There are more than eight thousand apps in the Shopify App Store. Every one of them is presented as essential. Most stores under £1m are running between six and fifteen, paying somewhere between £80 and £400 a month, and could not say with confidence what half of them do.
This guide sets out which categories genuinely earn their place at this size, which are better deferred until you are larger, and which problems Shopify already solves without an app at all. It also covers the most significant change to the small-store operational stack in several years, which happened last week.
A note on figures. App Store pricing is published in US dollars and changes frequently — sometimes several times a year. The bands given below are indicative and were accurate at the time of writing. Check the listing before you commit. We have not quoted precise prices where we could not verify them from the vendor directly.
The principle: an app is a labour substitute
Before any specific recommendation, the test that should govern every decision.
An app is worth its subscription when it removes more labour than it creates. That sounds obvious. It is routinely ignored, because the labour an app creates is invisible at the point of purchase and the labour it removes is what the listing advertises.
Every app carries three costs beyond the fee:
- Configuration. The hours to set it up properly, and the further hours when you discover the default settings were wrong.
- Attention. Another dashboard, another set of notifications, another thing to check.
- Entanglement. Apps write to your theme, hold your data, and become progressively harder to remove. An app installed at £300k is often still there at £3m, doing a job something else now does better.
The useful question is not would this help? Almost anything would help. The question is how many hours a month does this return, and is that worth the fee plus the three costs above?
At £250k–£1m, most stores have one or two people doing everything. Hours are the binding constraint. That makes the calculation unusually clear: buy the things that return hours, decline the things that return marginal percentage points.
What changed in 2026, now that Stocky is gone?
Shopify's own inventory app, Stocky, shut down permanently on 31 August 2026. It was removed from the App Store in February, transfers and forecasting were withdrawn in mid-2025, and the APIs stopped working on the shutdown date. Data not exported before then is gone.
This matters more than a single app retirement usually would, for one reason: Shopify's native admin has no replacement for what Stocky did.
Shopify has absorbed most of Stocky's operational half into the admin. You now get real-time stock tracking, multi-location quantities, transfers, low-stock notifications, a purchase order module with supplier records and payment terms, barcode receiving, and native ABC analysis. That is more than most comparison articles credit it with.
What it does not do is the planning layer. There is no demand forecasting and no reorder point engine. Supplier lead times and minimum order quantities can be stored as metafields, but Shopify's documentation states plainly that these are held for reference and do not feed ordering or receiving calculations. Cost per item is a single static field, so there is no weighted-average costing or landed cost allocation.
The practical translation: Shopify will help you place an order. It will not tell you what to order, how much, or when.
The practical consequence for a store under £1m is that inventory forecasting has moved from a thing you could get for free to a line item. It is now a decision rather than a default, and a large number of merchants are making that decision this month.
If you were a Stocky user and have not yet exported your purchase order history and stocktake records, that data is already unavailable.
What Shopify already does, that people pay for anyway
Before adding anything, four things are worth checking. Each is free, native, and routinely duplicated by a paid app on stores at this size.
Shopify Flow. Shopify's automation engine — triggers, conditions, actions, no code. It was a Plus-only feature until July 2023, when it was extended to Basic and above. It is free on every paid plan. A meaningful proportion of stores at this size pay a third-party automation tool for workflows Flow handles natively. It will tag orders, alert staff on low inventory, flag high-risk orders, apply customer tags, and post to Slack or email on almost any store event.
Flow's limits are real — it is event-driven rather than scheduled, and complex branching gets unwieldy — but the first ten automations most stores want are all within it.
Search & Discovery. Free, first-party, and covers custom filters, synonym groups, product boosting for specific search terms, related products, and reporting on searches that returned nothing. The no-results report alone is one of the more useful and least-read pieces of data in a small store. The app is deliberately shallow — filters are capped and there is no personalisation or A/B testing — but paid search apps start at a point most stores under £1m have not reached.
Native returns. Shopify's built-in returns handle the mechanics: initiate a return, generate a label, restock the item. They do not give you a branded customer-facing portal or exchange incentives, which is what the returns platforms sell.
