Stocky vs Shopify Admin Inventory: What Changes After the August 31, 2026 Shutdown

Stocky won’t be available after August 31, 2026, which means merchants who currently run purchase orders, supplier records, and stocktakes through Stocky need to decide where that work lives next. This article is for Shopify merchants weighing whether the Shopify admin and Shopify POS cover their current Stocky workflows before the shutdown. It is a migration comparison, not a winner-take-all verdict: in some operations the admin and POS will be enough on their own, and in others they won’t. Shopify itself notes that some Stocky-specific features might work differently or might not yet be available in Shopify, so the goal here is to map what changes, what stays similar, and where gaps tend to show up.

What changes after Stocky shuts down

The headline change is access. Stocky was removed from the Shopify App Store on February 2, 2026, and merchants can’t reinstall it. The app will keep running for installed merchants until August 31, 2026, after which Stocky won’t be available and any Stocky APIs stop working on the same date. From that point, merchants manage inventory in the Shopify admin and Shopify POS instead of Stocky.

That has two practical implications. First, anything you currently rely on inside Stocky, from purchase order screens to stocktake history, needs an alternative before the cutoff. Second, integrations or scripts that talk to Stocky APIs need to be rewritten against Shopify’s native inventory and purchase order surfaces, or retired. For a fuller calendar of the dates involved, see the Stocky shutdown timeline.

This isn’t a feature-for-feature swap. It is a move from one tool to another, where some workflows line up cleanly and others need to be rebuilt or replaced. The sections below walk through the main inventory areas one at a time.

Inventory tasks moving into the Shopify admin and POS

Shopify’s transition guidance places several Stocky-style tasks directly inside the Shopify admin. Transfers between locations, purchase orders, inventory quantity adjustments, and historical inventory reporting are all handled in the admin after the cutover. Day-to-day counting work, the kind a store team does on the floor, lives in Shopify POS.

For merchants used to Stocky, the mental model shifts in two ways. The first is that purchase orders and transfers are no longer in a separate app: they are part of the same admin where products, orders, and locations already live. The second is that counts done on a phone or POS device feed back into the same inventory record that the admin reads from, rather than syncing across two systems.

What the cited guidance does not promise is that every Stocky-specific feature has a one-to-one match in the admin. Shopify explicitly states that some Stocky-specific features might work differently or might not yet be available in Shopify. So when planning a migration, it helps to map your current Stocky workflows to these four buckets (transfers, purchase orders, quantity adjustments, historical reporting, plus POS counts) and note which steps don’t have a direct equivalent. That list becomes the agenda for everything else, including spreadsheets, external tools, or process changes.

Purchase orders, what Shopify covers and what changes

Purchase orders are the area where the comparison tends to get the most attention, because Stocky users often spend much of their time there.

In Shopify, a purchase order records the products, their costs, and the quantities ordered from a supplier. It also tracks incoming inventory quantities, costs, payment terms, and an estimated arrival date. As stock arrives, a purchase order moves through statuses including Draft, Ordered, Partial, Received, and Closed, which gives a clear lifecycle for each order.

A few specifics are worth calling out for anyone planning the switch:

Sending POs to suppliers

Shopify purchase orders can be exported or downloaded as PDFs from the admin. They can’t be emailed to suppliers directly from the admin; merchants download the PDF and send it themselves through email or whatever channel the supplier prefers. If your current process assumes the system sends the PO, that step becomes manual or moves to a separate email tool.

APIs and automation

Purchase order APIs aren’t currently available in Shopify and are under consideration. That matters for any merchant who automates PO creation, syncs PO data into a finance system, or pulls PO history into a warehouse of their own. Until those APIs ship, that work needs another path, whether that is CSV-based, manual entry, or a third-party tool that doesn’t rely on a native PO API.

What this isn’t

This isn’t a claim that Shopify purchase orders reproduce every Stocky purchase-order workflow. They cover the core lifecycle of ordering, receiving, and closing out, and they capture the financial fields a typical PO needs. Some teams will find that enough. Others, especially those who built habits around Stocky-specific PO behaviors, will need to redesign parts of the process. For a step-by-step view of that lifecycle in the admin, see the Shopify purchase order workflow after Stocky.

Suppliers, what you need to recreate or maintain

Suppliers are the area most likely to need rebuilding by hand. Shopify states that suppliers can’t be exported from Stocky, which means there is no clean file to bring across. If you want to preserve supplier records, the practical step is to capture them while Stocky still runs, either by exporting whatever Stocky does allow you to export or by copying the relevant details into a spreadsheet of your own. The data export guide walks through what to pull and when.

