Native Shopify PO & Receiving — Wishlist from a Long-Time Stocky User

Shopify Discussion
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Hi Community,

We migrated from Stocky to native Shopify POs and have run into some significant gaps that are slowing down our day-to-day operations. Sharing our wishlist in hopes others can relate and we can get some traction on improvements.

1. Show “On Order” quantities on the Product page as soon as a PO is marked as Ordered

Right now, incoming inventory doesn’t appear on the product page until a Transfer is created and marked as In Transit. We shouldn’t have to dig through POs or ask an AI assistant to find out how many copies of a title are on order. Stocky surfaced this clearly on the product page the moment an order was placed. That visibility is essential for buying decisions and customer-facing availability.

2. The PO → Transfer → Mark In Transit workflow is too rigid

Creating a Transfer and then marking it In Transit adds unnecessary steps — and worse, native Shopify won’t let you select a subset of PO items to mark In Transit. Since suppliers ship titles on their own schedules (especially in the media/entertainment space), this all-or-nothing approach is a dealbreaker. It creates extra administrative work and actually obscures order status for individual titles rather than clarifying it.

3. Vendor-to-Supplier restrictions need to come back

Stocky allowed us to associate specific Vendors/Labels with the suppliers they’re exclusively available from. We invested significant time building out that data. Without it in native Shopify POs, there’s nothing stopping someone from accidentally adding a vendor title to a PO for a supplier who doesn’t carry it. This is a real operational risk for anyone dealing with exclusive distribution arrangements.

4. Auto-sort PO lines by Vendor and SKU

Stocky automatically sorted PO line items by Vendor and SKU, which made large orders much easier to review and submit. Native Shopify POs don’t do this, and manually reordering lines on a large PO is tedious.

5. Export POs to CSV and/or XLS — please

The current “PDF” export is a static image, not a real PDF. That means it can’t be parsed by AI tools, can’t be imported into spreadsheet software, and can’t be uploaded directly to supplier portals. I recently spent nearly an hour manually transposing data from a PO into an XLS file just to submit a couple of orders. A proper CSV/XLS export would eliminate this entirely.

Would love to hear if others — especially those who came from Stocky — are hitting the same walls. And if Shopify is listening: these aren’t edge cases, they’re core workflows for any product-based retailer.

Thanks

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It seems like the common thread across many of the recent Stocky discussions isn’t that merchants want more screens or additional steps they’re looking for the system to preserve the operational context they already built over the years.

Things like supplier relationships, “on order” visibility, partial receipts, and line-level shipment status aren’t just convenience features. They help buyers answer operational questions quickly:

• What have we committed to buy?
• What’s actually on the way?
• Which items are delayed?
• Which supplier is responsible?

Once that context is split across purchase orders, transfers, and separate workflows, teams end up spending more time reconciling information than making purchasing decisions.

For those who have already migrated away from Stocky, which of these has had the biggest impact on your daily workflow?

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You have basically mapped the shape of the whole thing. Native Shopify treats the PO as a thin document and the Transfer as the object that actually moves inventory, and almost every gap on your list falls out of that one split.

The On Order visibility is the clearest case. Incoming quantity on the product page is driven by Transfers, not POs, by design, so nothing shows until a Transfer exists and moves to In Transit. Stocky computed on order off the PO itself, which is why it surfaced the moment you placed the order. The same root sits under the all or nothing In Transit and the per title status you are missing, because that status lives on the Transfer, and collapsing one PO into one Transfer flattens the per shipment reality you actually have with suppliers shipping on their own schedules.

The export one is worth knowing the current ceiling on. Last I looked the native PO document has not been exposed to the Admin API the way Transfers have, so scripting your way around the static PDF is not really on the table yet either. Transfers and incoming quantities are in the API, so the on order number you want on the product page is rebuildable today, but the PO document itself is not, which is probably why point 5 feels like a wall rather than a workaround.

Are you in media distribution where one PO routinely splits across several supplier shipments? That is the exact case where the one PO one Transfer assumption hurts most, and spelling that specific workflow out in the feature threads tends to help Shopify prioritize more than a general ask does.

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They are true holes in functionality, especially for retailers that have complex buying processes. A solution could be to look at specialized inventory and purchasing applications that integrate with Shopify and provide stronger PO management, supplier rules, exports and forcasting. When shopping, select those that will integrate with Shopify inventory and keep your existing vendor information. Sharing detailed workflows like this also makes for good feedback in helping native po experience.

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@bj_1 — thanks for laying this out so clearly, especially the link between supplier-data portability and the PO-to-Transfer split.

The export point (#5) is the one that has a hard deadline attached to it. Stocky supplier records and PO history don’t have a migration path into native Shopify, and once Stocky is gone on August 31, that data is not recoverable. The static PDF export is a wall, as lumine noted, and the PO document is not in the Admin API either, so there is no scriptable workaround on the native side.

If you have not already, I would recommend exporting whatever you can from Stocky now (PO history, supplier lists, SKU-to-supplier mappings) while the export functions are still available. The CSV/XLS format you are asking for is exactly what is needed to preserve that data before the cutoff.

Out of curiosity, on point #3 (vendor-to-supplier restrictions), how did you handle exclusive distribution arrangements before Stocky? Was that data built into Stocky from scratch, or was it carried over from a previous system?

(Full disclosure: I am exploring a lightweight tool for Stocky migrants covering supplier-data export and landed cost allocation — not here to sell anything.)