How to Track Supplier Performance After Stocky

Migrating off Stocky is a starting point, not a finish line. Once your products, inventory, suppliers, and purchase orders live in Shopify, the next job is the ongoing one: figuring out which suppliers you can actually rely on order after order. This guide is for Shopify merchants, operations managers, and founders who used Stocky and now manage purchase orders in the Shopify admin, and who want a repeatable way to judge supplier performance using the purchase orders, receiving records, and supplier details they already have. It keeps the comparison qualitative and walks through a simple monthly review you can run yourself.

Stocky migration is only the first step

Moving off Stocky is mostly about getting your data into the right place. Once products, inventory, suppliers, and purchase orders are set up, the harder, longer-running question begins: which suppliers actually deliver what they say they will, and which ones cause problems you have to work around? Shopify purchase orders are created and managed in the Shopify admin, so the activity that tells you how a supplier is performing is happening in the same place you already work.

If you are still finishing the move and want a structured run-through of the data and steps involved, the Stocky migration checklist covers that side of the work. The rest of this guide assumes the migration is mostly done and focuses on what to do after, turning everyday purchase orders and receiving into a steady read on supplier reliability.

What supplier performance means after Stocky

Supplier performance is a plain idea: how often a supplier sends you the right products, in the right quantity, in good condition, on time, and at a price you agreed on. Shopify’s own supplier management guidance frames the comparison the same way, suggesting you compare suppliers on factors such as reliability, product quality, delivery times, and cost.

This guide stays at that qualitative level. It does not assign scores or weights, and it does not introduce metrics beyond what Shopify already records on a purchase order. The goal is to give you a clear, honest picture of each supplier, the kind of picture you would describe in a sentence or two to a partner: “this supplier is steady, this one has been sending damaged units, this one keeps slipping arrival dates.” That is enough to act on, and it avoids inventing numbers that look precise but are not.

Start with the purchase orders you already manage

The purchase orders you create in the Shopify admin are the raw material for supplier tracking. A Shopify purchase order records the products ordered from a supplier, along with their quantities, prices, payment terms, and an estimated arrival date. Creating the purchase order adds the ordered units to incoming inventory, and receiving it updates available inventory. A purchase order can also be downloaded as a PDF from the admin, which you can share with the supplier outside Shopify. If you are rebuilding that ordering process from scratch after Stocky, the Shopify purchase order workflow guide walks the full sequence from supplier setup through receiving.

For supplier review purposes, three pieces of every purchase order matter most: what was ordered (products and quantities), what was promised (estimated arrival date and terms), and what eventually arrived. Because all of this is already captured when you manage purchase orders in the Shopify admin, you do not need a separate system to start tracking supplier performance. You just need a habit of looking at this data on a schedule.

If you want a paper trail outside Shopify for a particular order, save the PDF copy of the purchase order alongside any email or message thread with the supplier. That gives you something to refer back to during a review when you are trying to remember what was actually agreed.

Turn receiving events into supplier signals

Receiving is where supplier performance becomes visible. When you receive a purchase order in Shopify, you record the quantities that actually arrived as accepted or rejected. Available inventory increases by the accepted quantities. Rejected quantities are removed from incoming inventory. Damaged or missing items can be marked as rejected.

That handful of actions produces the most useful signals you have about a supplier:

You do not need to convert these into a formal metric to use them. When you sit down for a monthly review, you can simply read down the list of receiving outcomes for each supplier and notice patterns: “this supplier had three partial receipts in a row,” or “this supplier shipped exactly what we ordered every time but ran late twice.” Those qualitative observations are the heart of the review. For a closer look at catching damaged or short shipments at the moment they arrive, see the purchase order receiving quality checks guide.

Review supplier details, payment terms, and currencies

Supplier records and the terms on each order also belong in the review. In Shopify, suppliers are created in the admin while you create a purchase order, and payment terms and supplier currencies are set on each individual purchase order rather than saved as defaults on the supplier profile.