Bundles and Subscriptions. Both are now first-party and free. Both are frequently paid for.
The rule of thumb: check whether Shopify does it before you shop for it. Shopify has absorbed a great deal of formerly third-party functionality over the last three years, and the App Store's ranking does not reflect this.
The four categories worth paying for
1. Inventory forecasting and purchase ordering
The one that changed, and the one that matters most.
At £250k, most founders reorder by feel — a glance at the stock page, a sense of what is moving, an order placed when something looks thin. This works, in the sense that the business survives. It also produces two costs that are almost never measured: capital tied up in stock that will not sell for months, and lost revenue on items that went out of stock and stayed out.
A forecasting tool computes sales velocity per SKU, applies your supplier lead times, and tells you what to order and when. The good ones exclude out-of-stock days from velocity calculations, which matters enormously — a product that sold nothing for three weeks because it was unavailable is not a slow product, and a tool that treats it as one will recommend you under-order it permanently.
What to look at. Prediko is the most commonly recommended Shopify-native option, priced by your annual GMV, with the entry tier around $49 a month for stores under roughly $100k. Fabrikatör is stronger on pre-orders and drops. Assisty is worth a look for multi-location. Inventory Planner (now Sage-owned) is the established heavyweight but is priced and scoped for larger operations; below £1m it is generally more tool than the problem requires.
When you need it. Once you hold more than roughly 150 active SKUs, or once stockouts are costing you visible revenue, or immediately if you were a Stocky user. Below 50 SKUs, a properly built spreadsheet fed by the Shopify sell-through export is genuinely sufficient, and we would rather tell you that than sell you something.
2. Back-in-stock alerts
The highest return per pound of any app category at this size, and the reasoning is simple: the customer has already found the product, already wants it, and has already told you so. Recovering that demand costs nothing beyond the alert.
Most stores in this band do not need a sophisticated tool. They need a reliable notify-me button, an email that actually sends, and — this is the part people get wrong — alerts registered at variant level. A customer who wanted a size 10 in navy does not want to hear that a size 14 in black has returned. Alerts that fire at product level rather than variant level train customers to ignore them.
What to look at. The category is crowded and largely commoditised. Free tiers are common and often adequate under a few hundred alerts a month. Restock Rocket and Stoq sit at the affordable end. Swym is the most established and integrates properly with the major email platforms. If you already run Klaviyo, check its native back-in-stock functionality before adding anything — for many stores it is enough.
Get the batching right. Sending every alert the instant stock lands means the first fifty subscribers buy the twelve units you received and the rest receive an email for something already unavailable. Batch the sends, or cap them against actual received quantity.
3. Email and SMS
The only category where we would advise paying properly rather than economising. Owned audience is the single most valuable asset a store at this size builds, and the platform you choose is difficult to leave.
Klaviyo is the default for Shopify and deserves to be, because of the depth of the Shopify data it can act on. It is not cheap, and it prices on contact volume, which means the cost grows with the asset. That is the correct shape for this particular expense.
Shopify Email is free up to a monthly send allowance and is a reasonable place to start below roughly 1,000 subscribers. It does not do the behavioural segmentation that makes email profitable, so treat it as a starting position rather than a destination.
4. Reviews
Not operational, but it belongs in any honest stack recommendation at this size because it affects conversion more than most operational fixes will. Judge.me and Loox both have viable entry pricing. Choose on whether you want photo reviews. There is little else to decide.
The four categories worth deferring
This is the more useful half of the guide.
Returns platforms
Loop, ReturnGO and the rest are excellent and they are not built for you yet. Loop's entry tier is around $155 a month plus a per-return fee, on an annual commitment. At twenty returns a month that is roughly $8 per return before the software has done anything.
The economics turn when exchange recovery exceeds the platform cost, which in practice means somewhere around 100–200 returns a month. Below that, Shopify's native returns plus a clearly written policy page will serve. AfterShip has a genuinely usable free and low-cost tier if you want a branded portal before you reach that volume.
