How to Reorder Without Stocky: Working Out What to Buy in Shopify Admin

The purchase orders still work. That is the confusing part.

If you have not pulled your data out of Stocky yet, do that before you read this — Shopify’s read-only export window is still open for a limited time, and the sequence is in what you can still get back.

You can raise a PO in Shopify Admin, assign a supplier, receive against it, and watch stock land. What you cannot do is the thing you actually opened Stocky for most mornings: find out what to buy. Admin records decisions. Stocky made them, or at least drafted them.

This is how to close that gap with what you have now, in rough order of effort.

First, know what Admin will and will not tell you

Worth being precise, because a lot of what circulated before the shutdown was wrong in both directions.

Admin does give you inventory by location, adjustment history with reasons and staff, purchase orders with supplier records, and ABC analysis as a report — though stores on Basic or Lite need an app for that one. Payment terms including Net 30 exist, attached to each purchase order rather than saved on the supplier.

Admin does not give you a reorder point field. It does not model supplier lead times in any way that affects a calculation. And it has no purchase order API, only a Transfers API, so automating the PO side is not currently possible.

The decisive detail is one Shopify states plainly. You can store lead time and minimum order quantity as variant metafields, and Shopify says those metafields hold information for your reference and are independent of purchase order ordering and receiving calculations. They are a note, not an input. Nothing reads supplier.lead_time_days and does arithmetic with it.

So the reorder maths has to happen somewhere outside Admin. The question is only where, and how much of it you automate.

The manual method that works

For a few hundred SKUs, a weekly spreadsheet pass is sufficient. The maths is not hard; the discipline is.

You need four numbers per SKU:

• Daily demand — units sold over a recent window divided by the days in it. 28 days is a reasonable default, longer if you are seasonal.
• Lead time in days — from your supplier records or, better, measured from your old purchase order history as order date to receipt date.
• Safety stock — covering the variability you actually see rather than a round number.
• On hand plus on order — which Admin gives you directly.

The reorder point is daily demand multiplied by lead time, plus safety stock. When on hand plus on order falls below it, order. The quantity is daily demand multiplied by however many days of cover you want, rounded up to the supplier’s minimum order quantity and pack size.

Two adjustments that matter more than the formula:

Correct for past stockouts. A SKU that was out of stock for nine days last month did not sell what it could have sold. Averaging raw sales bakes the stockout into the forecast and under-orders the same item forever. Either exclude out-of-stock days from the denominator or lift the average by the share of days lost.

Use measured lead times, not agreed ones. The number your supplier quoted and the number they achieve are different, and the second is sitting in your purchase order export. If your cost figures are patchy too, rebuilding cost history after Stocky covers reconstructing those from the same sources.

Export your inventory to CSV, drop these columns beside it, and sort by the gap between position and reorder point. That sorted list is your buying list.

Getting Admin to help a little

Three things are worth setting up so the spreadsheet has less to do.

Metafield definitions for supplier detail. Shopify documents the pattern: supplier.lead_time_days, supplier.minimum_order_quantity, supplier.case_quantity, supplier.supplier_sku, supplier.primary_name. They will not calculate anything, but they travel with the variant and export cleanly, which beats a second spreadsheet that drifts.

Minimum and maximum thresholds per variant, also as custom metafield definitions. Same limitation, same benefit.

Low-stock alerts through Shopify Flow. This is the one piece of genuine automation available. A Flow triggered on inventory level crossing a threshold gets you the alert Stocky used to surface. It tells you something is low; it does not tell you how much to buy.

Where Sidekick actually helps

Shopify’s answer to the forecasting gap is Sidekick, and it is more useful than sceptics expect and less than the marketing implies.

Ask it what to reorder, or to analyse inventory across locations and suggest rebalancing, and it will recommend items from your sales data and draft the purchase order or transfer. Shopify’s documentation says it can respect minimum and maximum limits you have set, and it can create purchase orders for you.

What it is not is a model you configure. Stocky had six forecast types you could pick between — last X days, a custom date range, the same period last year, fill shelves, fill shelves if below minimum, and target stock level — and you could regenerate a purchase order against a named basis. Sidekick is a conversation. You cannot pin it to a method, reproduce last month’s logic exactly, or hand the same defensible basis to a colleague.

For a small catalogue with steady demand, that is fine. For a buying decision you have to justify to a finance team, the spreadsheet is more defensible.

Stocktakes, since they changed too

Quick count in POS handles spot checks and caps at 1,000 items per session. A full-location count is now an offline process Shopify documents directly: export on-hand inventory to CSV, count offline with a spreadsheet or scanner, import the counted quantities back, and keep the original export, the counted file and the import log as your audit trail.

That is workable and it is manual. If you have external audit requirements, it is worth knowing this is where the native tooling ends.

When the spreadsheet stops being enough

The manual method scales further than people expect. It stops working at fairly predictable points.

When demand arrives through more than one door. This is the big one. A reorder point built on Shopify sales models Shopify demand, while wholesale purchase orders and retail EDI commitments draw down the same physical stock without appearing in the numbers. The result is not a noisy forecast, which you would catch — it is a confident forecast that is wrong in the same direction every time.

When the SKU count outruns the attention. Somewhere past a few hundred active SKUs, a weekly manual pass stops getting done properly, and the SKUs that get skipped are the slow movers where the cash is quietly parked.

When lead times move. A single lead time per supplier breaks the first time one slips, and manual reorder points do not notice.

When the person leaves. A spreadsheet that only one person understands is a single point of failure that a forced migration has already taught you about once.

What to do about it

If you are Shopify-only with a manageable catalogue, the spreadsheet plus Flow alerts plus Sidekick is a reasonable place to sit, and it costs nothing. Plenty of former Stocky merchants should stop there, and we said so in what Shopify Admin actually replaces.

If you are past the points above, the question is not which app most resembles Stocky but how much of your demand the replacement can see. We have laid the options out, segmented by exactly that, in the best Stocky alternatives, with the direct comparison on Endless Commerce vs Stocky.

Endless Commerce forecasts DTC, wholesale, retail and marketplace demand together, against inventory that already accounts for what is committed elsewhere — 98% forecast accuracy on live first-party data, 30% fewer stockouts, and around 200 hours of manual planning saved per brand per month. The agents then place the resulting purchase orders rather than adding them to a list for someone to work through. If you are rebuilding reorder logic from scratch anyway, that rebuild is portable, and this is the cheapest moment to decide where it should live.

Every capability claim about Shopify Admin above is drawn from Shopify’s documentation at help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/inventory/transitioning-from-stocky and its related inventory pages. Plan level changes what you get, so check your own admin.