What Stocky did that Shopify's admin still does not

Stocky stops on 31 August 2026, and Shopify’s position is that inventory management belongs in the admin. Most of that is true. Purchase orders, receiving and transfers are all there now, and a shop that used Stocky to raise an order and book it in has lost nothing.

Four jobs did not make the move. Here they are, in the order shops tend to notice them, with what each one costs now.

1. Labels from a purchase order

This is the one people hit first, because it happens on the day a delivery lands.

Shopify’s own migration guide is unusually direct about it. Labels print from the Retail Barcode Labels app or from the product list, not from the purchase order screen. Quantities do not fill in from a partial receiving. For a large receipt it suggests exporting to CSV, or using a third-party labelling app.

So the job becomes: work out what arrived, find each product, type the quantity, print, repeat. On a delivery with thirty variants that is most of a morning, every week, for something that used to be two clicks.

What it costs. Shopify’s own Retail Barcode Labels is free, and rated 2.3 from 466 reviews, which is the lowest score of any app in this category. The apps built for labelling a delivery run from nothing to about $20 a month, and several have free plans of a few hundred labels. How they differ, on the one thing that matters, is in Shopify apps that print barcode labels from a purchase order.

There is a second cost that only shows up later. Nothing in the free route records what you already printed, so a delivery arriving in two drops is counted twice by hand. That is where duplicate labels come from, and it is covered in when Shopify’s Retail Barcode Labels app is not enough.

2. Forecasting and reorder suggestions

Stocky told you what to buy. The admin does not.

If you carry a few dozen lines you can do this by eye, or with a reorder point worked out once and reviewed quarterly. Past a few hundred lines it stops being a judgement call and becomes arithmetic. That is why demand forecasting is a whole app category, and why most Stocky alternative articles are written by companies in it.

What it costs. This is the expensive gap. The planning apps that fill it start at $49 a month, and the well-reviewed ones run to $199. Stocky did this for nothing, because it came with Shopify POS Pro, which is why replacing it feels worse than it looks on paper. Prices and ratings for the four names that come up most are in Stocky alternatives by the part you actually used.

Before you buy one, work out whether you used the forecast or glanced at it. A reorder point calculator and a quarterly review is a real answer for a small catalogue, and it costs nothing.

3. Suppliers

Stocky held suppliers, their terms and their lead times. The admin has no first-class supplier record.

Worse, Stocky will not export them. There is no supplier CSV. If you have not copied that list out by hand yet, do it before the end of the month. The read-only window after the sunset will not hand you a button that never existed.

What it costs. Nothing, if a spreadsheet will do, and for most shops it will. Terms and lead times change a few times a year. If you are buying a planning app anyway, check that it carries suppliers properly, because that saves you keeping the same list in two places.

4. Stocktakes

Stocky ran counts, kept the history and showed you the variance. Stocktakes in the admin are inventory adjustments, which is the mechanism rather than the workflow. You can count and correct. Keeping the count as a record you can argue from later is the part that is missing.

What it costs. Nothing to work around, and something to ignore. A count with no history tells you today’s number and nothing about whether you are getting better. A spreadsheet and the stock accuracy scorecard keep the trend without an app, and why your Shopify stock count drifts covers what the variance is usually telling you.

What this adds up to

If you used Stocky for purchase orders, you are fine, and you are paying nothing extra.

If you used two of the four above, you are shopping for one or two apps, and the bill depends almost entirely on whether forecasting is one of them. Labels and receiving are cheap. Planning is not.

The honest way to shop is by job rather than by app, which is how this list of alternatives is sorted. The deadline, the exports and the order to do them in are in the Stocky shutdown checklist.

Whatever else you replace, check the label job specifically. It is the smallest of the four and the easiest to forget, right up until the first Monday delivery when nobody can find the barcode for a box of forty.