Weebly and Square Online → to Shopify

Weebly and Square Online to Shopify: the export is thin, the URLs are strange, and both are solvable

Weebly stores now live inside Square Online, and the migration path off them is one of the more awkward ones because Square gives you a minimal export and Weebly routes product URLs by ID rather than by name. We have moved stores off it recently, and this guide is the procedure that came out of that work, including the two traps that cost other migrations their search traffic and their sales tax.

Why stores leave Weebly and Square Online

• The platform is in maintenance mode. Weebly’s ecommerce features stopped developing when Square folded it in, and Square Online is built around Square POS merchants rather than online-first brands.
• Payments. Square Online processes through Square. If you want Shop Pay, PayPal, Klarna or a lower rate, you are stuck.
• No real variant or inventory model. Options exist, but multi-location stock, B2B pricing and bundles do not.
• Apps. The Square App Marketplace is short. The tools growing brands rely on are Shopify-first.
• SEO control. ID-based URLs, limited metadata control and slow templates make ranking harder than it should be.

What Square Online actually exports

The Square Online Items export is a single CSV with sixteen columns: one row per variant, one image URL, categories joined by commas, weight in pounds, and a taxable flag per row. It contains no product descriptions beyond the basics, no sale prices, and no product URLs. Orders come from the Square Dashboard orders export. Customers come from the Square Customer Directory export, which does carry email marketing consent.

Data	Moves to Shopify?	How
Products, variants, SKUs, prices, stock, weight, categories	Yes	Items export, transformed and imported. Option names can be blank in the export even when real variants exist, so we rebuild option structure from the variant rows.
Product images beyond the first	Partly	The export carries one image. The rest are harvested from the live product pages before the old site goes down.
Descriptions	Yes	Harvested from the live product pages by our migration scripts before the old site goes down.
Orders with line items, totals and status	Yes	Square orders export, imported through the Admin API as real orders with the original numbers.
Customers with consent	Yes	Customer Directory export, consent carried one to one.
Tax settings	Manually verified	See the tax trap below.
Passwords	No	Customers reset on first login or use passwordless accounts.
Theme	No	Rebuilt on Shopify.

The two traps

1. Weebly product URLs are routed by ID, not by slug

A Weebly product lives at /store/p123/anything.html, and the site 302-redirects that to the real slug. The real slugs do not match anything you would guess from the product title, they are often mixed case, and the sitemap only lists the first thousand products. A redirect map built from the sitemap or from titles leaves a slice of the catalog dead on launch day. The fix is to probe every product ID from the export against the live site while it is still up and record the exact URL it resolves to, then build the 301s from that inventory. Products that were renamed on Weebly have two live slugs and get two redirects. Category pages have both an ID form and a pretty form and get both.

2. Migrated variants can arrive with tax switched off

On a recent migration the automated tool imported every variant as non-taxable when the source had 96 percent of them taxable. Nothing in the admin flags it. The store would simply have stopped collecting sales tax at launch. We now diff the taxable column of the export against every imported variant before go-live and correct it in bulk. If you are migrating without us, check this.

How the data moves

Off-the-shelf migration apps list Weebly as a source, and we have tried them. They stall on the parts that matter: their redirects are built from flat slugs guessed from titles, which is the wrong approach on Weebly for the reasons above; they skip tracking numbers and additional images; and they report matching counts while leaving tax flags and marketing consent untouched. We run Weebly and Square Online migrations on our own AI-driven migration technology instead: scripts written for the Square Online exports and the Weebly URL structure, executed against Shopify’s Admin API, and reconciled against the source exports in the same session. That covers the image harvesting, description cleanup, the URL probe, the tax diff, per-parcel tracking on shipped orders and the reconciliation report you receive at handover.

How we run it

1. Exports and URL harvest. Items, orders and customers exported; every product ID probed for its real URL while the site is live.
2. Build in a free Shopify development store. Theme, checkout, payments, shipping, taxes.
3. Sample import and sign-off. Twenty of each, edge cases included.
4. Full run of products, customers, orders and fulfillments, with the tax diff applied.
5. Images and descriptions completed from the live pages.
6. Redirects from the harvested inventory, each one tested through the storefront.
7. Launch with a delta sync and Search Console resubmission, then a 30-day 404 watch using the capture kit we deploy on every store.

Timeline and cost

Most Weebly and Square Online stores are live on Shopify in six to eight weeks. Migrations start at $2,500 for stores under 500 products and $3,500 for larger stores, quoted as a fixed price after the audit, with 50 percent to begin and 50 percent once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures. You pay Shopify nothing until launch.

