Stocky Has Shut Down: What To Do Now About Your Purchase Order Workflow

1. What has actually happened

Shopify built Stocky as a free inventory management app and later acquired it. For several years it was the only real PO and forecasting tool tightly integrated with Shopify: free, functional, and built for the specific way Shopify's inventory model works.

That ended on 31 August 2026. The sequence:

• 2 February 2026: Stocky was removed from the Shopify App Store, so no new installs.
• 31 August 2026: Stocky's APIs stopped. Any automated workflow, integration or data sync that touched Stocky stopped with them.
• Since then: Shopify indicated read-only access may continue for a period so merchants can retrieve data. Treat that as borrowed time, not a plan.

If you're reading this after the fact, you're in one of three positions: you migrated already and you're checking nothing was missed; you're managing reorders by hand and feeling it; or you haven't noticed a problem yet because stock hasn't run low since. The third is the dangerous one, and this guide is written for all three.

2. Get your data out, or rebuild it

Before evaluating replacements, deal with your data. If Stocky still opens for you, export everything today: read-only access is a courtesy, not a commitment. If it doesn't, skip to rebuilding what you lost below.

What to export, if you can still get in

Purchase Orders: In Stocky, go to Purchase Orders and use the export function to download your PO history as CSV. This gives you a record of what you ordered, from whom, and at what quantities, which is useful for reference when setting up a new tool and for your accounts.

Suppliers: Go to Suppliers and export the supplier list. This contains contact details and the supplier-to-product mapping you've built up. Rebuilding this from scratch in a new tool is tedious but straightforward, and having the export saves you from doing it from memory.

Reorder points: In Stocky, go to Products and export the product list with reorder points. This is the most valuable export: it captures the threshold decisions you've already made per SKU. Screenshot or export this before anything else, because reorder points are not stored in Shopify's core inventory data and will not transfer automatically to any replacement.

Stock transfers and adjustments: If you've been using Stocky to manage transfers between locations or record adjustments, export those too for your records.

Rebuilding what you lost

If Stocky is already closed to you, nothing is unrecoverable; it's just work. Each piece can be reconstructed from data you still own:

Reorder points. These are the real loss, because Shopify has nowhere to store them. The good news is that they were only ever a judgement about how fast something sells and how long your supplier takes. You can recalculate them: reorder point = average daily units sold × lead time in days × 1.2, where the 1.2 is a 20% safety buffer. Pull 60 days of order history from Shopify admin → Analytics → Reports → Sales by product, divide units by 60, and apply your known lead time per supplier. Our reorder point guide works through the arithmetic with examples. Replenishly does this calculation for you and suggests a threshold per product, which for most merchants is faster than reconstructing the old numbers by hand.

Suppliers. Your product records still carry a vendor field, which is usually most of the supplier mapping. Export your products from Shopify admin, group by vendor, then fill in contact details from your email or accounts software.

PO history. Past orders exist in your email (the POs you sent) and in your accounting software (the invoices you paid). You don't need this in a new tool; you need it for your records, and that copy is enough.

3. What Shopify's native tools do and don't replace

Shopify launched its own Purchase Order system built into the admin. For merchants who mostly used Stocky to create and send occasional POs, this may be sufficient. But it's worth being clear about the gaps before assuming native is a drop-in replacement.

What Shopify's native PO system does cover

• Creating purchase orders manually within the Shopify admin
• Attaching a supplier (Shopify calls these "suppliers" in the PO context) to a PO
• Adding line items to a PO from your product catalogue
• Marking a PO as received, which updates inventory quantities
• Partial receipts: you can receive some items and leave others outstanding
• Basic PO status tracking (draft, ordered, received)

What Shopify's native PO system does not cover

• No automated reorder point monitoring. Shopify does not watch your inventory and alert you or act when stock drops below a threshold. That detection is entirely manual: you need to notice the problem yourself.
• No automatic PO generation. When stock is low, Shopify does not generate a PO draft for you. You create the PO manually, add the products manually, and set quantities manually.
• No reorder point per product. There is nowhere in Shopify's core admin to store a reorder point (minimum stock threshold) against a product or variant. Stocky had this. Native Shopify does not.
• No automatic supplier email dispatch. Creating a PO in Shopify's admin does not send it to your supplier. You still need to download the PO and email it yourself.
• No forecasting or demand-based reorder suggestions. Stocky's forecasting feature (which suggested reorder quantities based on sales velocity) has no equivalent in native Shopify.
• The supplier/vendor split is confusing. Shopify has "vendors" (stored on the product itself) and "suppliers" (stored on POs) as separate concepts. If your products have vendor names set, those vendor names do not automatically populate as PO suppliers. You'll need to manage these separately, which catches people out during migration.

