Stocky migration concerns shifted from choosing a replacement app to preserving data that may not export cleanly before access ends.
The emerging consensus is:
Standard CSV exports preserve core records such as POs, stocktakes, inventory, and some cost data.
Supplier/vendor notes, PO notes, payment terms, MOQ reminders, and calibrated par levels are not reliably exportable and should be copied manually into a spreadsheet.
The Stocky API exposes richer PO data than CSVs, including actual received dates (received_at) and per-line supplier cost (supplier_cost_price), which are important for lead-time and cost-history analysis.
A key timeline clarification was added: Aug. 31 was the cutoff for Stocky functionality/API access, while Shopify says read-only export access continues for roughly 90 days afterward. Participants warned not to assume supplier detail pages or notes remain accessible during that window.
Several replacement-app developers described import capabilities, but most acknowledged notes and some operational context cannot be fully automated. Later posts branched into forecasting/par-level methodology, especially handling out-of-stock days and thin sales history. The discussion remains open, especially around landed costs/duties and exact CSV field coverage.
Everyone’s asking which app replaces Stocky. After spending real time on the actual migration, I think that’s the wrong first question.
The apps are mostly fine. The hard part is getting your history out in one piece.
The clean stuff exports without drama as CSV: PO history, stock counts, supplier list, current costs. That’s not where you get hurt.
What worried me is what doesn’t come out cleanly. Your vendor notes, for one. All those per-supplier reminders you build up over years: MOQ 50, call before ordering hoodies because they run two weeks behind in Q4, our discount tier is 12% over $2k, blacklist the Tallinn warehouse after they shipped the wrong dye lot twice. That context lives in a notes field, and from what I can tell it doesn’t survive the export.
Same with cost history. Not what a product costs today, but how the cost actually moved over time. And the par levels you’ve spent months calibrating. None of it seems to land in the tidy CSV.
Once Stocky goes read-only after Aug 31 you get roughly 90 days, and then it’s gone for good.
So here’s what I can’t answer from the docs. Has anyone done a full export and confirmed exactly what comes back, notes and cost history included? If you’ve already switched, did your new tool import any of that, or did you start from a blank slate?
My honest read: pick whatever app you like, but get everything out before August, because the vendor knowledge and the cost trail are the parts you can’t rebuild. Curious whether anyone has actually solved this, or if we’re all just quietly losing it.
That’s a good point. Most migration discussions focus on features and pricing, but the historical context is just as valuable. I’d also want to preserve things like supplier lead times, reorder habits, and purchasing decisions, not just the current inventory numbers.
For anyone planning to migrate, it probably makes sense to export everything available now and keep an archived copy before Stocky becomes read-only, even if your new app doesn’t import every field. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s completed the migration and can confirm exactly what metadata was retained versus lost.
The two columns I would check the moment the export lands are supplier-specific cost and PO received date.
Shopify natively carries a single unit cost on the inventory item. Stocky lets a cost live per supplier, plus the trail of what you actually paid over time. When that collapses into one number, you lose the ability to see that supplier A was cheaper until March, which is exactly the thing you reason with when you renegotiate.
Received dates are the other quiet one. A PO export is usually just the lines and the order date. If the date the goods actually landed does not come across, your real lead time per supplier is gone, and any new tool has to spend a season relearning it before its reorder suggestions are worth anything. Sales velocity survives, since that is computed from Shopify order history and that stays put. The human context and the receiving trail are the parts that do not.
So to your question about what is retained: pull the export now while it is still writable, open the CSVs, and look for those two plus supplier and PO level notes. That is where I would expect the breakage.
Did your PO export include a received date column, or only the ordered date?
This is the sharpest breakdown of the problem I’ve seen anywhere, thanks for writing it out.
The received-date point is the one most people underestimate. Ordered date tells you nothing about lead time. Landed date is the whole signal, and if it doesn’t cross over, any new tool is flying blind on reorder timing for a full season before it relearns. The per-supplier cost trail is the same story: collapse it into one number and you’ve quietly erased your negotiating memory.
To your question: I haven’t run a full export myself yet, which is exactly why I’m asking. What I’ve seen suggests the ordered date comes across fine but the received date is the shaky one, which matches what you’re describing.
Have you run a full export yourself? If the received date really is missing, did you find any workaround, or just accept relearning lead times from scratch?
Right framing. The CSV stuff (POs, stock counts, supplier list, current costs) exports fine — it’s the vendor notes and cost trail that quietly vanish.
What I confirmed on my own export:
Vendor notes don’t come out. The supplier list exports, but the free-text notes field doesn’t. Same for PO notes. Only fix is opening each supplier/PO and copying it out by hand before Aug 31.
Cost history is partial. Current cost lands fine; historical movement is only reconstructable from the full PO export, and only for receives logged against a PO. Manual adjustments leave no trail.
Par levels came out with my stock counts, but check yours — it seemed to vary.
On import: none of the replacement apps I tried ingested notes or cost history. You rebuild that context by hand.