The practical implication is small but worth holding onto: because terms and currency live on each purchase order, you should confirm them every time you draft a new order rather than assuming they carry over from the last one. During a review, that also means you read the actual terms recorded on each purchase order rather than a saved profile setting when judging whether the supplier honored those terms.

If you are still cleaning up or rebuilding supplier records after the migration, the Stocky CSV migration guide covers the data side of that work. For ongoing performance tracking, what matters is that each purchase order in Shopify points to a clearly named supplier so your monthly review can group activity by supplier without guesswork.

It also helps to use supplier notes (on the purchase order or in your own records) to capture context you will forget by the time you next sit down to review: a delay the supplier flagged in advance, a substitution they offered, a quality issue you raised and how they responded.

Build a monthly supplier review workflow

A useful supplier review does not need to be elaborate. It needs to happen on a regular cadence, using data you already have. Shopify lists purchase orders with statuses including Draft, Ordered, Partial, Received, and Closed, and you can view all purchase orders or filter the list by these statuses. A supplier performance review can be built from those statuses, receiving outcomes, and supplier notes, looked at on a regular monthly schedule.

A simple monthly pass might look like this:

1. Look at the All view first

Open the purchase orders list and scan the All view to remind yourself of the volume and spread of orders across suppliers in the last month.

2. Filter by status

Filter the list by Ordered to see purchase orders that have been placed but not yet received, and by Partial to see orders that came in incomplete. The orders sitting in Ordered past their estimated arrival date and the orders that ended up Partial are the ones that most often point to supplier issues.

3. Check Received and Closed orders

Filter by Received and Closed to look back at orders that finished in the period. For each one, note whether everything was accepted, whether anything was rejected as damaged or missing, and how the actual receiving date compared to the estimated arrival date on the purchase order.

4. Read the notes and write your own

Read any supplier notes attached to the orders, then write down what you noticed for each supplier in a sentence or two. Save that note somewhere you will see it next month so patterns build up over time.

Done once a month, this takes a short sitting, and the cumulative notes are what make supplier patterns visible. For a month-by-month breakdown of what to look at in each pass, the monthly supplier reporting guide turns this into a repeatable routine.

When a spreadsheet works and when a dedicated tool helps

For a small operation with a handful of suppliers and a modest number of purchase orders, a simple spreadsheet is enough. One row per purchase order, columns for the supplier, the order date, the estimated arrival date, the status, the receiving outcome (fully accepted, partial, anything rejected), and a short note will let you run the monthly review without anything else. If you would rather start from a ready-made layout, the supplier scorecard template lists the exact fields to track. Sort by supplier when it is time to review, and you can see each supplier’s recent history in one place.

As the number of suppliers and purchase orders grows, keeping that spreadsheet current by hand starts to compete with other work. Entries get skipped, notes get vague, and the monthly review drifts. At that point a dedicated supplier-scorecard tool can take over the repetitive part of turning purchase-order and receiving activity into a per-supplier view, leaving you to spend the review time on judgment rather than data entry. The threshold is different for every operation, but the signal is consistent: when the spreadsheet stops getting filled in reliably, it is time to consider something purpose-built.

Next steps after your Stocky migration

The migration is done and the data is in Shopify. The ongoing work is smaller and steadier: a short, regular review built from purchase orders, receiving outcomes, and supplier notes that you already produce as part of normal operations.

Pick a cadence you can actually keep, a monthly review is a reasonable default, and put it on the calendar. During each review, filter the purchase orders list, read the receiving outcomes, check the notes, and write down what you saw for each supplier. Keep those notes somewhere you can scroll back through, because the value compounds. One month of observations tells you very little. Six months of short, honest notes will show you, without any scoring system, which suppliers are reliable, which ones have a recurring problem, and which ones are worth a longer conversation.

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. Build supplier scorecards after Stocky.

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.