Shopify Stocky Is Shutting Down: An Honest Guide to What Replaces It

If you ran purchase orders or forecasting through Stocky, you have a deadline: the app stops working after August 31, 2026.

Full disclosure before anything else: Planster makes demand planning software, so we are one of the options at the end. We have tried to write the guide we would want to read, which means telling you when the free option is the correct one.

Shopify pulled Stocky from the App Store on February 2, 2026, and inventory transfers and min/max forecasting were already removed back in July 2025.

Here is the part most "Stocky alternative" posts skip, including ones written by software companies: for a lot of merchants, Shopify Admin is now the right answer, and you do not need to buy anything. Shopify absorbed most of what Stocky actually did. This guide is about telling those two groups apart — the ones who are already covered, and the ones who just lost something Shopify never replaced.

What actually happened to Stocky

Stocky shipped free with Shopify POS Pro and did two fairly different jobs. It handled inventory operations — purchase orders, receiving, stock transfers, counts, supplier records — and it did a lighter version of inventory planning — demand forecasting, reorder suggestions, and stock recommendations.

Shopify has moved the operations half into Shopify Admin. Purchase orders, transfers, receiving, quantity adjustments, and inventory history are all native now. That migration is real and it works.

The planning half did not come with it.

Shopify's own inventory documentation lists tracking, adjustments, history, transfers, and purchase orders as native capabilities. Demand forecasting based on sales velocity and seasonality, reorder points, and safety stock calculations are not among them. (Verified 2026-07-23.)

This is not Shopify being cagey. They have been clear that Admin is where inventory operations live, and they have not claimed it forecasts demand. It simply does not.

Before anything else: export your data

Do this now regardless of which direction you go, because it is the one genuinely irreversible part.

• After August 31, 2026, Stocky APIs stop working and the app is no longer available.
• Historical Stocky data does not automatically move into Shopify. There is a read-only window afterward, but do not plan around it.
• Suppliers cannot be exported directly from Stocky. This is the one that catches people. Budget real time to reconstruct supplier records by hand, and do not leave it to the last week.
• Do not uninstall Stocky to "clean up" before you have exported. Shopify warns that data from an uninstalled Stocky may not be retrievable on reinstall.

Export purchase order history, supplier details, and cost data. Even if you never open the files again, reconstructing three years of landed costs later is miserable.

Step-by-step, in the order the steps depend on each other: the Stocky export checklist.

The actual question: which half of Stocky did you use?

This is the whole decision, and it takes about thirty seconds to answer honestly.

If you mostly used Stocky to run operations

You created POs, received stock, moved inventory between locations, and ran counts. Shopify Admin covers this. Migrate and stop reading. It is native, it is included, and it is where Shopify is putting its development effort. Adding a paid tool to do what Admin now does for free is a bad trade.

If you leaned on Stocky to tell you what to order

You used its forecasting or reorder suggestions to decide purchase quantities and timing. That capability is gone and Admin does not replace it. Low-stock alerts via Shopify Flow are not a substitute: an alert fires when you are already low, which is usually well past the point you needed to place the order given supplier lead time.

There is a third group worth naming: merchants who never trusted Stocky's forecasting much and have been running a spreadsheet alongside it. If that is you, nothing changed today — but the spreadsheet is still the thing costing you money, and the migration is a reasonable moment to look at it.

When Shopify Admin is the better fit

For a large share of former Stocky users, this guide ends here. Purchase orders, transfers, receiving, quantity adjustments and inventory history are all native in Shopify Admin now. It is included in your plan, it is where Shopify is putting its development effort, and it is the system your staff already have open.

Shopify Admin is the better fit when:

• Your ordering decisions are already obvious — steady demand, short lead times, few SKUs
• You sell on Shopify and nowhere that matters
• You never really trusted Stocky's forecasting and were eyeballing it anyway

None of those are consolation prizes. Adding a paid tool to do what Admin now does for free is a bad trade, and we would rather say so than sell you something.