4. Decision framework: which Stocky feature was your main one?

Stocky did several things. Most merchants leaned heavily on one or two of them. The right migration path depends on which feature you'll miss most.

If forecasting was your main feature

Stocky's forecasting used your sales velocity to suggest how much to order and when. Replenishly now does this too: it reads 60 days of your Shopify order history, calculates average daily sales per product, and suggests a reorder point using the formula ceil(avg_daily_units × lead_time_days × 1.2). Suggestions appear as one-click chips in the Inventory Watch and as a bulk-apply panel in Settings. See how the calculation works.

Where Replenishly's velocity-based thresholds fall short: they use a rolling 60-day average and don't account for seasonality, trend direction, or promotional uplifts. If you need full demand forecasting with seasonal models and open-to-buy planning, that's a different category of tool: Inventory Planner (more powerful, higher price point) and Prediko (simpler, Shopify-native) are the established options there.

For most merchants migrating from Stocky, Replenishly's velocity-based suggestions cover the majority of what Stocky's forecasting actually provided in practice.

If stock counting and stocktake was your main feature

Shopify's native stocktake functionality covers most of what Stocky provided here. You can count stock and commit adjustments directly in the Shopify admin. For more advanced cycle counting workflows, apps like Stocky alternatives for counting (there are several on the App Store specifically for physical inventory counting) are worth evaluating.

If the PO-to-supplier-to-receiving loop was your main feature

This is the workflow where Stocky genuinely earned its keep: you set a reorder point, Stocky detected when stock dropped below it, you (or Stocky automatically) generated a PO, sent it to the supplier, and reconciled what arrived against what was ordered.

This is what Replenishly is built for. It monitors your Shopify inventory via webhook, generates a PO draft the moment stock drops below your threshold, routes it to the right supplier (you can have multiple suppliers, each with their own spreadsheet format), and emails the PO directly to the factory. When stock arrives, the receiving audit sheet lets you log what you actually received against what was ordered and commits the delta directly to Shopify inventory.

Two things worth being honest about:

• Replenishly now includes velocity-based threshold suggestions: it analyses 60 days of order history and suggests a reorder point per product based on how fast it actually sells and your lead time. For full demand forecasting with seasonal models, you need a dedicated forecasting tool.
• Replenishly is $9.99/month after a 14-day free trial. Stocky was free. That's a real difference, and it's worth factoring in.

If you used Stocky lightly: the occasional manual PO

Shopify's native PO system is probably sufficient. It's free, it's inside your existing admin, and if you're creating POs infrequently and manually anyway, the automation gap doesn't matter much.

5. Rebuilding the workflow in an afternoon

The original version of this guide recommended running a replacement alongside Stocky for a full reorder cycle. That safety net is gone, so the order of work changes: get the automation watching your stock first, then refine the numbers as real orders come through.

Common questions since the shutdown

Is Stocky coming back?

No. It was pulled from the App Store in February 2026 and switched off on 31 August 2026. Shopify's position is that purchase orders now live in the admin natively.

Can I still get my data out?

Possibly. Read-only access was expected to linger for a while after the shutdown. If Stocky opens for you, export today; if it doesn't, section 2 covers rebuilding each piece from data you still hold.

What's the free replacement?

Shopify's native purchase orders, and they genuinely are free. The trade is manual work: you watch stock yourself, create each PO yourself, and email suppliers yourself. If you place orders rarely, that's a fair deal.

How do I get my reorder points back?

Recalculate them from your own sales: average daily units over 60 days × lead time × 1.2. They were only ever an estimate, and a fresh one based on recent sales is often better than a threshold set two years ago.

Will my old Stocky POs import into a new tool?

Generally no, and it matters less than people expect. What you need going forward is suppliers, products and thresholds. Historical POs belong in your records, not in the tool that places the next order.

The bottom line

The deadline has passed, so the question is no longer whether to migrate but how long you'll keep reordering from memory. The risk isn't dramatic: it's the week a good seller quietly hits zero and nobody notices until a customer does.

Start with your thresholds, even rough ones for your top 20 products. Everything else follows from having something watch stock levels again.

If the PO-to-supplier-to-receiving loop is what you're missing, Replenishly is built for exactly that, with a 14-day free trial and no card required at install. Setting up your first supplier and generating a test PO takes about ten minutes.