Shopify inventory

Stocky is gone. Here is what Shopify merchants do about reordering now.

It came bundled, it did the boring parts of reordering, and on 31 August 2026 it stopped. This is the calm version of what to do next, including the honest case for replacing it with nothing.

Stocky was not brilliant. It was there: already set up, often by someone who has since left, and it had become the place where the reorder decision happened. Now the place is gone.

The part nobody selling you software wants to say: the panic is mostly misplaced. What you lost was a place to put a decision, not the ability to make it. Rebuilding the decision takes an afternoon. Rebuilding the data takes longer, and that is the part with a deadline.

What Stocky actually did, and did well

Stocky did three things: it produced basic reorder suggestions from sales history, it created and tracked purchase orders against suppliers, and it ran stocktakes, including barcode driven counts for retail. It also held supplier records and cost data in the same place as the orders.

Two of those it did genuinely well, and they are not the two people talk about.

The purchase order was a real object. Not a spreadsheet tab, not an email thread. A PO had a supplier, lines, a cost per unit, an expected date and a receiving state. When half a container arrived you received half, and the other half stayed open. That sounds trivial until you live without it and discover that “what is on the water right now” is a question nobody can answer with confidence.

Stocktakes closed the loop. Counting is unglamorous, and it is the only thing that makes a forecast honest. A tool that made counting less painful did more for your reorder accuracy than any algorithm inside it.

What it did less well was the suggestion itself, and that is a description of the category rather than a criticism.

And there was the real reason everybody used it, which was not the features. It came bundled with Shopify at no extra cost for merchants on the qualifying plan, so nobody ever had to build a business case for it. That explains the shape of the problem now. A tool that arrives free gets adopted by people who never evaluated it, so the decision in front of you may be one you have never made before.

What Shopify ships in its place now

Take this seriously. Pretending the platform’s own tooling does not exist is dishonest and a bad bet, because the platform ships to everybody.

Shopify’s assistant, Sidekick, forecasts demand, recommends reorder quantities, and can draft purchase orders for you.

That is not a consolation prize. For a lot of merchants it covers the part of Stocky they actually used, from the platform that already holds the sales data, with nothing new to install or pay for.

What I would be careful about is the shape of the output rather than its quality. Three questions I would answer by testing, rather than by reading marketing copy, ours included, before building an ordering month on any assistant:

• Can you get the same answer twice? Ask for the same SKU’s reorder quantity on Monday and again on Thursday with no new sales. If the number moves, you need to know why before you build a process on it.
• Can you see the inputs? A recommended quantity is a conclusion. The useful parts are the demand window it used, the lead time it assumed and the buffer it applied.
• Does it see stock you hold somewhere else? If everything you own sits in one place, that does not matter. If it does not, it matters more than any other line here, and it is the one to test against your own catalogue rather than read about.

This is a live product that moved in June 2026 and will move again. Test it against your own catalogue, and again before you sign anything annual.

The fork in the road, stated plainly

Here is the part where I am supposed to explain why you need software. Instead, here is the test I would actually apply.

You probably need nothing beyond what the platform ships if all of these are true: one channel, one stockholding location, and one person making the ordering decision, that person being you. In that world the forecast is not the hard part. Your judgement is good, because the catalogue fits in your head and the cost of being wrong is one late shipment, not a stranded 40 foot container.

If that is you, take the platform’s tooling, spend an afternoon building the one-page audit trail below, and go do something more valuable. I would rather you read this and buy nothing than buy something you never open.

You need more than that when any one of these is true:

• You are multi-channel. Once the same SKU sells on Shopify and another marketplace, with stock in more than one fulfilment network, the question stops being “how much do I sell” and becomes “how much do I own, where is it, and which pool runs dry first”. A better forecast does not answer that.
• Lead times long enough that the decision compounds. At six weeks, a mistake costs you six weeks. At fourteen, you are correcting an order placed before the last one landed, and every error sits on your balance sheet for a quarter.
• Somebody other than you has to be convinced. A partner, a lender, a supplier you are asking for terms, a co-founder who thinks you over-ordered last time. The moment a number has to survive a conversation, “the tool said so” stops working.
• More than one person touches ordering. Two people with good judgement and no written rule produce two different orders, both defensible. That is how you end up with 14 months of cover on one SKU and a stockout on its sibling.

What you still have, and what is already gone

Do this before you evaluate a single replacement. Stocky stopped working on 31 August, but Shopify says you keep read-only access to export your data for at least 90 days after that. So this is still an export job, on a clock: run every report you can while the window is open, then take an honest inventory of what you have. Sales history you can always pull from the platform. The supply side is the part at risk, because it only ever existed inside the tool.

Once you have it out, open the files this week rather than in October. An export nobody has ever read is not a backup, and this is the last point at which you can still fill the gaps from memory. If the read-only window has closed on you and you got nothing out, the clean Stocky record is gone and no tool rebuilds it — but the underlying information is not. Your accounting system has supplier invoices with dates on them, your email has the order confirmations, and Shopify still holds every inbound transfer you received. Reconstruct the last twelve months from those three, accept that it is rougher than a clean export would have been, and start recording received dates properly from your next purchase order onward.