Why the gap shows up later than you think

Nothing breaks the day Stocky goes dark. Your POs still work. Transfers still work. That is precisely why this is easy to get wrong.

The gap surfaces the first time you plan a real peak season without a forecast underneath you — no velocity model, no seasonality curve, no safety stock sized to actual demand variability, no lead-time-aware order-by date. Just last year's numbers, a spreadsheet, and a gut call on a purchase order large enough to hurt if it is wrong in either direction.

If you are reading this in the fall and wondering why buying suddenly feels harder than it did in the spring, this is why.

Your options, honestly

Roughly in order of cost, with what each is actually good for.

1. Shopify Admin alone — included

Best for: merchants whose needs are operational, and small to mid-size stores with steady, predictable demand.

Native, free, no migration beyond what Shopify walks you through. No forecasting, reorder points, safety stock, or seasonality. For a large share of former Stocky users this is genuinely sufficient, and we would rather say so than sell you something.

2. Admin plus a spreadsheet — included, plus your time

Best for: a manageable SKU count, one channel that matters, and someone willing to own the file.

Perfectly honest at small scale. It stops scaling when SKUs multiply, when you add channels, or when the person who built the file goes on vacation. The failure mode is not a wrong number; it is a stale one.

3. A Shopify inventory app

Best for: Shopify-centric brands that want forecasting back without a big platform decision.

This is the direct like-for-like replacement tier, and it is where most former Stocky users should look first. Prediko is Shopify's recommended replacement and deservedly popular — its Pia agent sends daily digests and drafts POs. It is priced on your trailing-12-month GMV, starting at $49/month under $100k GMV and stepping up through brackets from there. Cogsy lists its all-in-one plan at $199/month with a strong cash-flow framing. Both are Shopify-centric by design, which is a fair trade if you are Shopify-centric.

4. A dedicated demand planning platform

Best for: brands past roughly $10M selling across DTC, Amazon, retail, and wholesale.

Worth it only when a wrong buying decision costs more than the software. Inventory Planner is the mature option, priced against your revenue.

Where Planster fits, and where it doesn't

Planster — us — is flat $1,000/month and sits on top of Shopify Admin rather than replacing it, adding per-SKU statistical forecasting, reorder points and safety stock sized to real demand variability, scenario planning with a capital-impact preview, and retail-deal planning.

The part that covers the specific gap Stocky left is the agent: it re-checks every SKU, order and channel overnight and emails a ranked list of what needs a decision, with the purchase orders already drafted. It cannot approve an order or send anything to a supplier — those stay with you.

We are worth looking at when you are past roughly $10M, selling across DTC, Amazon, retail and wholesale, and a single wrong purchase order costs more than a year of the software.

We are the wrong answer when:

• You are Shopify-only and under roughly $10M. Option 3 is a better fit than we are.
• Your needs are operational. Shopify Admin already does that, for free.
• You want reports that exist on day one. Our reporting is custom-only — you build what you need and the agent can draft the definition, but there is no catalogue to browse. Inventory Planner has one and we do not.
• You want a long track record. We are newer than most tools on this list.

A note on what to search for

Searching "Stocky replacement" will mostly surface option 3, because that is the tier that competed with Stocky directly. That is the right instinct if you want the operations-plus-light-forecasting bundle back in one app.

But if Shopify Admin already covers your operations, you are not really shopping for a Stocky replacement anymore. You are shopping for the planning layer Shopify never built — a narrower and more expensive category. Knowing which of those two you are doing will save you a month of demos.

The short version

1. Export your data now, especially suppliers, which cannot be exported directly.
2. Migrate operations to Shopify Admin. It is native and it works.
3. Ask whether you used Stocky to run operations or to decide what to buy.
4. If operations: you are done. Spend nothing.
5. If buying decisions: Admin does not cover that. Look at option 3 first, and option 4 only if you are multichannel and past roughly $10M.