Stocky has gone: what a small Shopify shop should do about reorder points and purchase orders now

Stocky was the free inventory app a lot of small Shopify shops grew up on: reorder points, purchase orders, stock takes, and a page that said what to order this week. Shopify's help centre now says the app is unavailable after 31 August 2026 and directs shops to the inventory features in the admin. The community threads on the change run to a couple of hundred posts, and the question in most of them is the same: what holds the reorder points now?

What Stocky did, in three parts

Reorder points. For each product, a quantity at which to order and a suggested order size, worked from sales and the supplier's lead time.

Purchase orders. A record of what was ordered from whom, when it should land, and what was received against it, so stock on order counted.

Stock takes and adjustments. A way to count and correct.

The Shopify admin does the third well, and the second partly: it tracks quantities per location, records transfers between them, and shows incoming stock. What it does not hold is a lead time per supplier, and without lead time there is no reorder point, only a quantity.

The three choices

1. The admin plus a weekly list. For a shop with under a few hundred products and a handful of suppliers, this is enough. Keep the lead time per supplier and the safety days in a sheet, pull the 90-day sales per product from Shopify's reports once a week, and compute the reorder point. Our reorder point calculator does the arithmetic for one product at a time, prints the stock-out date and the cash the order ties up, and that is the whole system. The cost is an hour a week. The failure mode is the week it is skipped.

2. An inventory app. The Shopify app store has a dozen that replace Stocky's features directly, from a few pounds a month to a few hundred. Choose on three things: whether it holds lead time per supplier, whether it writes purchase orders that count stock on order, and whether it pushes a reorder list to you rather than waiting to be opened. We have not trialled them and do not rank them here; the community threads above carry the first-hand reports.

3. A full inventory platform. Linnworks and the like, for shops selling across Shopify, Amazon, eBay and Etsy with stock in one place. Worth it when the problem is keeping five channels' stock levels in step, which is a different problem from reorder points, and overkill for a shop on one channel.

The input that matters most

Whichever route, the number that decides whether the system works is the supplier lead time, and it has to be measured rather than quoted. Record, for each supplier, the date ordered and the date the stock was sellable, for the last few orders. Use the longest recent figure, not the average, as the lead time in the reorder point, and the gap between average and longest as the safety stock. A reorder point built on "they say two weeks" fails on the first order that takes four.

Stock on order has to count

The thing shops lose when they go from Stocky to a sheet is the purchase order. Without it, stock on order is forgotten and the same product is ordered twice, or it is remembered and never counted, so the reorder point fires again. Whatever replaces Stocky, keep one list of open orders with landing dates, and count it in the "what we have" number. The calculator has a box for exactly this.

The cash side

A reorder point tells you when; it does not tell you whether you can afford the order. Shops that moved from Stocky to a sheet report one advantage: the sheet has a cost column, so the week's reorder list comes with a total. Keep that. The fee calculator shows what each sale leaves after the channel's fees; the reorder list shows what the next month's stock costs; the gap between them is the shop's cash position, and it is worth seeing every Monday.

This is what an AI Stock Clerk set up by Overlyft does: the weekly run through the list from Shopify's sales data, the reorder points recomputed, the open orders counted, and the list with its cash total on the owner's desk before the week starts.