How are you currently managing purchase orders and supplier inventory in Shopify?

Shopify Discussion
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1

Hi everyone,

I’m curious how other merchants are handling purchase orders and supplier management in Shopify.

I’ve spoken with a few store owners recently, and many seem to be using a mix of spreadsheets, email, and inventory apps to manage purchasing. Common challenges I’ve heard include:

  • Creating purchase orders manually
  • Tracking incoming inventory from suppliers
  • Managing vendor information
  • Knowing when products need to be reordered
  • Keeping a history of supplier purchases

I’d love to hear how you’re currently handling these workflows.

A few questions:

  1. Do you create purchase orders inside Shopify or outside of it?
  2. Are you using spreadsheets, ERP software, or a Shopify app?
  3. What’s the most time-consuming part of inventory purchasing?
  4. What feature do you wish Shopify had built in for supplier management?

I’m researching this area and trying to better understand the real pain points merchants face when managing suppliers and inventory replenishment.

Looking forward to hearing your experiences and learning from the community.

Thanks!

2

honestly the PO stuff inside Shopify is so bad i gave up on it. we do everything in spreadsheets + email like everyone else apparently. for me the worst part was never writing the PO itself though. it was figuring out what needed reordering or moving in the first place, especially with more than one location. i was literally checking each store by hand to see where stock was low. that’s actually the thing i ended up building an app for (StockRelay), it just auto-creates transfer orders between locations when stuff drops below a minimum you set. doesn’t do supplier/PO management at all so it’s not a full Stocky replacement, just kills that manual check-every-location grind. supplier side though i’ve got nothing, still messy for me too. curious if anyone’s found something decent there post-Stocky

3

Hey @antonio_builds ,

Congrats on building your own app, your in a great position to expand it’s capabilities!

How do your current suppliers usually prefer to receive orders? Do you think they’d plug into an automated data feed, or would a simple portal fit their workflow better?

Best,

Julien

4

Hey Julien, thanks!

Honestly I should be upfront, my app (StockRelay) doesn’t touch the supplier/PO side at all, it only does automatic stock transfers between a merchant’s own locations based on min levels. So I’m not really the right person on the supplier-feed question, I’ve mostly seen that pain from the outside rather than solved it.

The PO/receiving space seems like the harder, more crowded problem though, looks like you’re already deep in it. Are you building toward the supplier/portal side yourself?

5

Hey Antonio,

Thanks! Yeah, the PO and receiving space is a beast, mostly because every merchant’s supply chain looks completely different under the hood.

That’s actually why I’m not building a rigid, one-size-fits-all app. Instead, I’m focusing on building custom backend integrations and data syncs for the exact gaps Shopify leaves behind—especially on the supplier communication side. I use Gadget.dev to fast-track the infrastructure, or hook straight into a client’s own cloud stack if they prefer.

Since StockRelay handles internal logistics so well, you’re bound to run into users who love your app but are still drowning in external vendor spreadsheets. If any of your clients ever need a custom supplier bridge or an automated data feed to complement what you’ve built, I’d love to team up and build the plumbing for them.

Let’s definitely stay in touch!

Best, Julien

6

From what I’ve seen, many small and mid-sized merchants still rely on a combination of spreadsheets and email because it’s simple and familiar, even though it becomes difficult to manage as order volume grows.

The biggest pain points usually seem to be:

  • Manually creating purchase orders.

  • Tracking partial deliveries from suppliers.

  • Knowing exactly when inventory should be reordered.

  • Keeping supplier contact details and pricing in one place.

  • Maintaining a clear purchase history for reporting and forecasting.

For businesses with only a few suppliers, spreadsheets can work reasonably well. But as operations scale, having purchase orders, supplier records, and inventory replenishment integrated into one workflow becomes much more valuable.

One feature that would be especially useful as a built-in capability is automated reorder suggestions based on inventory levels and sales history, along with centralized supplier management and purchase order tracking.

7

Hey @ayox , thanks for your insights, that’s interesting.

Indeed, moving from spreadsheets to automated procurement can feel daunting, but managing growing order volumes shouldn’t mean drowning in an oversized, bloated ERP system.

By building a lightweight, headless data sync between current storefront API and a centralized database, we can automatically calculate reorder points based on real-time sales history, lead times and auto-generate draft POs. This approach keeps the infrastructure fast and clean, tracking partial supplier deliveries in the background without heavy application overhead.

