With Stocky shutting down on August 31, I’m curious how multi-location Shopify merchants are planning to handle inventory going forward.
I’m researching workflows for stores that:
Ship 1K–10K orders/month
Use 2–3 warehouse locations
A few questions I’m trying to understand:
1. What are you planning to replace Stocky with?
(Another app, spreadsheets, Shopify native, something else?)
2. What are the biggest pain points with your current inventory workflow?
3. Which features are essential for multi-location inventory?
Examples I’ve heard so far:
Purchase order management
Transfers between locations
Demand forecasting
Low stock alerts
4. What price range feels reasonable for an inventory tool like this?
For context: I previously worked on multi-location inventory systems in the transportation industry and I’m trying to understand whether Shopify merchants face similar problems.
If anyone is open to sharing more detail about their workflow, I’d appreciate hearing more.
We’ve worked with our customers that fit this profile and here were some of their pain points that we work with them to address.
Inventory:
Not knowing when to reorder products and how much to order based on past sales trends and forecasted adjustments, and vendor lead times
Time consuming process to create POs
Trying to determine optimal inventory levels at each warehouse
Maintaining accurate inventory. Not using barcodes, and intuitive bin locations/naming
Fulfillment:
For this order volume, you need to be doing sku location slotting and multi-order picking. I’m shocked at how much time is wasted by companies this size still printing out orders to fulfill in FIFO sequence and one at a time. You can easily reduce pick time by 1/2 utilizing these things.
Shipping:
Packers determining which box shipping box to use. Since they don’t want to have to try a perfect fit box and then find out it won’t fit and have to build a new, larger box, they’ll error to the larger box, increasing shipping costs. Using an algorithm to figure out the smallest box size saves time for the user and shipping costs.
Manually comparing shipping rates from multiple carriers is so time consuming. This is easy for our system to do automatically to ensure you use the lowest cost carrier/service and save the manual time selecting.
Interesting research, especially around the gap between purchase order management and actual replenishment planning.
I’m also working in the Shopify inventory forecasting space, so one area I’d be interested to hear your findings on is how merchants prioritize demand forecasting versus multi-location transfers.
For stores operating 2–3 locations, do you see forecasting being most useful at the store level, warehouse level, or both?
I’d also be curious whether merchants prefer suggested reorder quantities that they approve manually, rather than fully automated reordering.
We’re not quite at the largest enterprise scale, but one thing I’ve noticed is that the biggest challenge isn’t usually forecasting—it’s inventory visibility.
Once inventory is spread across multiple locations, the hardest part becomes knowing which stock number is actually correct at any given moment. Purchase orders and replenishment can usually be worked around, but inventory discrepancies tend to create customer-facing problems very quickly.
For us, transfers between locations and maintaining accurate inventory across sales channels have been more painful than forecasting. A forecast can be wrong and you adjust next week. An inventory discrepancy can result in oversells the same day.
As for replacing Stocky, I’ve seen merchants going in a few different directions. Some are moving toward dedicated inventory management systems, while others are keeping forecasting and purchasing separate from inventory synchronization altogether.
One feature I’d consider essential is having a clear view of inventory movements and adjustments across locations. The ability to see what changed, where it changed, and when it changed is often more valuable than another forecasting dashboard.
We’ve also seen some multi-store merchants rely on tools such as Easify Inventory Sync to keep inventory aligned between stores and locations, while using separate tools for purchasing and demand planning. The needs seem to diverge quite a bit once a business grows beyond a single warehouse.
Out of curiosity, are most of the merchants you’ve spoken with struggling more with replenishment planning, or with maintaining inventory accuracy across locations? My impression is that the latter tends to create the more expensive problems.
