Shopify is killing Stocky on Aug 31 and the native replacement drops the parts I cared about most, reorder suggestions and purchase orders. Shopify even confirmed those aren’t coming in 2026. The bigger paid apps and ERPs feel like overkill and got expensive.
For anyone who used Stocky: what did you actually use it for day to day, and what are you switching to? And honestly, if a simple tool did just the reorder suggestions plus an exportable PO and nothing else, would you pay something small for it, or just tough it out with the free native one?
Trying to figure out what people genuinely need before committing to a setup. Curious what everyone’s doing.
You’re definitely not the only one dealing with this right now. Most of the merchants I’ve spoken with didn’t use Stocky because it was a full inventory system—they used it because it made reordering straightforward and took some of the guesswork out of purchase orders.
The tricky part is that what seems like a simple “reorder suggestion” feature is actually driven by a lot of moving pieces behind the scenes: sales trends, supplier lead times, seasonality, inventory turnover, and stock coverage. That’s why many of the alternatives either feel too expensive or don’t quite solve the same problem.
Before jumping into a replacement, I’d look at what you’re actually relying on Stocky for day-to-day:
• Reorder recommendations?
• Purchase order creation?
• Supplier management?
• Multi-location inventory?
• Forecasting based on sales history?
The answers usually make it much clearer whether a merchant needs a dedicated inventory platform or just a lightweight solution to fill the gap.
I’m seeing some interesting trends among merchants preparing for the Stocky sunset, and the “best” replacement seems to depend heavily on store size and operational complexity.
Curious—roughly how many SKUs are you managing, and are you operating from a single location or multiple warehouses? That context would help narrow down the options considerably.
Hello there @erlenstoms
Mostly this is because many merchants used Stocky just for reorder recommendations and basic PO creation. A typical workaround is to work with Shopify inventory reports exported to Google Sheets with formulas for reorder points and turn approved restocks into draft orders or a PO template. Some also leverage Airtable to automate low stock alerts without the full ERP overhead. If a solution remained focused on just sugestions plus exportable POs I’d wager many merchants would fork over a very small monthly fee to stay clear of heavy systems.
Many sellers have already started moving from Stocky. Alternative depends on the needs, whether it’s forecasting, low-stock alerts, stock transfers, or more. Some tools offer features very similar to Stocky, and a few are even available for free like Channel Bay.
This is exactly the workflow I’m trying to understand better right now.
From what I’m seeing, the biggest gap does not seem to be “full inventory management” or another complex ERP-style tool. It seems to be the simple daily workflow Stocky covered for many merchants:
know what needs to be reordered
get a suggested reorder quantity
create/export a purchase order
receive the goods
update inventory
For merchants affected by the Stocky sunset: would a focused tool that only solves reorder suggestions + simple POs + receiving be useful, or would that still not be enough?
Also curious: are most of you moving to another app, or are you falling back to spreadsheets and email for now?
I’m not selling anything here. I’m researching this workflow and trying to understand what merchants actually need before assuming a solution.
Disclosure, I make a barcode label app (LabelCraft), so I will speak to one slice of this and stay out of the reorder-forecasting debate. For the reorder and PO core, the names that come up most for Stocky refugees are the broader inventory suites (people mention Sumtracker, Fabrikator, Qoblex and a few others); worth trialing each against your real workflow. One thing that often gets unbundled in the move is label printing: Stocky printed barcode labels straight off a received PO, and a number of the replacements either skip that or treat it as an afterthought. If your new stack does not cover it, you can keep label printing as its own step (receive stock, then print barcodes from a label app). That is the niche my app fills, but the point holds whichever reorder tool you pick. Happy to compare notes once you have a shortlist.
Used Stocky mainly for reorder suggestions based on sales velocity and exportable POs, that covered the daily workflow for most people.
Switching to either native inventory + manual spreadsheer tracking or a smaller app focused just on reorder points/POs rather than a full ERP.
And yes, I’d pay a small amount for a tool that just did reorder suggestions plus an exportable PO. The native options missing reorder logic entirely is the main gap people want filled.