The three numbers Stocky was computing for you

Strip away the interface and almost every reorder tool does the same small piece of arithmetic. Do it by hand once, on your top ten SKUs. After that you can assess any replacement quickly, because you know what the answer should look like.

Take a real-shaped SKU: eight weeks of sales, 1,008 units over 56 days.

One, daily demand. 1,008 divided by 56 is 18 units a day. Note the bad case too: the best single week sold 189 units, and 189 divided by 7 is 27 a day.

Two, lead time. Not what the supplier told you. What actually happened. Take the last three POs from the history you just salvaged: 39, 44 and 43 days from order placed to units sellable. That is 126 divided by 3, or 42 days. The worst in the past year was 49 days, when a factory shutdown ate a week.

Three, the buffer. The only number with judgement in it, and it exists because the first two are sometimes wrong at the same time.

• Normal demand across a normal lead time: 18 x 42 = 756 units
• Bad demand across a bad lead time: 27 x 49 = 1,323 units
• Safety stock is the gap: 1,323 minus 756 = 567 units

Your reorder point is normal demand over the lead time plus the buffer: 756 plus 567 = 1,323 units. Which, if you noticed, is exactly the bad case. That is the whole idea in one line: the reorder point is what you would burn through if everything went wrong at once while you waited. Cross it, you order. The same steps laid out one at a time are in our reorder point calculator, and the buffer half of it in the safety stock calculator.

Now translate it into something you can read off a shelf. At 18 a day, 1,323 units is 73.5 days of cover, so the rule is: order when cover drops below about 74 days. Holding 2,400 units today is 133 days of cover, so you are not ordering this month.

Order quantity is a separate question, mostly about cash and case packs. For 120 days of supply: 18 x 120 = 2,160 units. Case pack is 12, and 2,160 divided by 12 is 180 cases exactly, so no rounding argument. A 1,500 unit MOQ you clear. A 3,000 unit MOQ is a real decision about cash, and no software makes that one for you.

That is the engine. Everything a reorder tool adds is speed, coverage across hundreds of SKUs, and a record of what it decided.

What an auditable plan means, and why it matters more than it sounds

“Auditable” sounds like a compliance word. It is not. It means one thing: for every order you place, you can still answer why that quantity six months later, without relying on anyone’s memory.

A forecast you cannot argue with is not a forecast. It is a horoscope with a decimal point.

An auditable reorder decision has these written down when the order goes out, not reconstructed afterwards:

That last row is the one people skip and the one that pays. The failure it prevents: a SKU stocks out, everyone concludes the forecast was bad, and safety stock gets turned up across the whole catalogue, which costs cash on every SKU in it. Then somebody finds the note. The system said 2,160, a person ordered 1,400 because cash was tight that month, and the forecast was fine. An input problem gets misdiagnosed as a model problem, and you pay for that on every future order.

And it survives the person leaving. That is the deeper lesson of the shutdown: if your reorder logic did not live in Stocky and did not live in a document, it lived in one person’s head, and Stocky was where that person typed it.

What I cannot do for you, and neither can anything else

House rule: name the limits before the reader finds them.

No tool can reconstruct a record you did not export. If Stocky’s data is out of reach, your true lead times come back only as far as your invoices and order confirmations go, and the rest you re-learn from new POs. Money does not fix that.

No forecast knows about a promotion you have not told it about, an influencer post, or a competitor going out of stock. Every reorder engine is a well-informed guess about the recent past pointed at the future. The buffer exists because that is true.

Nothing replaces counting. If your on-hand number is wrong, everything downstream is confidently wrong, and a better forecast makes the error more expensive rather than less. If Stocky was where you counted, fixing counting is a separate project from fixing reordering, and I would do it first.

And specifically about us. SKU Compass is built for multi-channel reorder planning, not for retail point of sale stocktakes, and we do not do barcode-driven counting. If the part of Stocky you loved was the barcode scanner and the shop floor count, we are not the replacement for that piece. Look at retail-first inventory tools instead. Anything touching seasonal demand shaping is a longer conversation than this post, and I would rather have it with you directly than make a claim about it here.

Your first fortnight without Stocky, in order

Sequence matters more than speed.

1. Days one to three: export, then take stock. If Shopify’s read-only window is still open for you, run every Stocky report and put the files in one folder with a date in its name. Then work the table above and write down what is missing, explicitly, rather than discovering it in November.
2. Day four: list your open POs by hand. Supplier, lines, what has been received, expected date. Inbound stock you have forgotten about is how you double-order.
3. Day five: compute the three numbers for your top ten SKUs. By hand, using the arithmetic above. Ten is enough. This is what makes you a competent buyer of a replacement instead of a hopeful one.
4. Week two: run one ordering cycle on the platform’s own tooling. A real cycle, with real orders. Compare its numbers against your ten hand-calculated ones, and where they differ, work out which of the three inputs it disagrees with you on. That tells you more than any feature comparison table, mine included.
5. End of week two: decide, and write the decision down. If it matched your hand numbers and you are single-channel, you are done. Build the audit sheet and stop shopping. If not, you know exactly what you are shopping for, which beats knowing only that you lost something.

The merchants who handle this well will not be the fastest movers. They will be the ones who get their supply-side data out first, then take their time choosing. The ones struggling in October will be those who spend September comparing pricing pages and never work out which of their supply-side numbers they still have.