Specialty Retail
eCommerce Migration
Square to Shopify
& SEO
The Migration Challenge
The Business Context
A specialty retailer with two distinct product verticals — cleaning equipment and hobby supplies — had outgrown Square's eCommerce capabilities. Square's catalog management tools, SEO options, and checkout customization were limiting growth.
The business had a large, established product catalog with consistent photography across both verticals. The migration needed to preserve the catalog integrity, maintain existing search rankings, and deliver a Shopify store capable of handling the dual-category complexity.
The store's physical location in New Orleans also required tight local SEO integration — the online and in-store traffic needed to reinforce each other, not compete.
Why Square → Shopify Is Hard
Square and Shopify use fundamentally incompatible data schemas for products, variants, images, and inventory. No migration tool in the market at the time handled this transition cleanly — especially the image library, which Square hosts on a CDN that isn't directly accessible to standard Shopify import tools.
Square's product model doesn't map cleanly to Shopify's variant system. Custom field transformation was needed for every product type.
Square stores images on temporary CDN URLs tied to the merchant account. Migrating requires downloading every image and re-uploading to Shopify's media system.
No off-the-shelf tool existed to do a clean Square → Shopify migration at this catalog size. Custom scripting was the only viable path.
The SEO Risk
The store's existing SEO equity was modest but real — particularly for cleaning equipment brands and accessory terms. A poorly managed platform migration can destroy this equity overnight through URL structure changes, missing redirects, and indexing misconfiguration.
The new Shopify URL structure was designed before migration, a full redirect map was built, and Google Search Console was configured to monitor for crawl errors immediately after launch.
Result: zero ranking drops observed. The migration was invisible to Google's crawlers — which was the explicit goal.
The Custom Migration Script
When no migration tool exists, you build one. The script handled product data transformation, image retrieval, and Shopify import generation in a single automated pipeline.
What the Script Did
Connected to Square's API and exported the full product catalog — every product, variant, description, price, and inventory level — into a structured working format.
Mapped Square's data schema to Shopify's CSV import format. Variant logic, collections, metafields, and tags were all remapped and normalized.
For each product, retrieved every associated image URL from Square's CDN and downloaded the image to a local staging area for re-upload.
Generated Shopify-compatible import CSV files and uploaded images to Shopify's media library in batches, linking back to the correct product records.
By the Numbers
The script has since been refined and is available as a service for other merchants needing to migrate off Square. If you have a large Square catalog and need to move to Shopify, this is a solved problem.
The Shopify Build & SEO Architecture
Dual-Vertical Catalog Architecture
The cleaning equipment and hobby supplies verticals are structurally different product categories with overlapping but not identical customers. The store architecture needed to serve both without cross-contaminating the category logic or creating navigation confusion.
Built for 10x Keyword Growth
Square's SEO tooling is limited — static title tag templates, no structured data support, minimal control over canonical logic. Shopify gave full control, and the architecture was designed to take advantage of it.
Handoff & Training
A catalog of this size requires ongoing management. Staff were trained on Shopify's admin for product updates, inventory management, and collection editing — covering both the main catalog workflows and the custom metafields used for the dual-vertical architecture.
Documentation was provided for adding new products that match the SEO and catalog structure already established. The goal was a store the team could own and operate without ongoing agency dependency for day-to-day tasks.
Post-Launch Performance
Indexed keyword count grew 10x within 6 months of launch. Shopify's SEO infrastructure and the rebuilt URL architecture unlocked a previously unindexed long-tail catalog.
Zero ranking drops during or after the platform migration. The redirect map and pre-launch validation made the transition invisible to search engines.
Average order value increased with Shopify's native upsell and cross-sell capabilities — unavailable on Square's platform — and improved checkout flow trust signals.
Square → Shopify Migration Service
The scripts and processes built for this migration are now a repeatable service. If you're running a Square eCommerce store and need to move to Shopify — regardless of catalog size — this is a solved problem.
We've migrated catalogs ranging from a few hundred products to thousands, with image libraries of all sizes. The migration is clean, the SEO transition is managed, and the result is a Shopify store you own and operate.