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Shopify Stocky alternatives: get your data out first, then find out whether you need one

Stocky shut down on 31 August 2026, and the read-only window to export what is left of your data closes around the end of November. Purchase orders are native in the Shopify admin now — so the first question is not which app to buy, it is whether you need one.

Updated 18 September 2026

Stocky was the free answer to “Shopify has no purchase orders” from the day Shopify acquired it in 2018 and bundled it with POS Pro. It is gone: delisted from the App Store on 2 February 2026, and shut down along with its APIs on 31 August 2026. If you have landed here you are probably looking at a dozen “Stocky replacement” pages, every one of them written by an app that would like to be the answer.

This page is written by an app vendor too, and StockUnison replaces almost none of Stocky — we will say exactly which small slice it does. Before any of that, two things matter more than shopping.

First: get your data out, because that clock is running

Shopify’s migration notice gives read-only access to export “for at least 90 days” after the shutdown. Counting from 31 August, the window closes around the end of November 2026. What comes out and what does not is not symmetrical:

• Export now, as CSV — your completed purchase order reports, your stocktake history, and your historical cost data.
• Cannot be exported from Stocky at all — your suppliers. If you built up supplier records in there, the only copy you will ever have is the one you make by hand, before the window shuts.
• Cannot be imported into Shopify — historical purchase orders. They come out as CSV and they stay as CSV; nothing carries them into the admin or into a new app.

Do that part before you read the rest of this page. Everything below will still be true next month. The export window will not.

Second: find out whether you still need an app

This is the step every vendor page skips, for obvious reasons. The Shopify admin does purchase orders itself now — recording suppliers and prices, importing by CSV, scanning barcodes, and tracking receiving through a linked inventory transfer. Transfers between your own locations are native as well, and Shopify points Sidekick at the “what should I reorder” question. For retail, Quick count in Shopify POS handles spot checks; a full counted stocktake is still a CSV process.

So the honest 2026 answer to “what replaces Stocky” is that for a lot of merchants, the Shopify admin does, for nothing. Open it and try to raise one purchase order against a real supplier before you pay anybody.

It will not suit everyone, and the gaps are specific rather than vague. Merchants working through the sunset in Shopify’s own community thread name the same ones over and over: no default tax rate, so it is asked per line; no pack-size field; currency conversion shown on the total but not per line; no columns for sales data or current stock; no merging of purchase orders; no ABC-style product rating; and above all no way to generate a purchase order from demand — you type the quantities yourself. If your Stocky habit was opening the reorder suggestion and accepting it, that is the one habit the admin does not replace, and it is exactly what the paid tier below is selling.

Replace the jobs, not the app

Stocky quietly did four different jobs, and they have not all landed in the same place. Work out which ones you actually used — the tell is which Stocky screens had real data in them.

1. Purchase orders and suppliers. In the admin now, as above. A paid app earns its place here only if you need something the admin does not do: approval flows, landed cost spread across a shipment, multi-currency supplier catalogues, or purchase orders generated from a forecast rather than typed by hand.

2. Forecasting and replenishment. “How much should I reorder, and when?” — the gap named above, and the reason the paid tier still exists. It is also the axis the vendors compete hardest on.

Every figure below was read from each app’s own App Store listing on 18 September 2026. “≤3★” is the share of reviews at three stars or below, calculated from each listing’s own rating breakdown — a better separator than the average, which clusters between 4.5 and 5.0 across the whole tier and tells you almost nothing.

Two things in that table are worth more than the ordering. Inventory Planner is the name most of these listicles lead with, and it carries a 12.5% complaint share — five times Prediko’s and nearly ten times Stockie’s, on the same size review base as Stockie. It may still be the right tool for a large operation; it is not the safe default its ubiquity implies. And Stockie is the one nobody mentions: $4.99 to start, 152 reviews, and the cleanest record in the tier bar the very small ones.

The apps with 0% are the ones with too few reviews for the number to mean much — on twenty reviews, a clean sheet and a five-percent complaint rate are the same evidence. The whole field side by side, sync tools included, sets each meter against its price.

3. Stocktakes and adjustments. Counting what is on the shelf and correcting Shopify to match. Quick count in POS covers spot-checking a zone or a few products; a full count is a CSV process; and most of the forecasting apps above include a stocktake of their own, so this rarely decides the purchase on its own.

4. Keeping several stores’ counts in agreement. The job Stocky never did — but the migration moment is when multi-store merchants discover it was the missing one all along. If you run one store, this row is not for you.

The trap in “Stocky replacement” shopping

Every vendor page frames its own category as the natural successor. A forecasting app will tell you forecasting was Stocky’s soul; a sync app would love to tell you it was multi-store. Neither is the honest answer, which is that the job most Stocky users actually used it for now sits in the admin for free, and the apps are competing over what is left of the list.

Two checks before you commit to any successor, learned from reading this category’s one-star reviews:

• Ask what happens to your data if you leave. You are migrating precisely because an app you depended on disappeared, and you have just found out first-hand that suppliers do not always come back out. Prefer tools with a real export.
• Check the recent reviews, not the rating. Sort by newest. An app coasting on a 2022 reputation shows it there first.

The multi-store slice, honestly bounded

If part of your Stocky-era pain was juggling counts across more than one Shopify store — a B2B store beside retail, an expansion store, an outlet — that job never belonged to Stocky, and your new forecasting app will not do it either. It is a separate, smaller tool class: store-to-store inventory sync.

That is the one job StockUnison does: one store’s counts become the truth, every other store follows within seconds, matched by SKU, previewed in preview mode, every write logged. The free plan matches your whole catalogue and previews every change without writing anything — a reasonable way to find out whether you even have the multi-store problem before paying anyone for it.

If you run one store: export your Stocky data this week, raise one purchase order in the Shopify admin, and see whether you have a problem left. If you do, pick a forecasting tool on its own merits — and skip us, because that is not the job we do.