Shopify Purchase Order Workflow After Stocky: From Supplier to Receiving

After Stocky, the purchase order side of your operation moves into the Shopify admin itself. The pieces are the same in spirit (a supplier, an order, a receipt, a review), but the tools are Shopify’s, and the lifecycle has its own status names and its own quirks around incoming and available inventory. This guide is for Shopify merchants, small operations teams, and founders who used Stocky and are now rebuilding their purchase order routine directly in Shopify. It walks the workflow in order, from setting up a supplier through creating and placing a purchase order, receiving stock, handling exceptions, and finally using all of that as input to a recurring supplier review.

What changes after Stocky

Once you stop using Stocky, your purchase order process is rebuilt around Shopify’s native purchase order tools. Purchase orders are created and managed inside the Shopify admin, and any purchase order can be downloaded as a PDF from there. That PDF is how you share the order with a supplier outside Shopify when you need a paper trail.

Each purchase order has a defined lifecycle. Shopify moves a purchase order through statuses including Draft, Ordered, Partial, Received, and Closed as you create it, place it with the supplier, and receive stock against it. The rest of this guide walks that lifecycle in order. The overall sequence (pick a supplier, build the order, receive it, review what happened) will feel familiar, but the field locations, status names, and inventory behavior are Shopify’s own.

If you have not finished the broader move off Stocky yet, the Stocky migration checklist covers the surrounding cleanup work. The steps below assume your products and inventory already live in Shopify and you are ready to start writing purchase orders against them.

Step 1: Set up a supplier

You do not have to pre-build every supplier you work with. In Shopify, suppliers are created in the admin at the point of creating a purchase order, so the first time you order from a new vendor you can add them on the fly while drafting that order. Existing suppliers are picked from the list; new ones are added in place.

One detail worth knowing up front: payment terms and supplier currencies are not stored as defaults on the supplier profile. They are set on each individual purchase order. If a supplier always invoices you in the same currency on the same terms, you still fill those fields in per order. It is a small habit change from Stocky, where you might have leaned on saved supplier defaults.

For the suppliers you are bringing over from your old setup, the practical move is to keep a short reference list (name, contact, normal currency, typical terms) somewhere you can read while building an order. The Stocky CSV migration guide covers how to organize that supplier reference data as part of your wider move. From there, suppliers populate naturally into Shopify as you start writing purchase orders against them.

Step 2: Create the purchase order

With a supplier in hand (or ready to be added), you build the purchase order itself. A Shopify purchase order records the products and quantities ordered from a supplier, along with their cost and supplier SKU details, shipping details, an estimated arrival date, and optional notes and tags. In practice you work through the order roughly in that order:

• Choose the supplier (or add a new one).
• Choose the destination location that will receive the stock.
• Add products and the quantities you are ordering.
• Fill in cost and supplier SKU for each line where relevant.
• Add shipping details and the estimated arrival date.
• Add notes and tags if you want to mark the order for later filtering.

The cost field is where you record what you are paying the supplier per unit. Treat it as part of the order record; it travels with the purchase order through receiving and into your history.

One important behavior to internalize: creating the purchase order adds the ordered units to incoming inventory. They are not yet available to sell, but they show as on the way. That is how Shopify keeps your inventory picture honest between the day you place an order and the day stock actually lands at the destination.

Step 3: Save it as a draft, then mark it as ordered

There are two lifecycle steps before any stock comes in. While you are still assembling the purchase order, you can save it as a Draft. A Draft is a working copy: quantities, costs, shipping, and notes can still change, and the order has not yet been committed to the supplier. Use Draft for orders you are negotiating, checking with a colleague, or building up over a few sessions.

When the order is final and you have placed it with the supplier, you mark it as Ordered. That status records that the purchase order has actually been sent out into the world, and it is the status that receiving works against later on.

To get the purchase order to the supplier, download it as a PDF from the admin. Send that PDF through whatever channel you already use with that supplier (email, a portal, a chat thread, a printed copy). The download is the handoff: Shopify holds the canonical record, and the PDF is the version your supplier reads.

Once it is marked as Ordered, leave it alone until stock starts arriving. Any further changes from this point are typically handled through the receiving flow rather than by editing line quantities, so that incoming and available inventory stay in sync.

