If you managed purchase orders, stocktakes or demand forecasts through Stocky, that workflow no longer exists. The app stopped functioning on 31 August 2026 and its APIs went with it.
This is a short guide to what happened, what you have lost, and what to do about it this week. It is written for stores turning over between roughly £250,000 and £1m, where the loss is felt most sharply — large enough to have depended on Stocky, not large enough to have already replaced it with something enterprise-grade.
What happened to Stocky?
Shopify acquired Stocky in 2018 and bundled it with POS Pro. For merchants who installed it before May 2020, it was free outright. For everyone else it came with the POS Pro subscription. It handled purchase orders, supplier records, stocktakes, inter-location transfers and basic demand forecasting — the layer between Shopify's stock counter and a full inventory system.
The withdrawal ran in stages:
- July 2025 — inventory transfers and forecasting were removed and moved into Shopify admin
- 2 February 2026 — Stocky was delisted from the App Store, ending new installations
- 31 August 2026 — the app stopped working and its APIs stopped responding
Shopify has indicated read-only access for a limited period after shutdown. If you can still open Stocky, export your purchase order history, supplier records and stocktake data today. Do not assume the window persists. If you cannot open it, that history is gone, and you should proceed on the basis that you are rebuilding supplier lead times and cost records from scratch.
Around 200,000 merchants were on the app when the timeline was announced.
What does Shopify do natively, and where does it stop?
A great deal of writing on this topic — including some published since the shutdown — claims Shopify has no purchase order or supplier functionality. That is out of date. Shopify moved most of Stocky's operational half into the admin ahead of the retirement, and the picture is better than the commentary suggests.
What Shopify admin now does natively:
- Real-time stock tracking, decremented on sale, across multiple locations
- Inventory transfers, with split shipments for partial deliveries and bin locations within a site
- Purchase orders under Products → Purchase Orders: create and manage them, import line items by CSV, assign suppliers, set supplier currency and payment terms such as Net 30, and receive stock through a linked transfer
- Supplier records, assignable to purchase orders
- Barcode receiving, Quick count on POS, and inventory adjustments with a full audit trail
- ABC analysis, natively
- Sidekick, Shopify's assistant, which will suggest what to reorder and draft the purchase order
What still has no native equivalent:
- Demand forecasting. Shopify reports what sold. There is no forecasting engine, no seasonality model, no velocity calculation that accounts for periods when an item was unavailable.
- Reorder points. Minimum and maximum thresholds have to be built as custom metafields. Nothing computes them for you and nothing triggers on them automatically.
- Supplier terms that drive anything. You can record lead times, minimum order quantities, case packs and supplier SKUs — but only as metafields. Shopify's documentation states plainly that these are stored for your reference and are independent of purchase order ordering and receiving calculations. You can write the lead time down. Nothing reads it.
- Margin and COGS. Cost per item is a single static field. No weighted-average costing, no landed cost allocation for duty or freight.
- Purchase order APIs. The Transfers API is available; purchase order APIs are not generally available, with read access only in developer preview. This matters if you were planning to automate around them.
The gap is narrower than most commentary claims, and sharper. Shopify has replaced Stocky's operations — raising a purchase order, receiving stock, counting, adjusting. It has not replaced Stocky's planning — working out what to order, how much, and when.
That distinction runs through the rest of this series.
What to do this week
1. Recover what you can. Export anything still readable. Supplier lead times are the item most expensive to reconstruct, because the only source is your own memory of past orders.
2. Establish where your reorder decisions currently sit. For most stores at this size the honest answer is "in the founder's head, informed by a glance at the stock page." Stocky was frequently a record of that judgement rather than a driver of it. If so, the loss is smaller than it appears and you have time to choose carefully.
3. Do not panic-buy. The category has responded to the shutdown with a great deal of urgent marketing. Some of it is aimed at stores several times your size. A tool built for multi-channel allocation across Shopify, Amazon and wholesale will not serve a single-channel store better than a simpler one — it will serve it worse, because you will pay for and configure capability you do not use.
4. Match the tool to the actual problem.
Under roughly 50 active SKUs, single location. A spreadsheet is sufficient and we would rather say so. Pull the sell-through-by-SKU export for the last ninety days and the inventory-by-location export from Shopify admin. Compute units sold per week per SKU, multiply by supplier lead time in weeks, add a buffer of two to three weeks' cover. That is a reorder point. It is not sophisticated and it is considerably better than instinct.
Between roughly 50 and 500 SKUs. This is where a dedicated tool earns its fee. Look at Shopify-native forecasting apps priced by revenue band — Prediko is the most commonly recommended, with an entry tier around $49 a month for smaller stores. Fabrikatör is stronger if you run drops or pre-orders. Assisty is worth examining if you hold stock in more than one location. Pricing across the category moves frequently, so check the listing rather than any comparison article, including this one.
Above 500 SKUs, or multi-channel. Inventory Planner and the heavier platforms become relevant. Expect a meaningful implementation effort rather than an install.
5. Insist on one specific capability. When evaluating, ask whether velocity calculations exclude out-of-stock days. This sounds like a detail and it is not. A product that sold nothing for three weeks because it was unavailable is not a slow-moving product. A tool that treats it as one will recommend you under-order it, it will go out of stock again, and the forecast will get progressively more wrong in a self-reinforcing loop. Several tools handle this correctly. Several do not, and it is rarely stated on the listing.
Download
Reorder point calculator
An Excel workbook that takes your Shopify sell-through export and returns a reorder point per variant. No email required.
The opportunity in this
An unwelcome framing, but an accurate one.
Most stores never audited whether Stocky was actually driving their purchasing or merely recording it. Being forced to choose creates an opening to fix something more fundamental: whether your product data can support forecasting at all.
Forecasting tools are only as good as the SKU structure underneath them. If your variants are inconsistently named, if the same colourway appears under three different labels, if discontinued lines are still active, or if cost-per-item is blank on a third of your catalogue, then no tool will produce a reliable forecast. It will produce a confident one, which is worse.
Before you buy, spend an hour on the export. If the data is coherent, buy the tool. If it is not, fix the data first — the tool will still be there next month, and it will work.
The App Ceiling
This section appears in every one of The Operational Guides. It describes where the advice above stops working.
Everything above 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.