@erlenstoms You basically asked the exact question I am trying to answer, so I will be straight with you. I am a developer building a deliberately simple, cheap app for the Stocky loop: purchase orders, receiving with partials and cost corrections, and barcode labels straight off the received PO, plus a hand moving your Stocky data across before it vanishes on Aug 31. Low-stock nudges are in, full demand forecasting is deliberately out, because that is where these tools get expensive. Not live yet, not selling anything. The one thing I cannot guess from here is your “small fee” question: if it did just that loop well, would you pay for it, and what per month feels fair to you? That is genuinely the whole decision on whether to build it.
This is a solid starting point, and lumine’s pushback is the right one — a couple of things that helped me when I hit the same wall:
Safety stock and the reorder POINT are two different jobs. The formula here sizes the buffer; it doesn’t tell you WHEN to act. Pair it with: reorder point = (avg daily sales x avg lead time) + safety stock. When on-hand crosses that number, it’s time to order — the safety stock is just the cushion baked into it.
On lumine’s carrying-cost worry: the fix usually isn’t to drop the formula, it’s to apply it selectively. Run it on your A-items — the ~20% of SKUs that drive most of your revenue and hurt most when they’re out — and use a cruder flat buffer for the long tail. Holding “max lead time” worth of safety stock across your whole catalog is what ties up the cash; across your top 30 SKUs it’s cheap insurance.
The variable most people under-weight is lead-time variability, not demand. In my experience most stockouts came from the supplier being late, not a demand spike. If your lead time swings from 12 to 25 days, that spread dominates the formula. Worth logging your last few POs’ actual arrival dates vs. what was promised — that “max lead time” number is often bigger than people assume.
For seasonal items the average-daily-sales input is the trap — I’d compute velocity off the comparable season last year rather than a trailing 30/60-day average, or the number lags the ramp every time.
Curious how others handle the seasonal SKUs specifically — do you recompute per season, or just widen the buffer and accept some overstock?
@erlenstoms Yep, we’ve heard quite a bit from our own users that native Shopify just doesn’t stack up to what you had in Stocky - easier reordering and purchase orders that aren’t painful to manually create one at a time.
With Stocky going away, and our own users asking us for a robust way to handle POs and light inventory management / reordering with Shopify; we decided to build our own solution, but for free.
We think Shopify merchants deserve a robust, stable and long term way to handle Purchase Orders (and the re-ordering/receiving processes that come with them) in a way that fits their business, and not at an additional cost. We’d love to hear any feedback as we continue to build more features to make this a helpful home for Shopify store merchants coming from Stocky!
Honestly the “would you pay something small for just reorder + exportable PO” question is the right one to ask, because most stores don’t need the full ERP stack — they need the three or four things Stocky did well and nothing else.
From what I’ve seen people actually relied on: reorder point suggestions, creating and receiving POs, cost tracking per supplier, and multi-location stock levels. The rest of Stocky mostly went unused.
One thing worth flagging before you commit to anything: Shopify doesn’t expose native Purchase Orders through their API, so no third-party tool can read or sync Shopify’s own POs. Every “PO app” out there is really running its own PO system inside the app. That’s not necessarily bad, but it means “exportable PO” is the feature to test hardest — make sure whatever you pick lets you get your PO data back out as CSV, so you’re never locked in the way Stocky users are about to be.
To your actual question: yes, a focused tool at a small monthly price beats both the overkill ERPs and the stripped-back native one for most stores in the 100–1000 SKU range. Just make sure it handles receiving properly (partial receipts, cost updates on receive) — that’s where the cheap ones usually fall short.
Building on @ysajang’s and @lumenpike 's points, because together they have a labelling consequence nobody has spelled out yet. When you export every report type from Stocky before Aug 31 (POs with line items, stocktakes, and any product or barcode report it will give you), check that at least one file keeps four columns: SKU, barcode value, quantity received, and cost or price if you print those. That is the minimum you need to reprint labels for any historical receipt after Stocky’s data is deleted, and it is easy to miss while you are focused on forecasting history.
Going forward, ysajang’s API point cuts both ways. Native POs are not readable by any app, so received quantities can only reach a third-party tool via CSV export, every delivery, forever. Native Transfers, though, ARE exposed through the API, so if your supplier flow can run as a Transfer (or you receive against one), an app can pick up the exact received quantities with no retyping at all. Worth testing that side of your setup before the deadline rather than after.
