Shopify’s Native Inventory vs Stocky: What Admin Actually Replaces

With Stocky shutting down on August 31, 2026, the first question most merchants ask is the cheapest one: can I just use what Shopify already gives me?

For a lot of shops the answer is yes, and nobody selling inventory software wants to say so. Here is the line as clearly as we can draw it.

What moved into Shopify Admin

Shopify has consolidated the operational half of Stocky into native Admin and POS:

• Purchase orders — create them, track them, and mark items received. Receiving updates available stock and adjusts the incoming count automatically.
• Transfers between locations
• Stock adjustments
• Low-stock alerts
• Location-based inventory tracking and syncing across sales channels

That is the day-to-day mechanics of moving and counting stock, and it is covered.

What did not move

The planning half thinned out, though less evenly than most write-ups suggest. Checked against Shopify’s own documentation rather than against vendors selling the alternative:

• Demand forecasting. Stocky shipped six forecast types: last X days, a custom date range, the same period last year, fill shelves, fill shelves if below minimum, and target stock level. Admin replaces all six with Sidekick, which recommends items from sales data and drafts the purchase order for you. That is a conversation, not a model you configure, and you cannot regenerate a purchase order against a named forecast basis the way Stocky could.
• Automated reorder points. No native field. Shopify’s documented route is a custom metafield definition per variant for minimum and maximum, low-stock alerts through Flow, and Sidekick drafting orders that respect those limits. Assemblable, not shipped.
• Supplier lead times and minimum order quantities. Metafields again, and Shopify is candid about the limitation: they store information for your reference and are independent of purchase order ordering and receiving calculations. Stocky enforced minimum order quantities inside the forecast.
• Costing. Each variant has a single static cost per item that does not move when you receive stock. Weighted-average costing and landed cost allocation need a third-party app.
• Purchase order automation. There is no purchase order API. Transfers have one; Shopify lists purchase order APIs as under consideration. You also cannot email a purchase order from Admin — you download the PDF and send it yourself, where Stocky sent it for you.

Two things we previously listed as missing are in fact present, and it is worth being straight about that. ABC analysis ships natively as a report, though stores on Basic or Lite need an app for it. Payment terms exist too, including Net 30 — but they attach to each purchase order rather than to the supplier, so the terms you agreed once get re-entered every time you order.

The pattern still holds: Shopify kept what records what happened and thinned what predicts what should happen next. Admin will tell you that you have eleven units left. It will not tell you that eleven units is three weeks of cover, that this supplier takes five weeks, and that you needed to place an order a fortnight ago.

The one-question test

Did you open Stocky to record something, or to decide something?

If you opened it to count stock, move stock between locations, or raise a PO you had already decided to raise, Admin covers you. Export your history, learn the new screens, and spend nothing.

If you opened it to find out what to buy — reorder suggestions, forecast views, the buying list — that capability is gone on August 31 and Admin does not bring it back. You need a planning system, and the question becomes which one.

Most merchants know which of those they were doing. If you are unsure, look at whether anyone on the team has already rebuilt a version of Stocky’s reorder logic in a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is the answer.

Side by side

Sourced from Shopify’s documentation, not from vendors selling the replacement.

	Stocky	Shopify Admin & POS	Endless Commerce
Purchase orders	Yes	Yes	Yes
Transfers, adjustments	Yes	Yes	Yes
Low-stock alerts	Yes	Yes, via Flow	Yes
Demand forecasting	Yes, six forecast types	Sidekick suggestions, not a configurable model	Yes, across every channel
Automated reorder points	Yes	No native field; metafields plus Flow	Yes, agents act on them
Supplier lead times and MOQs	Yes, enforced in the forecast	Metafields for reference only	Yes
Supplier payment terms	Yes	Per purchase order, not saved to the supplier	Yes
ABC analysis	Yes	Yes, app needed on Basic and Lite	Yes
Weighted-average costing	Average unit cost	No, single static cost per item	Yes
Purchase order API	Stocky APIs, ending	No, transfers only	Yes
Email a PO to a supplier	Yes, from the app	No, download and send	Yes
Wholesale and retail EDI	No	No	Native EndlessEDI
Cost	Bundled with POS Pro	Included	Published pricing

If you need planning back

The tools split by how much of your demand they can see, which matters more than the feature list. Before you buy anything, it is worth knowing how far the native screens stretch on their own — working out what to buy in Shopify Admin walks the manual method and the point at which it stops scaling.

Shopify-native planning apps — Prediko and similar — read Shopify data and forecast against it. If Shopify is your whole business, that is all of your demand and they do the job well for the money. This is the right answer for a lot of former Stocky merchants, and it is close to a like-for-like swap.

Broader inventory tools — inFlow, Sumtracker, Ordoro — bring multichannel inventory, barcoding, or shipping alongside varying degrees of replenishment logic. Worth it when the gap Stocky left was wider than forecasting alone.

A single source of truth matters once demand arrives through more than one door. A Shopify-native forecast models Shopify demand while wholesale purchase orders and retail EDI commitments draw down the same physical stock without appearing in it. The result is a confident forecast that is wrong in the same direction every time, which is harder to catch than a noisy one. Endless Commerce forecasts DTC, wholesale, retail and marketplace demand together against inventory that already accounts for what is committed — 98% forecast accuracy on live first-party data, 30% fewer stockouts — and its agents place the resulting purchase orders rather than recommending them.

What to do this month

1. Export first. Purchase orders, stocktakes and cost data come out as CSV. Supplier records do not come out at all. The full sequence is in exporting your Stocky data.
2. Run the one-question test and decide whether you need a planning tool or just the native screens.
3. If you need planning, work out how many channels your demand arrives through before you shortlist. The Stocky alternatives page is organised around exactly that, and Endless Commerce vs Stocky is the head-to-head if a single source of truth is what you are weighing.

A note on where this leaves you

Stocky is the second inventory product Shopify has retired in two years, after acquiring ChannelApe in 2024 and sunsetting it the following year. Neither decision was unreasonable from Shopify’s side, and both left merchants migrating on someone else’s schedule. If you are rebuilding anyway, it is worth a moment’s thought about whether the replacement should be owned by a company that also owns one of your sales channels — an argument we make at greater length in don’t run your back office on a sales channel.

Every capability claim on this page is drawn from Shopify’s own documentation — the migration guide at help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/inventory/transitioning-from-stocky, plus Shopify’s Stocky, purchase order, supplier and ABC analysis pages. Shopify’s native features change and plan level affects what you get, so check your own admin before deciding on this page’s word alone.