8

Hello @supportnexalab
From what I have seen most merchants still do their purchasing outside of Shopify with a mix of inventory apps, spreadsheets, and accounting or erp software. The biggest bottlenecks are typically predicting reorder points with accuracy and tracking incoming stock through multiple vendor.
One benefit that a lot of merchants request is a more fully fleshed out native purchasing workflow (with supplier records, purchase order management, receiving inventory, reorder recommendations, etc. in one screen). In the meantime, companies are often turning to niche inventory management applications to bring these processes under one roof and reduce manual effort.

10

Many Shopify merchants seem to face the same challenge: Shopify handles inventory tracking reasonably well, but its native purchasing and supplier management capabilities are fairly limited. As a result, businesses often end up relying on spreadsheets, email, inventory apps, or ERP systems to manage purchasing workflows.

The biggest pain points typically include creating purchase orders manually, tracking partial deliveries from suppliers, maintaining supplier pricing and contact information, managing inventory across multiple locations and knowing exactly when to reorder stock.

For smaller operations, a combination of Shopify inventory data and well- structured spreadsheets can still be effective. However, as order volume and supplier complexity grow, the manual work quickly becomes difficult to scale.

A practicle middle ground is to automate repetitive tasks such as low-stock alerts, draft purchase order creation, supplied notification and stock transfers between locations. This can reduce administrative work without requiring a Full ERP implementation.

For larger merchants with multiple suppliers, warehouse or complex replenishment need dedicated inventory management platforms often provide features that Shopify currently lacks, such as:

-Centralized supplier management
-Purchase order workflows
-Receiving and partial-delivery tracking
-Demand forecasting
-Inventory transfers between locations
-Reorder point recommendations
-Historical purchasing and supplier performance reporting

Ultimately, the best solution depends on business size and operational complexity. Many merchants start with spreadsheets, move to specialized inventory apps as they grow and eventually adopt more comprehensive inventory or ERP systems when forecasting, purchasing and multi-location inventory management become critical to daily operatios.

11

Bringing this one back up because I’m curious if anyone’s found new apps or integrations for handling POs and supplier management in Shopify. Has Shopify introduced any updates addressing these pain points in the past year, or are we all still relying on spreadsheets and custom solutions? Would love to hear about any innovations or hacks you’ve tried that make life easier!

12

Check out FyreTrail for deep PO management and Supplier management for an app that likely handles what you’re looking for. I can’t answer the Shopify updates question or the innovations/hacks either, but for the app question the answer is FyreTrail.

13

One thing I’ve noticed across a lot of these purchasing discussions is that the challenge isn’t just missing purchase order features it’s that purchasing information ends up scattered across multiple places.

Teams often have inventory in Shopify, supplier contacts somewhere else, pricing in spreadsheets, open POs in another tool, and receiving updates in email. Each individual process works, but keeping everything synchronized becomes the real operational overhead as the business grows.

It seems like the question isn’t only “Which PO app should I use?” but also “How many systems am I comfortable managing as purchasing becomes more complex?”

Curious whether merchants who’ve already migrated away from spreadsheets have found themselves using one operational system, or are most still stitching together multiple specialized tools?

14

Most stores end up using one of three options: Shopify’s native purchase orders, a spreadsheet, or a dedicated app. If they’re using spreadsheets alongside Shopify, it’s usually because the native workflow is missing something.

Raising a PO isn’t what takes time. Receiving is. The shipment arrives with different quantities, the invoice arrives later with different numbers again, and reconciling everything is where the work starts.

The feature I hear asked for most is supplier history: what you paid last time, how prices have changed, and what invoices are still outstanding. Shopify only keeps the latest cost, so that history usually ends up in emails or spreadsheets.

16

14 years running ecommerce stores here. The time was never in creating the PO - it was everything after: chasing what actually arrived versus what was ordered, short ships, and updating costs when a supplier quietly raised prices mid-year. Any system that treats receiving as one click instead of a reconciliation step is lying to you about the job.

(I eventually built my own app for this, so consider that context - but the above is true no matter whose tool you use.)

