Best Shopify Purchase Order Apps (2026)

Most merchants shopping for a "Shopify purchase order app" have never opened Products → Purchase orders. Shopify's native purchase order holds suppliers, costs and payment terms, and it is free. Any honest roundup of paid PO apps has to start there, because the delta an app is selling you is narrower than its landing page implies. Disclosure: we build StockCue, one of the tools below.

Try the native tool first

Shopify's own help documentation describes a purchase order as something that "lists the products, quantities, costs, payment terms, and supplier details for an order." You can create and manage suppliers with their contact details, payment terms and currencies. After you mark a PO as ordered, you can create an inventory transfer from it to track the shipment, receive the inventory, and add cost adjustments when the landed cost turns out to be different from the quoted one.

That is a real purchasing workflow, not a stub. The click path and the two-object model behind it are covered in the full Shopify purchase orders guide, and the field-by-field anatomy sits in what a purchase order should include. What matters for choosing an app is simpler: if your objection to the native tool is "it can't raise a PO", that objection is wrong, and any app pitch built on it should make you suspicious.

What a PO app actually adds

The honest gap is not the paperwork. It is everything that happens on either side of the paperwork.

Shopify's admin has no reorder point and no demand forecast, so nothing in it converts your sales history into "order 240 of this by Thursday". Shopify does not push you a low-stock notification either: its own Managing inventory page tells merchants that if they need direct notifications of low stock levels, they should install an inventory alert app or build a Flow workflow. The cycle is native in the middle and empty at both ends, and both ends are where the decisions live.

One caution while you price this. Shopify has an ABC product analysis report that grades products by revenue contribution, which is a reasonable way to pick what deserves attention on a buying run. Shopify's own Stocky migration guide hedges on whether you get it: "Depending on your plan, you might need an app for ABC analysis." We will not resolve that for you, because Shopify's own pages do not resolve it consistently either. Check the report on your plan before assuming it is there.

The comparison

Prices below were read on the apps' Shopify App Store listings and vendor pricing pages on September 6, 2026, and every one of them will move. Social proof from the same reading, on the same date: Assisty showed 4.8 stars from 356 reviews, Prediko 4.9 from 246, Inventory Planner by Sage 4.5 from 151, Fabrikatör 4.8 from 112, and StockCue, which we build, zero reviews and no rating at all.

Two absences are deliberate. Cogsy is not listed: its vendor domain now redirects to a page stating that Cogsy has been discontinued and is no longer available, even though an App Store listing for it was still rendering on September 6, 2026. That contradiction is enough to keep a tool off a recommendation. Several other names from competing 2026 roundups are missing for the duller reason that nobody here has read their listing directly, and a listicle that fills cells from other listicles is how a wrong price travels for two years.

The apps

Shopify's native purchase orders (free)

The right answer for a store buying from a few suppliers on a rhythm it already knows. You get the supplier record, line items with cost and payment terms, the ordered state, and a linked transfer that receives the stock and takes cost adjustments. You do not get a nudge, a suggested quantity, or a view that groups everything due from one supplier into one order. If your buying decisions are made before you open the admin, that gap costs you nothing.

Assisty

Positions itself as AI-powered inventory management for multi-location brands, covering demand forecasting, reorder points, purchase order automation and replenishment planning across locations and SKUs. As of September 2026 it had a free tier and a $19/mo paid entry point, with 4.8 stars from 356 reviews, the largest review base of any app checked for this post. Right for a merchant who wants reporting depth, a lot of SKUs and more than one location without a mid-market price tag. Its reviews mention a learning curve on complex setups.

Prediko

Describes itself as AI inventory forecasting, demand planning and purchase order management. As of September 2026 its tiers ran from $49/mo to $199/mo plus a custom enterprise tier, with unlimited users, SKUs and inventory alerts on every paid plan, and it held 4.9 stars from 246 reviews. Right for a growing DTC brand that buys against a forward revenue target rather than only projecting from history; reviewers repeatedly mention its team importing their suppliers for them during migration. Wrong for a store whose whole question is when to reorder 150 SKUs.