Square POS: what happens to it

If you run Square in a physical shop, you have two options. Move retail to Shopify POS so online and in-store share one inventory, which is what most stores do; or keep Square POS for retail and sync stock through an app. The second works but adds a moving part, and it is worth deciding during the audit rather than after launch.

A recent Weebly migration, in numbers

A gift retailer with 1,658 products and nine years of orders on Weebly came to us in July 2026 and was live on Shopify 44 days later, with 3,412 orders, 3,213 customers, 1,758 tested redirects and its Google Shopping history intact. The full write-up is our Weebly to Shopify migration case study. The parts that a generic import would have got wrong:

• The sitemap listed 1,000 products. The export listed 1,658. Roughly a hundred of the products beyond the sitemap cap would have 404ed on launch had the redirect map been built from the sitemap.
• Probing every product ID against the live site took twelve minutes and produced an exact URL for each, including 40 or so mixed-case slugs that no title-based guess would have matched, plus a handful of products that had been renamed and still answered on both slugs.
• The export said 96 percent of variants were taxable. Shopify enforces nothing here, so the flags were applied on import and re-applied from the final export on launch day: 1,599 taxable, 63 exempt, matching Weebly exactly.
• Marketing consent came from the Square Customer Directory export, not from the order data. Customers were subscribed only where the directory said so.

None of this is visible in the Shopify admin. Product counts match, order counts match, the store looks finished. It is why we reconcile against the source rather than the destination and why every redirect gets requested through the storefront before launch.

Customers, consent and Square’s directory

Square keeps its customer records in the Customer Directory, which is shared between Square Online and Square POS. The directory export carries names, emails, phone numbers, addresses where the customer supplied one, and the email marketing subscription state. That subscription flag is the only reliable source of consent; the order export does not carry it. We import customers from the directory, link orders by email, and mark each customer subscribed only where the directory says so. Customers who only ever bought in the physical shop come across too, which is often the first time the online store has had them on a list.

Checklist before you start

• Export items from Square Online, and orders and the customer directory from the Square Dashboard. Keep the files.
• Do not cancel Square Online until the URL harvest is done. Once the site is down the real product URLs are gone.
• Note any digital products and the files behind them; they do not export and are re-uploaded.
• List the Square apps and any third-party tools connected to the store.
• Decide whether Square POS moves to Shopify POS or stays and syncs.
• Check whether your domain is registered through Square or Weebly. If it is, plan the transfer early, because registrar moves take days.

Reviews, gift cards and digital goods

Square Online has no native product review system of its own, so most stores either have none or use a third-party widget. Where a widget was used, its export goes into Judge.me or your chosen app, matched on the product ID we harvested. Square eGift Cards are a Square Payments product rather than a store feature, and outstanding balances are exported from the Square Dashboard and recreated as Shopify gift cards, with customers told the code has changed. Digital products, where the store sells downloads, do not export their files; each is re-uploaded and attached through Shopify’s Digital Downloads app so delivery is automatic again.

Why we do not hand this to a migration app

A generic migration app reads products with the first image, categories, customers, and orders with line items and totals, and its summary screen shows matching counts throughout. That is where its usefulness ends on Weebly. It does not carry tracking numbers on shipped orders, which we add from the shipment data. It does not migrate the additional product images, which we harvest from the live pages. It does not touch consent, which comes from the Customer Directory. It leaves vendor and product type empty, because Weebly never had them, so we backfill both. And its redirects are generated from flat slugs guessed from titles, which on Weebly is exactly the wrong approach for the reasons above, so our redirect map is built from the product-ID probe instead. Matching counts are why a migration can look complete and still leave a hundred dead URLs and no sales tax; running the import and the reconciliation on our own technology, in the same session, is how we avoid finding out after launch.

What you get at handover

The migration closes with a reconciliation ledger for products, orders and customers, the harvested URL inventory with the status each redirect returned when tested, the tax diff showing every variant checked, and a recorded admin walkthrough. If Square POS moved to Shopify POS, the handover also covers the till setup and a staff quick-reference sheet.

Questions we settle in the survey

• Is Square POS staying, moving to Shopify POS, or being retired?
• Which Square marketing tools are in use, and where does the email list live?
• Are there products hidden on Weebly that should stay hidden, or be dropped?
• Does the domain sit with Square or Weebly, and who has the registrar login?
• How much order history do you want visible in Shopify?

Frequently asked questions

Ten minutes on the migration survey gets a written assessment within one business day. If your store started life on another builder, our Wix and Squarespace guides cover the same ground for those platforms.