The short version: Do not leave Square. Leave Square Online, which is a different thing, and keep the reader, the point-of-sale app, and the payout account you already have. Square Online is one product inside a larger account, and closing your online store does not close your Square account or stop you taking cards at a market. What you give up by splitting them is the shared item library, so your stall and your online orders stop sharing one stock count. That is the real cost of this switch, it is the only one that matters, and it is worth weighing honestly before you move anything.
Square Online, not Square. The distinction is the whole article.
Square is your merchant account: the reader, the point-of-sale app, the customer directory, the payout account, and your transaction history. Free to use with hardware you may already own.
Square Online is the storefront product sitting on top of it: your web store, its pages, and its ordering rules. Free at the entry tier, then $49 a month per location for Plus and $149 for Premium.
Closing the storefront does not close the account. You can carry on selling at markets exactly as before, keep your payout arrangements, and keep every historical record, while moving online ordering somewhere that handles it better.
That means this is usually not a migration at all. It is unbundling, and it is considerably lower risk than the word switching suggests.
Three reasons, in rough order of frequency.
Per-location pricing. Plus and Premium are charged per location, so a vendor at three markets pays $147 a month rather than $49, or $1,764 a year. The free plan does not multiply, which is why most multi-market vendors should be on Free rather than Plus in the first place. Our breakdown of Square Online's free plan covers that arithmetic.
Thin scheduling. Square Online treats pickup and local delivery as fulfilment options rather than as a scheduling system. A vendor with a Wednesday market cutting off Monday and a Saturday market cutting off Thursday cannot express that cleanly, and ends up encoding it in product names or in the order notes. Neither workaround survives contact with a customer who does not read carefully.
The free plan's card rate. Free charges 3.3% plus 30¢ online against 2.9% on the paid tiers. On $24,000 a year that premium is about $96. Small, and it grows: at $100,000 it is roughly $400.
Our look at Square Online for local food vendors covers where it fits well, which is genuinely broad.
One thing, and it is significant enough to think about properly.
The shared item library. Right now, adding a product puts it in both the stall app and the online store, and selling six loaves at the market makes them unavailable online immediately. Split them and you have two catalogs and two stock counts.
The consequence is the classic two-system failure: you can sell the same last four items twice, once at the stall and once online, and only find out when someone arrives to collect something that is already gone.
How much that matters depends on your mix:
The workable pattern for most vendors is the middle one: list a fixed quantity online, hold the rest back for the stall, and never let the two pools touch. That removes the reconciliation entirely at the cost of slightly less flexibility.
Comes with you:
Does not come with you:
That third point is worth repeating because it applies to every migration in this category: card tokens belong to the processor and the merchant account they were created under. Repeat online customers will re-enter their details once.
Eight steps, and the fourth is the one people skip.
Step four is genuinely worth confirming with Square support rather than assuming. The products are separable, and it costs nothing to have that in writing before you act. Ask specifically whether disabling the online store affects your reader, your payout schedule, or your access to historical transactions, since those are the three things you are relying on staying put.
Step one matters because your customer directory is the asset. Square holds names, contact details, and purchase history across both channels. Export it while everything is active, verify the file opens and the row count matches, and keep it somewhere you control.
Step three is the one that decides how smoothly the first month goes. Deciding your stock split in advance, in writing, means you are not making that judgement at seven on a Saturday morning with a van to load. A simple rule works: list roughly two thirds online and hold a third back for walk-ups, then adjust after a month of watching which pool runs out first.
If the online pool consistently sells out while you carry stock home from the stall, list more. If you are turning walk-ups away while online orders go uncollected, list less. That is a two-minute review once a month and it converges quickly.
The IRS's recordkeeping guidance covers what you are expected to retain and for how long, and it applies to your online sales regardless of where the storefront lives. Keeping the Square account open helps here, since your historical transactions stay accessible.
Small detail, easily handled, occasionally annoying if ignored.
If you close the online store while orders are unfulfilled or payouts pending:
Keeping Square active solves all four automatically, which is the practical advantage of this particular switch over most others. Treasury's ACH guidance covers how bank transfers actually move if a payout timing question comes up, and the FDIC's consumer resource center is a plain-language reference for the deposits side.
