Stocky Replacement: What to Look For

Most Stocky replacements get picked on the feature the merchant remembers best. The gap turns up about six weeks later at the receiving bay, when 80 units of a 100-unit order arrive and the new app has no sensible way to record that. Requirements first, shortlist second, is a slower start and a much shorter total.

This is a vendor-neutral list to score candidates against. It names no rankings and no winners: if you want the vendor-by-vendor version, that is the alternatives comparison, and the category map for what kind of app you are even shopping for is the inventory app category guide.

The three jobs Stocky did

Write down which of these you opened weekly. The ones you never touched are the ones you should refuse to pay for.

1. Suppliers and assignments. Supplier records with contacts and terms, and the mapping of which supplier sells which SKU at what cost. This is the least glamorous of the three and the most expensive to lose, because there is no export for it.

2. Purchase orders and receiving. Raising the order, getting it to the supplier, and booking the goods in when they turn up.

3. Counting and suggestions. Stocktakes, plus the layer that told you what to buy. Shopify's Stocky documentation described reorder points as calculated from the lead time and the number of sales per day, and its forecasting as recommendations built from a product's recent order history, its history at a chosen point in time, or an inventory level you set. That is the part with no free substitute.

Must-have requirements

Receiving that survives a short delivery. Ask what happens when 80 of 100 units arrive. Shopify's own model handles this: a linked inventory transfer reads "In progress" while it is partially received and "Transferred" once everything is in. Any app charging for receiving should do at least that, and should still be able to tell you what is outstanding a week later.

A quantity, not a flag. There is a real product category that only tells you something is running low. It is cheap and it is the right answer for some stores, but a threshold is a number you set and then maintain, and it goes stale the moment sales velocity moves. If Stocky's reorder suggestions were what you used, an alert is not a replacement for them.

Enough history, used properly. Ask how many months of sales history the tool reads and what it does about seasonality. A twelve-week average and a seasonally adjusted forecast produce very different numbers for anything with a Q4.

The purchase order has to leave the building. Shopify's native tool exports the document as a PDF. If a paid app's pitch is "we do purchase orders", find out whether it sends them to the supplier or only renders them, because those are different amounts of your week. What belongs on the document either way is covered in what a purchase order should include.

It has to beat free, not just match it. Shopify already gives you supplier records with payment terms and currencies, purchase orders with line-item costs, and receiving via a linked transfer, at no cost. Read what the native tool covers first, so you are paying for the delta rather than for a paid copy of something in your admin already.

Check the plan, not the price. Feature tables get compared against entry prices, and the two rarely line up. Find the tier that contains every feature on your list, and price that one.

Migration and data import

Three facts from Shopify's own migration guidance shape every migration conversation you are about to have.

Suppliers can't be exported from Stocky. There is no CSV and no other format, which means no importer can read a supplier file Stocky never produced. When a tool advertises a Stocky import, the useful question is which files its importer actually reads, what it can reconstruct from the exports that do exist, and which records you will be retyping by hand. Historical purchase orders can't be imported into Shopify either, so treat them as a file you keep for reference rather than data that lands anywhere. And nothing moves on its own: old purchase orders and stocktakes have to be exported manually if you want to keep them.

What matters most in practice is not the history. It is the orders still in flight. Know what you are waiting for and from whom, because that is the data whose absence costs you money next week rather than at next year's audit. The screen-by-screen export routine is in the Stocky export walkthrough.

One question almost nobody asks a new vendor: how do I get this back out? Stocky's supplier lock is the whole argument for asking it early.

Pricing models to watch

Four models are in use across this category, and none of them is universally better. Each one punishes a particular shape of store.

Whichever you land on, date the number. Pricing in this category moved during 2026, and a figure quoted in a blog post, including this one, is a snapshot of the day someone read a listing.

Disclosure, since you are reading this on an app vendor's site: StockCue is ours, and it uses the first model. Free covers 50 SKUs, then the paid tiers run 500, 2,000, and unlimited. Forecasting with seasonality is on every plan including Free; purchase orders, receiving and stock counts start on Starter; transfers are on the top tier only. As of September 2026 it had no App Store reviews, while several tools in the comparison had hundreds. Score it on this list like anything else.

A scoring checklist

Take this into each trial and answer it from the product rather than the pricing page.

If the honest answer to the last question is "nothing yet", that is a legitimate result. Native purchase orders plus a spreadsheet is a real setup for a small, stable catalog, and it costs nothing while you decide.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Stocky actually do?

Three things for most small stores. It held supplier records and which supplier sold which SKU. It raised purchase orders and recorded receiving. And it ran the counting and suggestion layer: stocktakes, reorder points calculated from lead time and sales per day, and demand forecasts based on recent order history, the same period last year, or a target stock level you set.

What should a Stocky replacement be able to do?

Only the jobs you actually used weekly. Score candidates on four things rather than feature counts: whether receiving handles a short delivery, whether the tool outputs an order quantity or only an alert that something is low, how much of your sales history it reads and whether it adjusts for seasonality, and which plan the features you need are actually on. Purchase orders and supplier records are also native and free in Shopify, so an app has to beat free on those, not just match it.

How do you check an inventory app before installing it?

Read the plan table on its Shopify App Store listing rather than the marketing page, and find the tier that contains the features you need instead of the entry price. Check the review count and the date you read it, since both drift. Then run one real cycle in the trial: import or key in a few suppliers, raise a purchase order for a live order, and receive it short on purpose to see what the app does.

Is a spreadsheet a reasonable Stocky replacement?

For a small, stable catalog, yes. Shopify's own purchase orders and transfers cover the paperwork for free, and a sheet covers the arithmetic. A spreadsheet has one specific failure mode worth knowing about: it never tells you anything. Nothing fires when a product's sales rate doubles, so you find out at the stockout rather than before it.