So: export all CSVs now (don’t wait for read-only), manually capture notes + cost adjustments into a spreadsheet, then pick your app second — the migration pain is nearly identical across them.
If anyone’s found a bulk way to pull the notes field (API? bulk operation?), I’d love to hear it — right now it’s a manual slog.
That’s a really important point. Most people are focused on finding a replacement app, but the bigger challenge is preserving the operational knowledge that’s been built up over time.
Things like supplier notes, purchasing workflows, historical costs, and reorder decisions often aren’t obvious until you need them. If that information doesn’t migrate cleanly, recreating it later can be extremely difficult.
It would be helpful if anyone who’s already completed the migration could share exactly what data was retained and what had to be rebuilt manually. Real migration experiences are probably more valuable than feature comparisons at this stage.
That matches what I’ve been finding, and I don’t think the bulk shortcut you’re hoping for exists on the export side. Shopify’s own guidance says suppliers can’t be exported from Stocky at all, and the notes/custom fields are Stocky-only. So the notes and the manual cost adjustments aren’t in the CSV, and I wouldn’t bet on the Admin API having them either.
Which lines up with what TinyOps laid out: it’s an extraction-coverage problem, not an import one. Realistically the only way to capture the notes before Aug 31 looks like pulling them straight from Stocky’s own screens while it’s still live, supplier and PO detail pages, keeping the stable Stocky ID so you can remap later. Slow, but it beats retyping hundreds by hand, and it’s the one window that closes for good at shutdown.
The truth-set idea upthread is the smart safety check: seed one supplier note, one PO note, one received date, one manual cost adjustment, then confirm any method actually captures all five before you trust it on the whole account.
How many suppliers and POs are you looking at? That’s the number that decides whether manual is even survivable or whether the capture has to be automated.
Great thread, thanks all. Sounds like the consensus is: export the CSVs now, manually capture notes + cost adjustments before read-only, and don’t assume any app imports the operational history. That tracks.
I’ve built a Stocky alternative (Purchase Order Hero), so hopefully I can give a dev perspective
Cost history: yes, this survives properly. The bit people underestimate is that you don’t need a special “cost history” export — it is your PO history. If you pull every historical PO with its line items intact (cost per line, dates preserved), you can reconstruct exactly how each item’s cost moved supplier-by-supplier, PO-by-PO, over years. That’s what I do: import the full PO history via Stocky’s API, then every product shows its cost trail across every PO it ever appeared on. So the “cost trail you can’t rebuild” — you can, as long as the tool imports line-level cost + dates and not just header totals.
One important nuance on the export vs. API: a plain CSV export flattens a lot. Pulling from Stocky’s live API (v2) while it’s still up gets you far more structure — supplier records, per-line costs, statuses, tax types, locations. After Aug 31 that door closes, so if history matters, migrate before the app goes read-only, not after.
Vendor notes: Structured supplier data (contact, address, account numbers, MOQ/lead-time-type fields) maps cleanly. But we have not been able to find a way to import notes currently
Par levels: worth setting expectations — most tools (mine included) don’t import Stocky’s calibrated par levels as-is. The trade-off is that a lot of newer tools recompute reorder needs from live Shopify sales velocity instead, so the static pars matter less than they did. But if you’ve hand-tuned them, plan to re-enter targets rather than import them.
Happy to run a real import against a copy of your data and tell you precisely what came back and what didn’t before you commit.
We allow you to fully import all stocky receiving history into Bookkeep including all suppliers (and vendors as suppliers).
We also allow you to upload a variant report csv to bring in your weighted average cost as well as the supplier price.
No we cannot import the supplier notes from the API import but if you export your supplier CSV we allow upload of that CSV which will update the notes.
The migration to Bookkeep takes 2-3 minutes and then all your history is at your fingertips for creating new purchase orders in Bookkeep. We have not totally replaced all stocky features but our purchase order creation and receiving process is as good or better than Stocky and we are moving fast to fill gaps.
Check us out we have a 14 day free trial and it’s only $49/month for inventory only. Hit me up directly if you have any questions.
@Vilpert Agreed that the history is the trickiest part to fully recover. However, we’ve been able to solve that quite tightly in the (free) app we’ve built - both with a one-click import of all Stocky POs (and their history) as well as a supplier import, with csv import/export for extra areas like notes that Stocky doesn’t make available over their API.
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. It includes all the features Stocky had - and more, including retail price and flexible label printing.
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!
The vendor-notes point is the one people find out about too late, so worth being concrete about what’s trapped and what isn’t. Having just been through this migration myself:
What exports cleanly vs. what doesn’t. Products, variants, and stock levels are Shopify’s — they survive no matter what. PO history exports, and your cost trail is reconstructable from PO line items IF you export them with their dates before the shutdown — a cost without its date is useless for margin history, so check that the export keeps both. The genuinely trapped part is the supplier records: contact details, lead times, payment terms, and every note you typed into a vendor card. There is no export for those. Rebuild them by hand into a spreadsheet now, one row per supplier, while you can still open the cards — it’s the only part of this with a hard deadline you can’t script your way around.
