Purchase Order Receiving Quality Checks in Shopify After Stocky

Receiving a purchase order is more than a stock update. For warehouse, store, and operations staff handling inbound shipments in Shopify, the moment a box is opened is also the moment you learn whether the supplier sent what they promised, in the condition you expected. This guide is for receiving teams and the merchants who manage them after moving off Stocky. It treats the Shopify receiving step as a structured quality check, so the counts you record at the dock become a clear, repeatable signal about each supplier.

Why receiving is where supplier performance starts

Receiving in Shopify does two jobs at once. It updates your available inventory by the quantities you record as received, and it captures a snapshot of how the supplier performed on that order. When you receive a purchase order in the Shopify admin, you record the quantities that actually arrived as either accepted or rejected, and available inventory is updated by the accepted quantities.

That makes the receiving screen the natural place to register quality. The gap between what you ordered and what you accepted is a concrete number. So is anything you reject. Over time, those small recorded facts add up to a picture of which suppliers ship complete, undamaged orders and which do not. If you are still working through the move off Stocky, the migration checklist covers the wider setup. This article focuses on the receiving step itself.

Before you mark inventory as received

The receiving step is not the place to rush. By the time a shipment arrives, the purchase order should already exist in Shopify and be set to Ordered. From there, you open the order and receive its inventory in the admin. Shopify lists purchase orders with statuses including Draft, Ordered, Partial, Received, and Closed, so an order in Ordered status is one that is expected but not yet received. Receiving is one stage of the larger Shopify purchase order workflow, which runs from supplier setup through placing and closing the order.

Before touching the receive action, do the physical work first. Count the cartons. Open them. Lay items out by SKU if you need to. Compare the line items on the purchase order to what is actually on the floor. If you record receipts before counting, any mistake you make is now also an inventory mistake, and unwinding it later is more work than slowing down for a minute now.

A useful habit: treat the purchase order on screen as a checklist. Do not change anything in Shopify until you can say, for each line, how many arrived and how many were unusable.

Check quantities against the purchase order

Once the physical count is done, open the purchase order and work line by line. For each SKU, record the quantity that actually arrived as accepted, and record any quantity that arrived but is not usable as rejected. Shopify will update available inventory by the quantities you accept, so the accepted number needs to match what is genuinely going onto the shelf.

This is where receiving becomes a quality check rather than a data-entry task. If a line was ordered at 100 and 100 arrived in good condition, the order matches and the supplier did their job on that line. If 100 was ordered and 90 arrived, that is a short ship. If 100 arrived but 8 are crushed, that is a quality problem. All three outcomes are recorded on the same screen, just with different accepted and rejected numbers.

If you are still getting used to handling counts directly in the Shopify admin after Stocky, the Stocky and Shopify admin inventory comparison walks through how the same information surfaces in the new place.

A practical tip for the team: agree, in writing, what counts as rejectable. Light scuffing on outer cartons might still be acceptable. A dented retail box on a giftable item usually is not. Consistency matters more than the exact line you draw, because the receiving record is only useful if everyone applies the same standard.

Handle partial shipments

Sometimes a supplier ships in waves, or a backorder splits a single purchase order across two deliveries. When only some of the ordered units arrive, accept what is actually there and in good condition. Do not inflate the accepted number to match the order, and do not pre-count units that have not arrived yet.

Once you save a receipt that covers part of the order, Shopify reflects this in the purchase order status list, which includes Draft, Ordered, Partial, Received, and Closed. A purchase order with some, but not all, units received shows as Partial. That status itself is a signal: the order is still open, the supplier still owes you units, and the next delivery against this purchase order needs to be checked when it arrives.

Treat each partial delivery as its own receiving event. Count it, accept it, and record any rejected units the same way you would on a single delivery. Available inventory rises only by the quantities you accept on each receipt, so a clean partial record keeps the shelf number correct while the order stays open for the rest.

Handle damaged and missing items

Damaged items and missing items are different problems with the same recording mechanism. Both can be marked as rejected on the receive screen. The important rule to keep straight is the inventory direction: only accepted quantities are added to available inventory, and rejected quantities are removed from incoming inventory and are not added to available inventory.

