We started before any code was written. We joined Delight's calls with Shopify and worked through the plan options with both teams. The answer was Shopify Plus with expansion stores, which covers a POS Pro location for every chapter inside the plan and removes the need for custom middleware.
From there the migration ran in five steps:
- Audit. We captured all 90 live URLs, the design system, the catalog and every third party script, and turned the findings into a numbered build plan.
- Data first. Products, customers, orders and content moved before theme work began, so the new design was built against real data.
- Theme build. We built on Shopify's Horizon theme with a thin layer of custom sections and blocks, working from the new designs supplied by Delight's designer.
- Launch runbook. Separate checklists for before, at and after cutover covered a final data resync, DNS, redirects and first day monitoring.
- Rollback window. We changed nothing on Squarespace during the build and kept it available for 30 days after launch as a fallback.
What We Built
Every record moved, with its history attached
- Catalog: 19 products, 68 variants and 77 product images, including weights, SKUs, SEO fields and gift cards, with inventory verified product by product.
- Customers and orders: the full Squarespace customer list and order history, with marketing consent preserved and outstanding gift card balances reconciled.
- Source data kept: original Squarespace IDs, signup dates, mailing lists and lifetime totals stored as Shopify metafields and tags, so nothing was lost in translation.
- Content: all five blog collections, including the four Squarespace cannot export. We scraped them, stripped the Squarespace markup and re-pointed every image.
- Media: 567 images pulled from the Squarespace CDN and rehosted on Shopify with alt text.
- Chapter sales: customers and orders from Delight's central Square account, each tagged by sales channel and by chapter.
A theme the team can run without a developer
The new storefront follows Delight's refreshed brand: pink wave section dividers, hand-drawn text embellishments and a cleaner layout. Each of these is a setting in the theme editor, not hard-coded.
- Product page: sticky image gallery, popular add-ons, key features, return policy, FAQs, review stars and video reviews.
- Collection pages: hero banner, sidebar collection links, filters and infinite scroll.
- Cart: a cart drawer and cart page. The old site had no cart icon in the header.
- Custom blocks: promo badges, product carousels, a marquee bar, a video section and separate mobile font controls.
- Marketing pages: Home, About, Find a Chapter, Start a Chapter, Give and Shop rebuilt to the new designs, with responsive layouts we designed where no mobile mockups existed.
A chapter directory built for a 250-campus network
The old chapter finder was a pasted map embed. We replaced it with a custom chapter directory: a searchable map, branded markers and a dedicated page template for every chapter.
SEO carried across
Moving to Shopify changed nearly every URL on the site. We mapped all 90 to 301 redirects, pruned placeholder and duplicate pages, ported titles, meta descriptions and structured data, and fixed heading hierarchy during the rebuild.
Integrations
One customer record across store, chapters, reviews and giving
The replatform was also the moment to connect the tools around the store. Every integration below feeds the same customer profile.
- Judge.me: Star ratings sit beside the product title, with written and video reviews further down the product page. Review activity syncs to Klaviyo for review requests and follow-ups.
- Outpour: Powers the giving form on the Give page. A completed gift passes the donor's name, email, amount, one-time or recurring status and giving program into Klaviyo, which starts the right donor thank-you flow.
- Klaviyo: Replaces ActiveCampaign for email and adds SMS. Signup forms in the footer and a new pop-up capture subscribers the old site never asked for.
- Square: Historical chapter customers and orders imported and tagged by chapter, so alumni and current students can be messaged differently.
- Shopify POS Pro: Every chapter can be its own point of sale location, ready for a book sold in person and merch shipped from the warehouse in one transaction.
- Meta: Pixel reinstalled through Shopify's Meta channel so paid campaigns report conversions.
- Instagram: Feed rebuilt for the homepage and footer.
Outpour deserved special care. The giving form runs in an embedded frame that Shopify cannot see into, so we connected Outpour to Klaviyo directly instead of routing donations through the store.