FYI: I build LabelCraft, so this receiving-and-labels slice is the one I work in daily.
Agree most people don’t need the full ERP, just the few things Stocky did well.
On the lock-in point raised earlier: the part worth testing hardest is receiving, since someone’s still keying the supplier invoice in by hand line by line.
Disclosure, I’m the dev: I’m not building a Stocky replacement, but my app PitStop turns an invoice or PO into matched line items instantly, with CSV export so nothing’s locked in.
Curious how you’re all handling that receiving step right now, straight into native admin, or something on the side?
I’m a Shopify developer trying to understand this gap properly rather than guess at it, so a question for anyone who has actually tested a replacement.
Which half is the real sticking point for you: the reorder/forecasting side, or the receiving side (updating average cost on receipt, and printing labels for only what actually arrived)?
I ask because the answers in these threads seem to split into two groups. Some people reorder off recent sales velocity. Others reorder off negotiated vendor terms and don’t care about forecasting at all, they just want the PO and receiving flow to stop making them re-enter SKUs in a separate barcode app.
Not selling anything and nothing is built. If anyone is open to walking me through their current workflow for 15 minutes, I’d learn far more from that than from another feature list.
I wouldn’t say the gap is functionality. That exists in apps already. I think the gap is that it’s not native to Shopify. Stocky was free for Pro stores. Because of this, many stores feel the functionality should be either free or included in what they’re paying for Shopify currently (included natively). Use that knowledge to determine if you should invest your time into creating an app that does the same things many apps already do.
That’s an honest answer, and coming from someone who actually built in this space it carries weight. The anchor price for anything Stocky did is zero, and that’s hard to fight.It makes me curious about the flip side though: in your own store’s operations, what do you happily pay a monthly app fee for and consider clearly worth it? Trying to understand where merchants see paid apps as obviously justified vs. “this should be included.”
Putting on my “store owner hat” because in owning a store I can answer this.
Any app that gives me more value than it would take for me to do the same thing is worth my dollars. This is where FyreTrail came from. The amount of work we did in our store justified building the app functionality to replace those labor hours. Now, that time is no longer spent doing the things FyreTrail does.
In fact, the pricing tiers are intended to be cheaper than what it takes as a store operator to do the same things day after day, week after week, etc. The reason is, what it’s worth to us is exactly what it would be to somebody else and that should cost a store less than what it would cost for them to dedicate time, labor, etc. and still mean they’re “saving money.”
I have calculated several times what FyreTrail saves our store… $480/month is what we spend without FyreTrail in equivalent “lost” labor. Now WITH FyreTrail that labor is spent doing other things and you get the same $480/month equivalent by only spending $159/month (or less!).
That labor-replacement framing is the clearest answer I’ve gotten anywhere on this topic: price against the hours it replaces, and make sure the merchant still comes out ahead. The gap between that math and the “Stocky was free” anchor you described earlier explains a lot about this market.
Genuinely appreciate you taking the time to answer from both the builder and store-owner side. Good luck with FyreTrail through the August transition.
Taking your last question first, because it is the interesting one. Would a small tool doing reorder suggestions plus an exportable PO sell? Probably, but that is the crowded lane. Prediko at around $49 and Stockful at around $20 already sit in it, and Shopify confirming forecasting is not coming in 2026 has pulled several more builders in. It is the loudest gap, so it is the one everybody is aiming at. The quieter gaps have less competition.
On what people actually used Stocky for, it splits three ways and the right answer differs by split.
Reorder suggestions from sales velocity: Prediko. I say that as someone with a competing app, because I do not do forecasting at all and will not pretend otherwise.
Purchase orders and receiving: Shopify is moving basic POs and linked transfers into the admin natively. Test that before you pay for anything. A fair number of people need less than they think.
Invoice due dates and knowing what you owe each supplier: that is the one nobody replaces. It is where I built mine, Purser, $37.99, free under 5 POs a month. Accounts payable and weighted-average cost, no forecasting.
Whatever you pick, export your purchase order file out of Stocky before August. Supplier records do not export at all, and rebuilding them from the PO file is the only way back.