A few common cases:

Damaged on arrival

The unit is physically here, but it is unsellable. Mark it as rejected. It does not go onto the shelf, so it should not increase available inventory. Set the damaged stock aside in a clearly labelled area while you sort out the supplier conversation.

Missing from the shipment

The packing list says 24 units, the carton holds 20. The four shortfalls are not in the building. Mark those four as rejected as well. They were not added to your physical stock, and they should not be added to available inventory.

Wrong item sent

If a supplier shipped the wrong SKU against a line, that line is short. The units you did not receive on that line are effectively missing for the purposes of this purchase order.

In every case, write down the reason next to the number. “8 rejected, damaged in transit” tells a very different story from “8 rejected, never arrived.” Both might show up as 8 rejected on the screen, but the supplier conversation that follows is not the same.

Record notes and evidence

The receiving screen captures accepted and rejected counts. Quality checks need a little more context than that, and Shopify’s supplier management guidance recommends keeping notes and documentation on the supplier relationship, including discrepancies.

For each issue, write down:

Photos help. A picture of a crushed carton, a broken seal, or a half-empty master case is much harder to argue with than a sentence in an email. Most teams keep this evidence outside Shopify, in a shared drive folder organised by supplier and purchase order. The receiving record in Shopify and the evidence folder should point at each other through the purchase order number.

Keep the language qualitative and factual. “Cartons 3 and 4 arrived with seals broken; 8 units inside were unsellable” is a useful note. A vague “bad shipment” is not.

Turn receiving issues into supplier follow-up

A discrepancy you record at receiving is the opening of a conversation, not the end of one. Once a purchase order shows rejected units or sits in Partial status because something did not arrive, somebody needs to contact the supplier and resolve it. Shopify’s supplier management guidance treats follow-up about damaged, missing, or partial shipments as part of the ongoing supplier relationship.

The follow-up itself happens through whatever channel you normally use with that supplier: phone, email, an account portal. Reach out, reference the purchase order, describe what was wrong, and ask for a specific outcome. Common outcomes include a credit against the next invoice, a replacement shipment, or a written commitment to correct the issue on the next order.

Then track the resolution next to your original receiving note. Did the credit appear? Did the replacement ship? Was it short again? A discrepancy that was acknowledged and fixed promptly tells you something different about the supplier than one that took three reminders and never closed. Both are worth recording.

When the issue is resolved, complete the receiving step or close the purchase order so the status reflects the actual outcome, such as Partial, Received, or Closed. Your open-orders list then reflects only work that is genuinely still open.

How this connects to supplier scorecards

Each receiving event leaves a small trail: an order against a supplier, an accepted count, a rejected count, a reason, a follow-up, an outcome. On its own, one event is just one event. Across many orders, the pattern is what matters. A supplier whose orders almost always close as Received with zero rejections looks very different on paper from one whose orders repeatedly land in Partial, or whose lines often carry damaged rejections.

A supplier scorecard is the place where you summarise that pattern in your own words, and a ready-made supplier scorecard template lays out the fields to track. It is a review layer the merchant maintains, built from purchase order and receiving history. It is not a native Shopify feature, and it is not a like-for-like replacement of any prior tool. You decide what to track, how often to review it, and what counts as a problem worth raising with the supplier or escalating internally.

Kept up consistently, this review turns the small acts of careful receiving into something you can act on at the supplier level: which suppliers to give more business to, which to put on notice, and which categories of issue (damaged in transit, short ships, late splits) keep coming back and need a structural fix rather than another one-off email. For the wider routine that pulls these receiving signals into a regular supplier review, see tracking supplier performance after Stocky.

Limitations

Kijun is not a full Stocky replacement. It does not replace Shopify POS stocktakes, inventory counts, demand forecasting, automatic reordering, or Shopify’s native purchase order and receiving workflows. Its role comes after the fact, turning supplier records and purchase orders into supplier scorecards.

Use kijun’s built-in Stocky migration guide to import supported supplier and vendor records, then turn purchase orders recorded in kijun into supplier scorecards. Turn receiving history into supplier scorecards.

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against cited sources through kijun’s editorial workflow. Last updated: 2026-05-26.

Stocky and Shopify are trademarks of Shopify Inc. kijun is not affiliated with or endorsed by Shopify.