Loyalty
Loyalty programmes work when you have enough repeat purchase frequency for points to accumulate meaningfully. Most stores under £1m do not, and end up paying a monthly fee to award points nobody redeems. Revisit once your repeat purchase rate is above roughly 25 per cent.
Advanced search and merchandising
Native Search & Discovery is limited but the paid alternatives start around $30 a month and climb quickly. The threshold is catalogue size rather than revenue: below roughly 500 SKUs, native search plus well-constructed collections handles it. Above that, and particularly if your no-results report is long, revisit.
Attribution and analytics suites
The category most likely to be sold to you on fear. Triple Whale and its peers solve a real problem — attribution across multiple paid channels — that stores under £1m generally do not have at sufficient scale to justify the fee. Shopify's native analytics plus the ad platforms' own reporting will get you most of the way. Spend the money on stock instead.
What does an app stack cost beyond the subscriptions?
Theme performance. Most apps inject scripts into your storefront. Ten apps is measurable in load time and load time is measurable in conversion. Uninstalling an app frequently leaves its code behind. If you have removed apps over the years, it is worth having someone check the theme for orphaned script tags.
Data fragmentation. This is the one that compounds. Your stock levels live in Shopify. Your forecast lives in the forecasting app. Your customer behaviour lives in Klaviyo. Your returns live somewhere else again. Each is correct in isolation. None of them knows what the others know, and no app will reconcile them for you, because each vendor's commercial interest is in being the system of record rather than in talking to the others.
At £300k this is an irritation. Later it becomes the central operational problem, which brings us to the last section.
Reference stacks
Indicative starting points, not prescriptions.
Around £250k Shopify Flow · Search & Discovery · a back-in-stock app on its free tier · Shopify Email or entry-tier Klaviyo · a reviews app. Forecast in a spreadsheet from the sell-through export. Expect roughly £30–£70 a month.
Around £500k The above, plus a forecasting and purchase-order tool, and Klaviyo properly configured with flows rather than campaigns alone. Expect roughly £120–£220 a month.
Approaching £1m The above, plus a returns portal if volume justifies it, and a considered decision about whether to add a second stock location. Expect roughly £250–£400 a month.
If you are materially above these figures, the likely cause is duplication — two apps doing overlapping jobs because the second was installed before anyone checked what the first did.
The App Ceiling
This section appears in every one of The Operational Guides. It describes where the advice above stops working.
Everything in this guide holds to roughly £1m–£1.5m in annual revenue. Past that point the constraint changes, and it changes in a way that adding further apps does not address.
Apps are built to be sold to many stores. That is what makes them affordable, and it is also what limits them: an app can only act on the data inside its own boundary. Your forecasting tool does not know what your ad platform is spending. Your ad platform does not know what is out of stock. Your back-in-stock tool does not know what your supplier lead times are. Each app is correct within its own scope and blind outside it.
Below roughly £1m, a person bridges those gaps. Someone looks at the stock report, notices a line is running low, and adjusts. The bridging is invisible because it is absorbed into the founder's day.
Above roughly £1m, three things happen at once. SKU count rises, so there is more to bridge. Order volume rises, so the consequence of missing something rises with it. And the founder's time is now spent on growth rather than operations, so the bridging stops happening reliably. Nothing breaks visibly. Revenue keeps climbing. What changes is that a percentage of it begins to leak in places nobody is looking — advertising spend running against unavailable variants, stock accumulating in the wrong location, returns sitting unprocessed for a week and a half while the item they contain is out of stock and being advertised.
That is not an app problem, and no app solves it, because the solution has to sit between systems rather than inside one. It requires something built for your specific stack, your specific SKU structure, and your specific supplier terms.
Build the foundations well now. The stores that struggle most at £2m are not the ones that used the wrong apps. They are the ones whose product data was never structured properly in the first place, which makes every subsequent automation expensive to build.
Where should you start?
If you take one action from this guide, make it this: open your app list and, for each one, write down the specific task it removes from your week. Any app for which you cannot name that task is a candidate for removal.
If you were a Stocky user, deal with the forecasting gap this month. It is the one genuinely urgent item on this page.