18

You built StockRelay for transfers but said the supplier side is still messy. Did you look at that and decide against it, or has it just not come up yet?
▎
▎ Asking because I’m poking at the supplier half and want to know if someone closer to it already found a reason it’s a bad idea. Every PO app I’ve checked sends the email and stops. Nothing reads the reply.
▎
▎ Also curious what your own supplier mess looks like day to day.

19

Your line about the time being in everything after the PO, not creating it, matches what I keep hearing.
▎
▎ I’m looking at building something here and don’t want to guess at the wrong half of the problem. Of the things you listed, which costs you the most time: short ships, price changes you catch late, or not knowing when stock will land?
▎
▎ And when a shipment arrives wrong, what happens now? Do you go back to the supplier, or fix your numbers and move on?

20

Not against it, just not where I went. The transfer side was a clean problem to close: min/max per item between two locations is fully specifiable and verifiable, so I could build it and actually trust it in production. The supplier side isn’t shaped like that. The part you’re pointing at, reading the reply, is exactly the wall. Sending the PO email is trivial, everyone does it. Parsing what comes back is where it falls apart: every supplier answers in their own format, half of it is free text, confirmations and partials and backorders all look different, and there’s no standard to anchor to. That’s not a bad idea, it’s just a real problem that doesn’t have the clean edges the transfer side had, which is why I stopped at transfers rather than pretending StockRelay covers PO management. It doesn’t.

Day to day my supplier mess is the same as yours honestly. Spreadsheet, email, and me reconciling the reply by hand. I never solved it, I just carved off the one piece I could make deterministic.

If you do crack the reply-reading part I’d genuinely want to see it, that’s the half nobody’s touched. StockRelay just handles the other end for me, the where-do-I-move-stock question across locations, so at least that grind is gone while the supplier side stays manual.

21

That’s a useful distinction, thanks. Specifiable and verifiable is a better bar than parseable, and it’s the one that matters.

So I’m not treating the parser as authoritative. It fills the row in, the source email sits beside it, you check it before it counts for anything. If it misreads something you’ve lost a few seconds. You don’t end up planning around a ship date nobody confirmed.

Whether that survives real use I don’t know yet. The PO examples online are all clean templates, so they tell me nothing.

Anyone in this thread: would you send me ten or so of the replies you actually get from suppliers? Messier the better. Partials, backorders, substitutions, the ones where they can do 40 of the 100 now and the rest in three weeks.

Redact what you want, or send them as they are and I’ll strip supplier names and pricing myself, then delete the originals. None of it goes in a repo or gets published. Forward to nolan.builds@icloud.com, or message me here if you’d rather not use email.

Antonio, I tried to DM you but the forum blocked it, so I’m asking here.

23

Disclosure first: I am building a purchase order app in this space, so read this as interested rather than neutral. Nothing to link, there is nothing to sell yet.

Two replies here stopped me, and they say the same thing from different directions. jpfrompurser: raising a PO is not what takes time, receiving is. stockwik: any system that treats receiving as one click instead of a reconciliation step is lying to you about the job.

That happens to match what I have been building toward, which is exactly why I do not trust myself to just agree with it. So two specific questions for anyone receiving stock regularly.

  1. When a delivery does not match the PO, what actually happens next in your shop? Concretely: do you correct your numbers and move on, go back to the supplier, or hold the receipt open until the invoice turns up and reconcile all three at once?
  2. jpfrompurser named supplier history as the most asked for thing. Is what you want the price trail per SKU over time, or the list of invoices still outstanding, or both? I ask because those are different builds and I would rather do one of them properly than both of them badly.

Happy to post back what I learn either way.

25

Interesting thread.

One thing that keeps standing out in these discussions is that most merchants aren’t struggling to create purchase orders.

They’re struggling with everything that happens after the PO is issued.

Receiving.
Partial shipments.
Supplier discrepancies.
Put-away.
Bin locations.
Cycle counts.
Inventory movements.

A purchase order can be created in minutes.

Reconciling what actually arrived can take hours.

That’s one of the reasons we’re focusing heavily on operational workflows at NexuSphere AI.

Inventory accuracy isn’t created when the PO is generated.

It’s created when inventory is received, verified, stored, counted, picked, packed, and shipped.

Curious for merchants here:

What consumes more time today?

Creating purchase orders?
Or reconciling what arrives at the dock?