On the Shopify side, suppliers are created in the admin when creating a purchase order. So a supplier record in Shopify comes into existence the first time you raise a PO for that vendor, rather than being a standalone object you build out in advance.

One detail worth flagging: payment terms and supplier currencies are specific to individual Shopify purchase orders and aren’t saved as default values on the supplier profile. If you have a supplier you always pay net 30 in EUR, that information lives on each PO, not on the supplier record itself. Operationally, that means the person creating a PO needs to know or look up the right terms each time, or you keep those defaults in your own document.

Whether that is a problem depends on volume and on how disciplined your team is at applying consistent terms. For a small set of suppliers with stable terms, the workaround is light. For long supplier lists with varied terms, it adds friction.

Inventory CSVs, what the Shopify admin handles

Shopify’s inventory CSV files can export current inventory quantities and update quantities for products in each location. This is the native lever for bulk inventory changes in the admin, and it is worth understanding before assuming you need a separate tool for bulk updates.

There are two export shapes to know about:

All states export

The All states export includes separate rows for each location and provides overwrite protection on import. If you are moving a lot of data and want a safety net against accidentally wiping values you didn’t mean to touch, this is the export to use. The trade-off is that the file is more detailed and the structure can feel heavier to work with in a spreadsheet.

Available export

The Available export is simpler and doesn’t provide the same overwrite protection as the All states export. It is easier to read at a glance, but a careless import can overwrite values you didn’t intend to change. For routine bulk updates where you know exactly which rows you are touching, that is fine. For larger or less familiar changes, the All states route is safer.

Setting on-hand counts

The On hand column in the inventory CSV is used to set or update the units physically present at a location. This is the column that maps to a stocktake-style adjustment: rather than recording a delta, you state the actual count, and Shopify updates inventory to match.

This is Shopify’s native inventory management lane, not a rebuild of Stocky’s CSV formats. The two systems use different file shapes, so transferring data is a matter of preparing a Shopify-shaped CSV from your source, not reusing Stocky exports as-is.

When the Shopify admin may be enough

For some merchants, the native combination of admin purchase orders, transfers, inventory CSVs, and Shopify POS will cover what they were doing in Stocky. The honest version of this section is short, because the answer depends heavily on the operation.

The shape that tends to fit well looks like this: a smaller supplier list, purchase orders that follow a fairly standard lifecycle, payment terms and currencies that don’t vary in complicated ways, stock counts handled at the POS, and reporting needs that are met by the historical inventory reports Shopify provides in the admin. In that shape, the admin gives you a connected end-to-end view: products, POs, transfers, counts, and reports in one place.

The shape that tends not to fit cleanly involves workflows built around Stocky-specific behaviors, heavy automation that depended on Stocky APIs, deep supplier records with lots of default fields, or analyses that span many POs and suppliers over long periods. None of those are impossible to handle after the shutdown, but they require extra setup or external tools.

A migration plan helps in either case. The Stocky migration checklist lays out the sequence of decisions: what to export, when to switch which workflow, and what to confirm before August 31, 2026.

Where gaps can remain after Stocky

Even with careful planning, a few gaps are predictable.

Historical data

Historical Stocky data, including old purchase orders and stocktakes, won’t automatically move into Shopify after August 31, 2026. If you want to keep past reports for accounting, audit, or year-over-year comparisons, you need to export them while Stocky still runs. After the shutdown, that data is no longer reachable through Stocky, so the window to capture it closes on the same date.

Cross-supplier and cross-PO reporting

Aggregating supplier performance over time, or looking at purchase-order spend by supplier across many POs, is not a built-in Shopify report. A single Shopify PO captures its own costs, quantities, and status, but rolling many POs together by supplier (or comparing one supplier to another across a quarter) usually needs an external tool or a spreadsheet built from exported data. If that kind of view is part of how you run buying decisions today, plan for where it will live after the move. For a monthly version of that review, see what to check in supplier reporting after Stocky.

Feature differences

Shopify is clear that some Stocky-specific features might work differently or might not yet be available in Shopify. The careful approach is to list the Stocky features you actually use, then check each one against current Shopify guidance rather than assuming parity. Some will match closely. Some will need a different process, a workaround, or an outside tool. A small number may not have a direct equivalent at all.

None of this makes a migration impossible. It does mean the move is worth treating as a project with its own checklist, rather than a switch that happens by itself on August 31, 2026.

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 inventory workflows. It does not recover Stocky records that Shopify says can’t be exported. Its role is narrower: helping merchants import supplier/vendor records where supported and build supplier scorecards from purchase-order activity recorded in kijun.

Use the built-in Stocky migration guide to import supported supplier/vendor records, then turn purchase orders recorded in kijun into supplier scorecards. Turn supplier work after Stocky into 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.