imports products and customers from uploaded CSV files. Shopify’s help center is clear about its limits: it does not import inventory by location, it does not handle Square’s prices by location (it takes the highest price), and it drops options beyond the third. It does not bring order history.

Cart2Cart, an RDA partner, and LitExtension both offer Square as a source and are fine for a first pass on products, customers and orders. They are built around the web store, not the counter. They do not carry tracking numbers on shipped orders, they tend to model refunded orders as plain paid orders, and they do not handle per-location stock, loyalty balances or gift cards the way a retailer needs. We use them where they fit and do the rest ourselves through the Square APIs, with every count reconciled against the source.

How we run it

1. Audit. Item library, locations, stock, customer directory, loyalty, gift cards, hardware at each counter, integrations and the web store if there is one, ending in a fixed-price scope.
2. Build in a free Shopify development store. As a Shopify Plus Partner we build there, so you pay Shopify nothing until launch. Theme, checkout, payments, taxes and shipping are set up alongside the POS.
3. Catalog. Items and variations mapped to products and variants, option sets restructured where needed, modifiers resolved, barcodes and costs loaded.
4. Locations and inventory. Each Square location becomes a Shopify location with its own stock, and registers are planned per location.
5. Customers. Directory imported with tags, notes and consent; loyalty balances and gift cards staged.
6. Orders and sales history. The agreed range of in-store and online sales imported silently in the background.
7. Hardware and payments. Shopify card readers ordered and paired, printers, scanners and cash drawers tested, staff trained on a test setup with the real catalog.
8. Sample, then full import. Twenty of each entity signed off first, then the full run with a reconciliation ledger from Square’s counts to Shopify’s.
9. Cutover with a delta sync. Sales and new customers since the full run are brought across, and inventory is counted at each location on cutover day so both systems start from the same numbers.
10. Post-launch SEO evaluation. For stores with a web presence, we review search performance once Google has re-crawled the store and the first real analytics exist, and act on what they show.

Cost and timeline

Square migrations start from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores), and typically take six to eight weeks. Multi-location retail, a hardware rollout across several counters and integrations with accounting or other systems are quoted as a fixed price after the audit. Terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures.

Modifiers and option sets

Square separates two ideas that Shopify handles differently. Option sets (size, color) generate variations, and each variation has its own SKU, price and stock; those map cleanly to Shopify variants, up to three options per product and, on current Shopify, up to 2,048 variants per product. Modifiers (engraving, gift wrap, add a strap) are choices made at the moment of sale that do not carry their own stock, and Shopify has no native modifier object. We decide per modifier set in the audit. Modifiers that change what is picked from the shelf become variants or separate add-on products. Modifiers that only change the price, such as a paid service, usually become add-on products that staff add alongside the item. Free-text requests become custom line item notes. The result is a catalog your staff can ring up just as quickly as before, and one your web store can sell without guesswork.

Square also allows prices to differ by location. Shopify’s default is one price per variant, so location pricing is handled with Shopify Markets or B2B price lists where the plan supports it, or simplified with your agreement. We flag every affected item before import rather than let a tool pick the highest price silently.

Loyalty points and gift cards

These two are where customers notice a migration, and neither comes out of the Square Dashboard cleanly. Square’s support team has confirmed in its seller community that loyalty balances cannot be exported from the Dashboard. The Loyalty API does return each account’s points balance with its phone number and customer ID, so we pull balances directly, match them to the imported customers and load them into the Shopify loyalty app you choose, with the program rules rebuilt to match.

The Dashboard gift card report shows outstanding balances, but the card numbers in it are truncated. The Gift Cards API returns the full card number and current balance, so we recreate each card in Shopify with its balance and, where the number fits Shopify’s code format, the same number. That means a customer holding a Square gift card can still redeem it, which we test at the till before launch. Balances are taken again at cutover, because customers keep spending cards right up to the last day.

Hardware, payments and switching processors

Square card readers, Square Terminal and Square Register process only through Square, so they do not carry over. Shopify POS runs on iPad, iPhone and Android devices, and in the US it supports Shopify’s own readers, including the Tap & Chip Card Reader and the Shopify POS Terminal, alongside supported models such as the BBPOS WisePad 3. Many receipt printers, barcode scanners and cash drawers from a Square setup also work with Shopify POS; we check every model against Shopify’s supported hardware list during the audit and order what is missing early so it is on the counter for training.

Card processing moves to Shopify Payments. Square keeps your merchant history, so leave the account open for refunds and disputes on past sales. If customers have cards on file, for example for house accounts, Square will export that data only to a PCI DSS Level 1 compliant processor on the account owner’s request, and its help center says that can take up to two weeks. Whether that file can be used on the new setup is checked in the audit; in most cases customers simply re-enter their card at their next visit.

Staff, permissions and the cutover day

Staff are recreated in Shopify POS with PINs and location access. POS-only staff do not count toward the admin staff limit on any Shopify plan, and roles with custom permissions come with POS Pro, which is $89 per location per month or $79 per month billed annually (POS Lite is included with every plan). Most retailers with more than a couple of employees choose Pro for the permissions, exchanges and inventory tools.

One Square detail shapes the cutover plan. Square’s own documentation notes that sales taken in offline mode can take up to 72 hours to reach Square’s servers. We close Square on the chosen day, count stock at each location, load the counted quantities into Shopify, and run a test sale and refund on every register before opening. The final sales pull from Square waits until offline payments have had time to sync, so no sale is missed in the history.

What you get at handover

A reconciliation ledger for items, variants, stock by location, customers, orders, loyalty balances and gift cards, with every exclusion named; the modifier and option-set decisions in writing; the cutover-day stock count sheets; a hardware and register configuration sheet per location; the redirect verification list if you had a web store; a staff quick-reference sheet for the POS app; and a recorded walkthrough of the Shopify admin and Shopify POS for your team.

Questions we settle in the survey

• How many locations and registers you run, and which hardware sits at each.
• Whether you use Square Online, another web platform, or sell in person only.
• Which modifier sets are in use, and whether prices differ by location.
• Whether Square Loyalty and gift cards are active, and which loyalty app you prefer.
• How far back the sales history should go in Shopify.

Frequently asked questions

Tell us about your locations, registers and catalog on the migration survey and we will come back with a written assessment. If you also run a Square Online or Weebly website, read the Weebly and Square Online guide, and for another retail POS move, see the Lightspeed to Shopify guide.