Par levels — I’d deliberately NOT port them, even where you can. A par level encodes your demand from whenever you last set it, and for most of us, that’s years stale. Recompute from the last 60–90 days of actual sales velocity times your real supplier lead time, plus a buffer you choose — the migration is a rare forcing function to fix numbers everyone knows are wrong, but nobody revisits.
The truth-set idea upthread is the right instinct: seed a few records you control, run the export, and verify they come back intact before you trust the method for the whole catalog. Cheap insurance against finding a silent gap on Sept 1.
Curious how many suppliers people are carrying — rebuilding vendor cards by hand is an afternoon at 20 suppliers and a real project at 200, and I suspect that number decides how painful this actually is for each store.
Hi there @Vilpert
It is a good idea to audit your Stocky data prior to selecting a replacement. Export everything you can, then compare them with the fields supported by your new inventory or PO system. For supplier notes and historical costs, you may wish to maintain a separate archive that is keept in a spreadsheet or database for operational knowledge retention. Many retailers are also taking this migration as a chance to clean up supplier records and redesign workflows with their current needs in mind.
I’m an engineer looking for a real-world partner to solve this before it’s too late.
I’ve spent the last 40 years integrating with more than 50 POS systems and building data migration tools. After looking through the Stocky API and Shopify’s migration documentation, I think it’s possible to extract considerably more useful historical data than the standard exports provide. I’m still investigating supplier notes and a few other items that don’t appear in the published API—they may be accessible another way.
Unfortunately, Shopify no longer allows new Stocky installations, so I can’t create a test environment of my own.
I’m looking for one volunteer who still has an active Stocky account and is willing to spend a little time working with me. My goal is to determine exactly what can be preserved before Stocky disappears and, if possible, build an automated extraction utility others can benefit from.
I think we’d know within a few days what’s possible.
I’m not selling anything here. I’m simply looking for one merchant who’d like to help solve this problem before the window closes. If we succeed, I’ll happily share what we learn with the community.
That is the key boundary: if a field never appears in the Stocky CSV or an accessible API response, no CSV migration tool can reconstruct it later.
I would split the archive into three parts:
Keep every raw Stocky export unchanged.
Capture non-exportable supplier notes separately while Stocky is still accessible (screenshots or a controlled manual register, including supplier name and capture date).
Create a manifest for the exported files, then verify PO numbers, suppliers, SKUs, ordered/received quantities, statuses, costs, duplicates, and row coverage.
Full disclosure: I built a browser-only checker for step 3. It audits exported PO, cost, and stocktake CSVs and creates a portable evidence pack, but it does not claim to recover supplier notes that are absent from the export. The free scan keeps CSV contents in the browser:
Until someone proves a reliable notes export route, manual capture is safer than assuming a replacement app imported everything.
From what I’ve seen the standard CSV exports cover core data like purchase orders, suppliers, inventory and current costs. I haven’t found official confirmation that supplier notes or historical cost changes are included, so I wouldn’t assume they’ll be preserved. If those records are important, I’d export and back them up seperately before the migration. Hopefully someone who’s completed a full migration can confirm exactly what carries over.
Vilpert is right that the notes are the part nobody checks until it is too late. Disclosure: I built one of the alternatives (Stockwik), so grain of salt on the rest.
The test-record advice above is the best thing in this thread - one dummy supplier note, one PO note, one cost adjustment, then run the export and see what survives. Do that before trusting any migration path.
Two additions from doing migrations with people: payment terms and per-supplier instructions are the other silent losses, so get them into a spreadsheet column even if it is manual. And whatever app you land on, confirm supplier notes have an actual home there and that its importer brings them in - ours does (notes, terms, and PO instructions all come in via CSV), but the spreadsheet backup is what saves you either way.
If anyone is stuck on the export itself, happy to help - that offer does not require using my app.
I actually dug into this because I ran into the same uncertainty. Pulled up Stocky’s own API docs and checked the supplier fields directly — notes are not in there. The suppliers endpoint only returns structured contact/address fields, no free-text field for vendor notes at all. Par levels/reorder point settings aren’t in any of the documented API resources either, so that lines up with what you’re seeing.
The one piece of good news: historical cost per supplier and actual received dates ARE in the API, just buried — each purchase_item has a supplier_cost_price and a received_at field, so if you pull the full PO history through the API (not just the CSV export) you can reconstruct the cost trail and real lead times per supplier. CSV export alone won’t surface it cleanly though.
So notes and par levels are the two things that genuinely don’t survive any automated export — official or otherwise. Manual copy is the only route Stocky itself gives you for those.
I ended up building a Chrome extension called InvoRescue to deal with this for my own store — it pulls the API data (PO history, cost trail, received dates) and walks you through capturing the notes/par level fields per supplier since those can’t be automated. It’s a paid one-time purchase rather than a subscription, since it’s a one-off migration job, not something you need long-term. Link’s on my profile if useful — happy to answer questions about what it does or doesn’t cover here first.