Can Shopify's Native POs Replace Stocky?

Shopify's native purchase order tool is more capable than most replacement marketing admits, and it answers a different question from the one Stocky answered. Native purchase orders record a buying decision accurately. They do not make one. Everything below follows from that single split.

What native purchase orders cover

Quite a lot, and it is free. Shopify's own purchase order documentation says a purchase order lists the products, quantities, costs, payment terms and supplier details for an order, that merchants can create and manage suppliers with their contact details, payment terms and currencies, and that after marking a purchase order as ordered you can create an inventory transfer for it to track shipments, receive inventory and add cost adjustments. You can add lines by search, CSV import or barcode scan, and export the finished document as a PDF.

The one structural thing to understand is that this is two linked objects rather than one pipeline: the purchase order records the commercial agreement, and the transfer records the movement of goods. That model, including the three statuses and fields a generic procurement lifecycle would lead you to expect and that do not exist here, is already written out with its own diagram in the Shopify purchase orders guide. This post starts from it rather than repeating it.

What Stocky did that they don't

Line the two up against the jobs Stocky actually held and the overlap is partial in a very specific way.

Shopify's Stocky documentation described reorder points as calculated from the lead time and the number of sales per day, with a worked example of a product selling 5 units a day on a 10-day lead time triggering at 50 units remaining. It described forecasting as recommendations built from a product's recent order history, its order history at a chosen point in time, or maintaining inventory levels the merchant had chosen. It ran stocktakes. None of those four things has a native equivalent in the Shopify admin.

Shopify says as much itself. Its migration guide names weighted-average costing, bin-level tracking within a location and dedicated counting workflows as cases where merchants may need a third-party inventory app, which is Shopify declining to claim parity rather than a competitor's characterisation. The same page hedges on one more: depending on your plan, you might need an app for ABC analysis. Shopify does publish an ABC product analysis report, graded on revenue contribution over a fixed 28-day window with the item's cost excluded from the grade, so whether that hedge applies to you is a question to answer on your own plan rather than from a blog post.

The receiving gap

Start by discarding the version of this claim you will see elsewhere: Shopify does receive goods natively, and it handles a partial delivery. The linked inventory transfer reads "In progress" while a shipment is partially received and "Transferred" once everything is in, with the outstanding units sitting in the Incoming state at the destination location. If a shipment lands short, the handling routine covers what to do about it.

The real gap is the shape of the trail, and it only bites at volume. Because the purchase order's own status stops at Ordered, "what is still outstanding on this order" is a two-screen question rather than a field, and there is no expected-delivery-date on the purchase order to sort by. With three open orders that is a non-issue. With twenty, across several suppliers on different lead times, it becomes a weekly reconciliation you do by eye. Tracking purchase orders in Shopify covers the routine, and purchase orders versus inventory transfers covers which object you should be creating in the first place.

Two smaller frictions in the same area, both stated as what we could and could not find rather than as confirmed absences. Shopify exports the purchase order as a PDF, and no send-to-supplier action appeared on the Shopify-owned purchase order pages read for this post, so budget for attaching and sending it yourself. Neither did any invoice-matching or accounts-payable reconciliation feature. If three-way matching or automated sending is load-bearing for you, check it on your own store rather than taking a blog post's word either way.

The reorder suggestion gap

This is the one that decides the question, and it is simple to state. A native purchase order starts as a blank form. Nothing in Shopify proposes a line, a quantity, or a date.

There is no reorder point in the admin. There is no demand forecast. On low stock, Shopify's own inventory page is explicit: if you need to receive direct notifications of low stock levels, install an inventory alert app from the App Store, or automate it with Shopify Flow. Flow is free on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, and it has triggers for a variant going out of stock, coming back in stock, and having its inventory quantity changed, but it has no trigger for "quantity fell below the number I chose". Threshold logic has to be built as a condition on the quantity-changed trigger, which is real work rather than a checkbox.

One trap worth naming, because searching for this will lead you straight into it. Shopify hosts a help page titled "Demand forecasting for Purchase Orders" on help.shopify.com. Look at the URL: it sits under a /stocky/ path, it carries the old Stocky banner, and it documents Stocky's forecasting, not the Shopify admin's. Stocky is retired, so that page describes a feature no merchant can use.

The closest native instrument is the Inventory remaining report, which gives days of inventory remaining per product. That is a retrospective number a person reads, not a threshold that fires. It is genuinely useful for a weekly review and genuinely not a reorder point.

Who can live on native POs

Yes, comfortably, if: you buy from a handful of suppliers, your catalog is small enough that you already know roughly what moves, you have one location, demand does not swing seasonally, and you rarely have more than a few orders open at once. In that shape the native tool is not a downgrade from Stocky, it is the same paperwork with better integration and no monthly fee. Keep the sales reports open next to it and you have a working purchasing routine for nothing.

No, if: you were opening Stocky's reorder suggestions weekly and buying from them, your catalog has a long tail you cannot eyeball, your demand has a real Q4 shape, you carry enough concurrent purchase orders that outstanding quantities need reconciling, or you relied specifically on weighted-average costing, bin-level tracking within a location, or a dedicated counting workflow. Those last three are Shopify's own list of app cases, not ours.

Notice there is no SKU number in either paragraph. Nobody has published one, and it would be the wrong test. The trigger is whether you can still hold the buying decision in your head.

If the verdict above is no, an app is one option among several, and the alternatives comparison covers the field, including the tools we do not build and where they are the better fit. Disclosure: one of the options there is ours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Shopify have built-in purchase orders?

Yes, and they cost nothing. Shopify's own documentation describes purchase orders that list products, quantities, costs, payment terms and supplier details, suppliers you create and manage with contact details, payment terms and currencies, and the ability to create an inventory transfer from an ordered purchase order to track shipments, receive inventory and add cost adjustments.

Can Shopify's native purchase orders replace Stocky?

For the paperwork half of Stocky's work, yes. Suppliers, purchase orders and receiving all exist natively. For the decision half, no: Shopify's admin has no reorder point and no demand forecast, and its own migration guide names weighted-average costing, bin-level tracking within a location and dedicated counting workflows as cases where merchants may still need a third-party app.

What can't you do with native Shopify purchase orders?

Receiving and closure aren't tracked on the purchase order itself; they happen on a separately linked inventory transfer, and there is no Partially Received status, no Closed status and no expected-delivery-date field on the purchase order. Shopify exports the purchase order as a PDF, and no send-to-supplier action appeared on the Shopify-owned purchase order pages read for this post, so expect to attach and send it yourself. And nothing in the native tool proposes what to order or how much.

At what catalog size do native POs stop being enough?

There is no published threshold, and a SKU count is the wrong test anyway. The practical trigger is whether you can still hold the buying decision in your head. Once you are rebuilding order quantities from sales reports every week, or tracking enough open purchase orders that you have to check which ones are outstanding, the native tool is still recording your decisions correctly but is no longer helping you make them.