Step 4: Receive inventory

When a shipment lands, you open the matching Ordered (or Partial) purchase order and record what actually arrived. In Shopify, receiving a purchase order means recording the quantities that arrived as accepted or rejected. Accepted quantities are the units you are taking into stock; rejected quantities are the units you are refusing for some reason (covered in the next step).

The inventory effect is straightforward: available inventory increases by the accepted quantities. Receiving the purchase order is what makes the stock sellable. Until you receive, the units sit in incoming; after you receive, the accepted ones move into the destination location’s available inventory.

In practice, work the shipment line by line against the purchase order. Count what arrived for each product, enter the accepted quantity, and move on. If everything arrived as ordered and nothing is damaged, the receive step is simply a count and a confirmation, and the purchase order moves into Received.

If the shipment is only part of what you ordered, or if some units are damaged or missing, treat that as an exception and follow the next step.

Step 5: Handle partial, damaged, or missing items

Real shipments rarely arrive perfectly. Shopify handles exceptions through the same accepted-or-rejected receiving flow. Damaged or missing items can be marked as rejected on the purchase order. The rule to keep clear in your head:

• Accepted quantities go into available inventory.
• Rejected quantities are removed from incoming inventory. They are not added to available.

So if you ordered 100 of an item and 90 arrived in good condition while 10 are broken, you would accept 90 and reject 10. Your available inventory grows by 90. The 10 rejected units come out of incoming, because they are not on their way any more, they simply did not make it in usable form.

When an order is only part-received (some lines fulfilled, others outstanding), Shopify shows the purchase order as Partial. Partial sits between Ordered and Received: the order is still live, you are expecting more, and you can come back to receive against it again when the next shipment arrives. When everything that is going to arrive has been received, the order finishes in Received, or you close it out if the remainder is not coming.

It pays to standardize how you check quality at the moment of receiving, especially for fragile or high-value goods, so that rejections are deliberate and consistent across people on your team. The purchase order receiving quality checks guide walks through what to look at before you click accept on a line.

Step 6: Review open and closed purchase orders

Day to day, the purchase orders list is where you keep track of what is in flight and what is finished. The purchase orders list can be searched, filtered, and sorted, including by columns such as supplier, status, and expected arrival date.

A simple working pattern:

• Filter by status to separate open work from finished orders. Ordered and Partial are your open pile: orders placed but not fully received. Received and Closed are your finished pile: orders that no longer need attention.
• Sort by expected arrival date inside the open pile to see what should have landed already and what is coming up next. That is your chase list.
• Sort by supplier when you want to look at one vendor at a time, for example before a check-in call or when you are reconciling invoices.

The status names are fixed: All, Draft, Ordered, Partial, Received, and Closed. Use them as your shared vocabulary across the team so that “open” and “closed” mean the same thing in every conversation. The list view is also where you confirm an order has actually moved off Draft, or that a Partial order has finally cleared to Received.

Step 7: Connect purchase orders to your supplier review

The workflow above quietly produces the raw material for a recurring supplier review. Every purchase order you place leaves behind a status history, a set of receiving outcomes (what was accepted, what was rejected), and any notes you wrote on the order. Together those records support a regular supplier review you can run on a regular monthly schedule, working straight from what is already in Shopify. The monthly supplier reporting guide lays out what to review in each pass.

A monthly pass tends to be enough for most operations. Pick a day in the calendar, open the purchase orders list, and look back across the month:

• Which orders ran late against their expected arrival date.
• Which orders arrived short or with damaged units (the rejections tell you this).
• What you noted on individual orders that you want to remember next time.

Keep the review qualitative. Look at reliability, product quality, delivery times, and cost as recurring themes per supplier, and write short notes against each one so patterns become visible across months. Over a few cycles you will start to see which suppliers are quietly excellent, which ones need a conversation, and which products tend to cause trouble regardless of who is shipping them. The supplier performance tracking guide goes deeper into how to structure that review without turning it into a heavy reporting project.

For a small supplier list, this monthly pass is fully manual and does not need any extra tooling: open the list, read the notes, write down the takeaways, close the tab. As your supplier count grows and the same questions keep coming up, a dedicated supplier-scorecard tool can take over the repetitive part of pulling the data together so the review stays a thinking exercise rather than a data-entry one. That is an option for later, not a requirement for getting the workflow running.

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.

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. Connect PO activity to 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.