What a cluster f***. Just seems to have been launched on us. Lots of extra steps. Stupid need to indicate transfer from supplier to store. We have ordered the product, we load the purchase order, we receive it. Why over complicate. Would have been nice to have a paid notification added.
Before developing do you even talk to small businesses to see what they need. Instead you seem to be spending unnecessary development money on wasted click throughs that small businesses do not need or want.
These changes reek of an arrogance, which we as a small business need to work through, all of which adds additional and wasteful cost to our bottom line. In a world that we are already struggling with as a small business to stay alive in.
The new Purchase Order Process adds so many unnecessary steps and clicks. What once worked just OK has lost all semblance of easy functionality. Please re-evaluate this new system for those of us who have to receive stock manually on a regular basis. It’s really cvery disappointing as a long time and heavy Shopify user to have these things change for the worse.
Even for someone as tech-challenged as me, I find this system very—too—complicated. I only have one warehouse, and my suppliers never make partial deliveries. With the old system, I’d create a purchase order, mark it as ordered, and upon receipt, I’d mark the products as received directly from the purchase order—and that was it. It was simple and consistent: I create a purchase order, I mark items as received via the purchase order. Now I create a purchase order for my supplier, which automatically creates a transfer order (totally useless), and to receive the goods I have to open the transfer order to note the products received. And on top of that, the button that allowed me to mark an entire product as received has disappeared (not the one that let me mark everything at once)!!! So now we have to either click the little arrows (not practical if there are 100 items) or enter the number received (not practical if you’re on a touchscreen device without a keyboard nearby)!!! I’d really like to disable this early access if anyone knows how to do it! I’m really at my wits’ end
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I’ve been on support for days now trying to figure out how to report that this new system is ridiculous. We have hundreds of suppliers, many are small makers and fair trade so we receive partial deliveries all the time but now I can’t easily see what’s partially delivered or not. I have to literally scroll up and down on the transfer page to see what products are at the bottom marked as still “in transit”. If anyone knows how to report it directly let me know. The chatbot goes in circles saying there’s no way to give workflow feedback and the agents say I have to log feedback directly in the admin panel.
Its not just an extra step, now i cant tell my distributor what PO is still outstanding without an “um, wait a minute, let me get to that screen and double check.” maybe i need to go back to paper POs and fax them, then check them off on the sheet when they come in, write the serial number down, then pay them.
BTW, I have 3 locations. This change may have resolved what was intended, but created a huge problem for other users. From some of the replies, it seems it was to help with multiple locations to diversify where the items are being shipped to. If this is coming from a supplier that is a Shopify shared partner, I can see where this could be helpful to the supplier, but was tried out with all types of users?
Creating a column in the purchase order of item to have a destination point may have been a better solution. The heading of the purchase order asks the destination, this may be the initial problem trying to be solved. Get rid of the destination being a header and make it a column, or better yet, leave it as a header and make it default column. Personally, I found the link with suppliers difficult to work with because it used my suppliers inventory, not my physical inventory, and I ended up turning it off. Not all of your users are virtual stores, your television campaign is showing brick and mortar stores, but you must have forgotten about us when you did this PO change. That round table meeting to make this change was missing my advocate, for sure.
Preach! They haven’t put much thought at all into the current process at all. And I thought Stocky was dumb.
I’m going to be hitting up my local developer to create an app for us. It’ll probably cost several grand but I’ve never had a way to receive inventory easily that works how I want, so here’s my opportunity to make it just for us.
To add even more unnecessary complexity, the Transfers screen doesn’t show the PO number related to the transfer until the transfer is opened. This is extremely inconvenient when receiving multiple POs from one vendor that arrived at the same time. I have to open every transfer to see which PO number is attached. The transfer number is different and unrelated to the PO number. There is no link that I can find on the PO to go to the transfer once it has been put into transfer status. The developers really missed the ball on this. I’m sure there is more complexity that I haven’t found yet that is unwanted and unwarranted.
It’s not just the purchase order system.
Our company (8400+/_ skus) moved from a “conventional” website to Shopify a little over a year ago. We liked how simple things where to do then. Now it seems like everything you do to manage your store is So Much More Complicated and Takes Way More Time to do.
Regretting the move some days.
The software engineers of Shopify should invite each commenter here to a usability study. There they’ll see how bad their Purchase Order + Transfer idea is.
They’ll also see the real stuff/situations that happen in real life.
I think anyone who is waiting for Shopify to see the error of their way will continue to wait. I’ve done a ton of research relating to ease of use, price, and offerings and have installed and started using Logistified. It is not perfect and is not always intuitive, however, they appear to be committed to providing at the very least what Stocky offered. Since installing, they have added automatic sync and the ability to import purchase order. Plus, they do offer a much more extensive approach to purchase orders and forecasting. I must say it is hard pill to swallow to pay for these services, but compared to some of the other apps, it is very reasonable. We have a product category of almost 20K and Shopify’s current PO system is not even an option. After playing for the last month, I feel we have made the right choice. At the very least, check it out.
Thanks for sharing this. A lot of merchants have been feeling the impact of Stocky’s limitations, especially those managing larger catalogs.
What stood out to me is your point about forecasting and purchase orders. For stores with thousands of SKUs, those features can make a huge difference in avoiding stockouts and over-ordering.
I agree that paying for another app isn’t ideal, but sometimes the cost of poor inventory management ends up being much higher. It’s good to hear they’ve been actively adding features like automatic sync and PO imports rather than leaving the product stagnant.
Out of curiosity, have you noticed any improvements in your inventory planning accuracy or purchasing decisions since making the switch?