Sometimes, and it costs nothing to find out.
Square Online's free plan is $0 a month with no time limit. So you can leave it switched on, listing a small selection, while your main ordering happens elsewhere. There is no subscription penalty for doing so.
Reasons to keep it live:
Reasons to switch it off:
The deciding question is whether you will genuinely maintain it. A neglected second storefront taking an order you do not see is worse than no second storefront, so if you are not going to check it weekly, turn it off.
Easier than most switches, because your customers are largely people you see in person.
Point four is the practical advantage of Square Online's free tier: you can leave the old store standing, strip it back to a single page pointing at the new link, and catch stray traffic indefinitely at no cost. That is a nicer outcome than most platforms allow, where cancelling simply breaks every old link.
Before you announce anything, take one real order through the new platform yourself, including the cutoff and the collection point, since those are the two promises your announcement will be making.
Four things, chosen because they are the reasons vendors leave.
If a candidate platform cannot do those, you are moving sideways and paying for the privilege. Our comparisons of Square Online against Shopify and Square Online against Cococart cover two of the obvious alternatives, and the second is a useful reminder to establish a platform's processing rate before comparing anything else.
For that shape, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. Pricing does not multiply by location. The honest bound, and it is the one this whole article is about: there is no point-of-sale. You cannot take a card at the stall through it, which is precisely why the recommendation here is to keep your Square reader rather than replace it. Plenty of vendors run exactly that pair. You can set up your real markets and cutoffs in a trial while Square Online stays live, and compare on one real week of orders.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | What changes when you leave Square | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square Online | Per-location pricing and POS tie-in stay behind | Free tier; paid from $29/mo per location | 30-day trial on paid plans | $0 platform fee | 3.3% + $0.30 free tier, 2.9% + $0.30 paid |
| Homegrown | One flat fee regardless of how many places you sell | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Bake.Shop | Drops instead of a general store | $149/yr (= $12.42/mo) | 14-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Big Cartel | Simple store, your own processor | Platinum $12/mo ($144/yr) | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee | Your own provider, so 2.9% + $0.30 typical |
| Shopify | More capability, more cost | $29/mo Basic | 3-day trial, then $1/mo for 3 | 2% platform fee if not on Shopify Payments | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Cococart | Simplest possible ordering page | $19/mo store, $59 Pro | 7-day free trial | Platform fee not published | Processing not published |
No. Square Online is one product within a larger account. Closing the storefront leaves your reader, point-of-sale app, customer directory, payout arrangements, and transaction history intact.
Yes. In-person selling is unaffected by turning off the online store. This is the main reason to think of the change as unbundling rather than migrating.
The shared item library, so your stall and your online orders stop sharing one stock count. The practical fix is to list a fixed quantity online and hold the rest back for walk-ups, so the two pools never touch.
Mostly per-location pricing, since Plus is $49 a month per location and three markets is $147. Also thin pickup scheduling, and the free plan's 3.3% online card rate against 2.9% on paid tiers.
Only if you will maintain it. It costs $0 and shares your item library, which is genuinely useful. A neglected second storefront that takes an order you never see is worse than none at all.
Your customer directory and order history from Square, and your original product images rather than the versions Square serves. Verify the row count matches before you rely on the file.
No. Card tokens belong to the processor and the merchant account they were created under, so repeat online customers will re-enter their details once on the new platform.
This is the easiest switch in the category because you probably should not switch at all. Square Online is one product inside a Square account, and turning it off leaves your reader, your payouts, your customer directory, and your history exactly where they are.
The one real cost is the shared item library. Split the storefront from the point-of-sale and you have two stock counts, which is how the same last four items get sold twice. The fix is a deliberate split: a fixed quantity listed online, the rest held back for the stall, and the two pools never touching.
If per-location pricing is what is pushing you out, check first whether you should simply be on Square's free plan, which does not multiply. That change costs nothing, takes a minute, and for a vendor at three markets saves roughly $1,668 a year against Plus.