Fabrikatör

Positioned around restocking with AI forecasting and PO automation. Pricing as of September 2026 started at $99/mo and ran to $199/mo, each tier adding $0.75 per backorder above 50 free backorders, which makes it the one tool here whose cost moves with how you trade. It showed 4.8 stars from 112 reviews. That pricing shape is a fair signal of where it is strongest: brands that genuinely sell on backorder and pre-order and want that tied into the replenishment loop. If you never take a backorder, you are paying for the shape of a business you do not run, and the alternatives to Fabrikatör are worth reading before you commit to that pricing.

Inventory Planner by Sage

The most mature product in this set, owned by an accounting software vendor and built for multi-channel, multi-warehouse replenishment rather than a single Shopify store. It showed 4.5 stars from 151 reviews in September 2026. There is no public price: the App Store lists it as free to install with external charges billed separately, and the vendor's pricing page publishes no figures, saying only that pricing is based on the volume of inventory you manage and that unlimited users are included. With four warehouses and two channels this is the right class of tool and nothing lighter will satisfy you. Its reviews carry a recurring complaint about a steep price rise after the Sage acquisition, worth raising on your own sales call.

StockCue (ours)

Built around the two dashed boxes in the diagram: it reads 24 months of sales history, forecasts with seasonal adjustment on every plan including Free, and turns that into a buying planner grouped by supplier, a PO you can email as a PDF, and full or partial receiving that syncs back to Shopify. The caveats, in the order they should matter: zero reviews on September 6, 2026, against 356 for Assisty and 246 for Prediko, so there is no social proof to lean on; pricing tiered by SKU count rather than flat; and a Free plan that does not include purchase orders, receiving or stock counts, all of which start at Starter. Barcode scan-to-receive is Growth, and transfers between your own locations are Scale.

Receiving is where they differ

Generating a PO is a solved problem. Every tool here does it, and so does Shopify for free. What separates them is what happens three weeks later, when the pallet arrives with 180 units instead of 240 and the freight invoice is higher than the quote.

None of the App Store listings read for this post state how their app records a short delivery. That is a limit of what a listing tells you, not a criticism, and it means receiving is the thing to test rather than the thing to read about. On a trial, deliberately receive one PO short and check three things: whether the outstanding units stay visible as still owed, whether the received units land in Shopify at the right location, and whether the cost following them through is the quoted cost or the landed one. Managing partially received purchase orders covers what that should look like, and the reorder-to-receiving workflow covers where it sits in the loop. A tool that fumbles a short receipt will fumble it every month.

If you are not sure purchasing is the category you need at all, the alerting, forecasting and stock-sync categories sit side by side in the Shopify inventory app category map.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Shopify have purchase orders built in?

Yes. Shopify's own documentation describes a native purchase order that lists the products, quantities, costs, payment terms and supplier details for an order, and it lets you create and manage suppliers with their contact details, payment terms and currencies. Once a PO is marked as ordered, you can create an inventory transfer from it to track the shipment, receive the inventory, and add cost adjustments. No app is required to raise or receive a purchase order.

What does a purchase order app add over Shopify's native tool?

Mostly the decisions around the document rather than the document itself. Shopify's admin has no reorder point and no demand forecast, so nothing native tells you which SKUs are due or how many units to buy. Purchasing apps add reorder recommendations, supplier-grouped buying views, automated sending, and in some cases forecasting on top of the same paperwork.

Which purchase order apps handle partial receiving?

The App Store listings for the main purchasing apps describe PO creation and automation, but they do not spell out how each one records a short delivery, so this is a question to settle on a trial rather than from a listing. StockCue records full and partial receipts and syncs the result back to Shopify. For any other app, receive one deliberately short shipment during the free trial and watch what happens to the outstanding units.

Do you need a purchase order app if you have one supplier?

Usually not. Shopify's native purchase orders already cover the supplier record, the line items with costs and payment terms, and the receiving through a linked transfer, which is enough for a small catalogue bought on a predictable cycle. The case for an app strengthens when you can no longer tell at a glance which SKUs are due and how much of each to order.