Stocky replacement: what to do now that the app is gone

Shopify retired Stocky on August 31, 2026. Most of the guides you'll find on a "Stocky replacement" search were written before that date and tell you to act before the deadline. The deadline has passed. What matters now is different: getting your data out while you still can, knowing what Shopify's built-in tools cover, and picking a replacement that fits how you actually operate — not how a pre-sunset guide assumed you would.

Here's the short version. If Stocky is still installed in your admin, export your purchase orders, stocktake history, and cost data today. Native Shopify now handles POs, transfers, and counts, but it has no standing reorder intelligence and no visibility into what stockouts cost you — so most stores that relied on Stocky's forecasting will still want a replacement app. Which one depends on your store type, and there's a framework below.

What actually happened to Stocky

The shutdown happened in three steps:

Source: Shopify's official migration guide, accessed October 2026.

Two details in that guide catch people out. First, Stocky was bundled with POS Pro, so if your POS Pro subscription lapsed or changed, your Stocky access may have ended earlier than August 31. Second, the export window is finite. Shopify committed to "at least 90 days" of read-only access after the sunset date — that window closes around the end of November 2026, and nothing in the guide promises an extension.

First move: export what's still exportable

Before you evaluate a single replacement app, get your records out. Shopify's guide is specific about what to export using Stocky's built-in reports:

• All completed purchase order reports, as CSV files. Historical POs cannot be imported into Shopify's native system — the native CSV upload only adds line items to a new draft PO. If you want your PO history for taxes, audits, or supplier disputes, the CSV is the only copy.
• Your stocktake history. Past counts don't move into Shopify either.
• Historical cost data. Stocky tracked costs differently than the native cost-per-item field; export it while you can.

One confirmed gap: suppliers cannot be exported from Stocky's built-in reports. You'll rebuild your supplier list by hand or reconstruct it from PO line-item data. There's also a separate full data export — requested through Stocky's deprecation page — that reportedly includes supplier records and reorder levels, though that's documented by third-party importers rather than by Shopify. We break down both export paths, field by field, in the Stocky data export guide.

What Shopify's native inventory covers now — and what it doesn't

Shopify built a genuinely useful operational core into the admin over the last two years, and it's fair to say so. What you get natively:

• Purchase orders with supplier records, line costs, payment terms (Net 30 and similar), and receiving through linked transfers
• Transfers between locations, with split shipments and partial receiving
• Stock counts with manager review and approval, plus Quick count on POS for spot checks of up to 1,000 items
• Adjustment history — every quantity change, with the reason and the staff member who made it
• ABC analysis (plan-dependent; some plans need an app for it)
• Sidekick can draft a PO or transfer on request, and Shopify Flow can run low-stock alerts

That covers a real share of what Stocky did. Small stores with stable demand may genuinely be fine on native alone. But three gaps matter, and Shopify's own migration guide effectively confirms them by routing you to third-party apps:

1. No standing reorder intelligence. There's no native reorder point per SKU. Min/max levels live in metafields you set by hand, and Sidekick drafts orders when you ask — it doesn't watch your catalog daily and tell you what's about to break. The native minimum/maximum guidance in the migration doc leans on custom reports and metafields, which is a spreadsheet workflow wearing an API badge.
2. No forecasting depth. Native Shopify has no dedicated demand forecast per SKU that you can inspect and sanity-check. If Stocky's forecast was the reason you used it, nothing native replaces it.
3. No loss visibility. Nothing in the native reports tells you which SKUs went out of stock, for how long, or what those gaps cost. Through late October 2026, Shopify's changelog shows no stockout or lost-sales analytics shipping. The migration doc's own answer for costing is "use a third-party inventory app" — and the same logic applies to reorder and loss reporting.

One more practical niggle: you can't email a purchase order from the Shopify admin. You download a PDF and send it yourself. Stocky users notice.

Picking a replacement by store type

There's no single best Stocky replacement — there's a best fit per operating model. Four archetypes cover most of the stores coming out of Stocky. (For verified pricing and a side-by-side table of every serious candidate, see the Stocky alternatives comparison — that page owns the detail; this section owns the decision.)

