Hi! I just have a question on if there is an app available that does what I’m looking for. I’m looking for an app that looks at current stock levels and recent sales history of each product, and compares that against the lead times I input per product to then be able to tell us when its time to reorder a certain product.
IE, I have a heat pack that takes say 15 days from the time I order from my supplier to the time I receive it. I will input that 15 days lead time for that product initially into the app, then it will automatically calculate based on current sales history and the current stock levels when I need to reorder.
Is there any app that can do something like this? I’m trying to avoid doing a big manual spreadsheet myself
Really great question! There can be a real science to re-ordering products at certain times. I took a look into the Shopify App store and found some Inventory Alert apps which might be helpful for what you’re looking for. These apps are more about sending out alerts and re-ordering when there is low inventory and I’m not sure about how detailed they could go with reordering based on sales history and more intricate details such as that:
There are some other apps in the app store which are slightly more Inventory Management based that could be more what you’re looking for. You can find these below:
Hi Nick, thanks for your reply. Unfortunately from what I can see none of those quite fit what I need. I have found one app (Inventory Planner) however at $149USD per month (as we have two store locations) I need to weigh up if we will get the use out of it as we are a relatively small store (250 products).
Other than that the store is great 0 just trying to find different apps and add-ons that can add value as I believe there is more we can be doing to make our lives easier and to give us more info.
Thanks for getting back and letting me know. If none of those apps can do what you need then I’m wondering if something custom could work. By custom I mean, reaching out to a Shopify Expert who would then build an app for your store. It would be a once off payment rather than a monthly subscription which the apps are like, so it could be a slightly cost in that sense, but it could definitley be worth your time to speak to and research for an Expert you might resonate with. You can log in and see the full Expert directory here.
There are 2 parts to this as we have customised it for our users.
Low stock alert - as mentioned already there are plenty of apps that achieve this.
Calculating the low stock level - we do an automated calculation by a schedule which takes into account past sales, delivery times etc. Once you have this value set the actual alerts so you can order stock is the easy part.
Thanks Tom. Could you give me a link to more info on this? I had a look at your app and couldn’t find much detail specifically on what you’ve mentioned.
Send me an email and can get one of the team to give you a run down of how it works. Right now it is a custom app we set up for users so we don’t publish it publicly as requires a little custom work.
Yes, there’s an app that does this: Mipler reports has a built-in Inventory Planner report that calculates exactly what you described. Per SKU it shows:
Sales velocity (average units sold per day, based on your actual order history)
Average days of stock covered at current velocity
Forecasted demand for the upcoming period
Suggested replenishment quantity
The report has adjustable controls right in the toolbar for lead time, the sales velocity window, the forecast window, and a safety stock buffer. So for your 15-day example, you’d just set lead time to 15 in the report and the forecast/replenishment columns recalculate around that number, no manual multiplication needed. You can also filter by vendor, so if different suppliers have different lead times, you’d run the report per vendor and set the matching lead time each time. Sort by “days covered” and you immediately see which SKUs will run dry before a new order could arrive.
One thing to know: Shopify’s native Admin/Analytics doesn’t do this calculation at all, it only shows current stock, no forecasting or reorder math. Mipler gives you the full velocity and forecast breakdown plus the flexibility to export it or schedule it to Google Sheets/email, so you can plug it into whatever ordering workflow you already use.
Do most of your SKUs come from one supplier, or are you juggling several with different lead times?
Disclosure first: I build StockPilot, a low stock alert app, so read this with that in mind. I am not going to claim it does exactly what you asked, because on one point it does not.
What you described has two halves, and most tools in this category only do one of them well. The first half is the arithmetic: sales velocity per SKU, days of cover at that velocity, a suggested quantity. Mipler, Prediko and others do that, and the reply above is a good answer if a report is what you want. The second half is delivery: whether that number reaches you on the day it crosses the line, or whether you have to remember to go and open the report. In practice the second half is what decides whether you reorder in time.
On the lead time itself, the reply above is right that you can carry it per vendor rather than per product, and that shortcut is worth taking whichever tool you pick. Worth knowing too that very few apps store a per-product lead time as its own field, mine included. What almost all of them give you instead is a days-of-cover threshold, which is the same number wearing a different hat: your 15-day heat pack becomes “tell me at 15 days of cover”, or 20 if you want a week of slack. Set that per supplier and anything new you add from that supplier is covered from the day you create it, with nothing to maintain product by product.
Two things I would test in any app you compare, mine included. Does the days-of-cover figure come from your real order history over a window you choose, or from a fixed assumption? And does the app hold one open alert per item until stock recovers, or email you again at every stock movement? That second one is the reason a lot of alert apps end up in a filter rule.
For completeness on what mine does not do: no purchase orders, no receiving, no barcode labels. It stops at telling you what to reorder and roughly how much. If you want that whole loop in one place, you want one of the purchase order apps instead.
Full disclosure: I’m building an inventory app for Shopify, so take this with that in mind — but your numbers are exactly the gap I’ve been hearing from small/mid stores. Inventory Planner at $149/mo for a 250-SKU store is a lot, and the “science” apps (ABC/XYZ, safety stock, reorder point) mostly price for enterprise.
What I’m building does exactly what you described: it takes current stock levels + sales history per variant, lets you set lead time per product, and surfaces a reorder suggestion with the recommended quantity (reorder point + safety stock math, not just a low-stock alert). Pricing is 19−49/modependingonSKUcount,soit′saimedatthe250−5,000SKUrangethatthe19−49/modependingonSKUcount,soit′saimedatthe250−5,000SKUrangethatthe149+ tools skip.
If that’s useful, there’s a landing page with the details: https://h3-inventory-ops.vercel.app — happy to hear what you’d want in the first version.
Correction on pricing — the $ signs got eaten by Discourse’s math formatting. Should read: 19-49 USD/mo depending on SKU count, aimed at the 250-5,000 SKU range that the 149+
▏ USD/mo tools skip.
Yes, what you’re describing is essentially demand-based reorder planning.
The important part is that the app should consider more than just “stock is below X” Ideally, it should calculate something like:
Current stock + incoming stock - expected demand during supplier lead time = projected stock position
So in your heat-pack example, if the lead time is 15 days and you’re selling an average of 4/day, the system would recognize that you need roughly 60 units to cover the lead-time demand, then recommend when/how much to reorder.
When comparing apps, I’d specifically look for these features:
Per-product or per-supplier lead times
Recent sales velocity (7/30/90 - day history)
Current and incoming inventory
Reorder-point/reorder-quantity recommendations
Safety-stock or desired coverage settings
Supplier/MOQ information
Automatic low-stock/reorder alerts
I wouldn’t choose an app that only gives a basic “low stock” notification. That won’t really solve the spreadsheet problem you’re describing.
Also, make sure it can account for inventory already on order. Otherwise, you can end up placing a second PO while another shipment is already on its way.
If you’re looking for a Shopify-native solution, this is a good use case for an inventory/PO planning app rather than a simple stock-alert app.