1. D2C, small catalog, one location

Under ~200 SKUs, one warehouse, no physical retail. If your turnover is steady and your suppliers are reliable, native Shopify plus a disciplined weekly review of the inventory page may be all you need — the operational core above handles POs and counts, and a simple spreadsheet covers the reorder math.

Upgrade to a lightweight planner when stockouts start costing you real orders. At this size, the budget tier (Stockie from $4.99/mo, Tallyfold at $5/mo) or a loss-focused tool is usually enough; you don't need a $99+/mo planner designed for multi-channel brands.

2. POS and brick-and-mortar retailer

This is the segment Stocky served hardest — it shipped with POS Pro — and it's the one the migration threads are dominated by. Your workflows live across the shop floor and the admin, so prioritize: transfers you can receive from the POS app, counting tools that work on the floor (Quick count, and stock counts with approval), and an audit trail.

Native handles most of this. Stockroom — free, Built for Shopify, with a POS extension — is the closest one-to-one workflow replacement for purchasing and receiving, and it imports Stocky data directly. The routine that keeps you honest is the same either way: weekly cycle counts and strict transfer discipline for events.

3. Multi-channel seller (Amazon, Etsy, Walmart)

Stocky was Shopify-only, so if you've since added channels, your replacement is a sync tool first and a planner second. Sumtracker ($59–119/mo) is the established option here, with real-time sync across Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Walmart plus bundles and POs on top. Don't buy a Shopify-only planner and bolt sync on later — the sync is the hard part.

4. Growing catalog, 100–5,000 SKUs, unreliable suppliers

If you're buying from suppliers whose quoted lead times slip — the most common profile in the Stocky migration threads — your real need is reorder intelligence you can trust: per-SKU reorder points built on demand that accounts for the days you were out of stock, lead times that reflect what suppliers actually do, and a weekly buying list.

This is the band we built InventoryX for, so weigh that against our bias: at $9.99/mo it runs a stockout-days ledger per SKU, estimates the revenue each stockout cost, and turns that into a weekly buying list with order-by dates. Onboarding is a free Stocky CSV import rather than a rebuild from scratch. Its honest limits: there's no forecasting dashboard, lead times are manual entries rather than auto-learned, and V1 isn't built for multi-location rebalancing. If you want a forecasting engine first and a buying list second, the alternatives page has better-fitting options.

Your migration checklist

Work this in order — each step protects the next one:

1. Export what survives. Completed PO reports, stocktake history, cost data — CSVs from Stocky's built-in reports, plus the full data export from the deprecation page. Suppliers can't come out of the built-in reports; plan to rebuild them.
2. Close out in-flight POs. Shopify's guide recommended stopping new Stocky POs two weeks before the sunset and receiving everything open. If anything is still stranded, recreate only the remaining quantities as a native PO or transfer.
3. Rebuild supplier records. Contacts, payment terms, currencies — and while you're there, record the actual lead time per supplier, not the quoted one.
4. Map lead times honestly. Pull ordered dates and received dates from your PO export and compute the real gaps. A supplier quoting 30 days who delivered in 38–52 over your last ten orders needs 45+ in your planning math, or your reorder points will always be late. The formula side of this is covered in the reorder point guide.
5. Re-set reorder parameters per SKU. For example: a ceramic mug at $28.99, selling 3.1 units/day when in stock, with a 45-day supplier lead time. Reorder point = 3.1 × 45 = 139.5, round to 140, plus roughly one week of safety stock (≈22) → 162 units. Order quantity: 30 days of cover ≈ 93, rounded to the case pack of 96. Work through your A-grade SKUs first — the 20% that drive most revenue — rather than all 1,800 at once.
6. Verify counts before you trust anything downstream. One full or staged count of your highest-velocity SKUs, so alerts and reorder points run on real quantities. The cadence options are in the inventory counts guide.
7. Clean up and brief the team. Remove the Stocky tile from the POS Smart Grid, retire old Stocky documentation, and walk whoever does receiving and counting through the native workflows.

Where to go next

If you run Shopify POS, the natural next read is our guide to POS inventory management — its troubleshooting checklist and weekly routine translate directly to this migration. Otherwise, the two pages linked above carry you the rest of the way: the alternatives comparison for the app choice, and the export guide for the deadline-driven part. Work the checklist in order; it's built so each step protects the one after it.