Stocky App Is Shutting Down — Here's What to Do Next

Shopify acquired Stocky in 2019 and bundled it free with every Shopify plan. For years, it was the default purchase order and demand forecasting tool for Shopify merchants. It worked — barely. The interface hadn't been meaningfully updated since acquisition, the demand forecasting was rudimentary (it used simple linear extrapolation, not seasonal modelling), and it couldn't handle multi-location inventory properly. In early 2026, Shopify confirmed what many expected: Stocky would be fully deprecated by 31 August 2026. After that date, the app will be removed from all stores. Your historical purchase order data inside Stocky will no longer be accessible unless you export it beforehand.

If you're running a Shopify store with more than a few hundred SKUs, losing Stocky means losing the only free tool that handled purchase orders natively inside Shopify. The Reddit threads on r/shopify are full of merchants who relied on Stocky for years and are now scrambling. The most common complaints: "I have 2,000 POs in Stocky and no way to bulk export them." "The demand forecasting was terrible but at least it existed." "I can't justify paying £300/month for Inventory Planner when Stocky was free." These are valid concerns. But here's the uncomfortable truth: if Stocky was your entire inventory management system, you were already operating with significant blind spots. Stocky couldn't calculate weeks cover. It couldn't flag dead stock proactively. It didn't account for supplier lead times in its reorder suggestions. You were making purchasing decisions with incomplete data.

Bailey & Coco is a dog accessories brand on Shopify with 2,845 active SKUs across 152 pattern variants. They source from China with a 70-day production lead time and 120-day sea freight window. That's nearly 200 days from placing a purchase order to receiving stock in their UK warehouse. With Stocky, they could create purchase orders and see basic sales velocity. But Stocky's demand forecasting didn't account for the 190-day total lead time. It would suggest reordering when stock was already critically low — by which time it was 6 months too late. The result: Bailey & Coco regularly experienced stockouts on their best-selling collar patterns in Q4, while simultaneously sitting on 8+ months of slow-moving seasonal lines they'd over-ordered in Q1. The total cost of this mismanagement — calculated from lost sales on stockouts plus the carrying cost of excess inventory — was roughly £47,000 per year. Stocky wasn't causing the problem. But it wasn't preventing it either.

Don't wait until August. The merchants who start migrating now will have months of parallel running to verify data accuracy. Here's your step-by-step plan:

There are three serious contenders for Shopify merchants migrating away from Stocky. Each has different strengths depending on your business size and complexity.

Inventory Planner is the most established option. It's been around since 2015 and has strong demand forecasting with seasonal adjustments. Pricing starts around £100/month for smaller stores but scales to £300+ for larger catalogues. The main criticism is complexity — the interface assumes you understand inventory management terminology, and the onboarding can take weeks.

Prediko is newer and more design-forward. It's popular with DTC brands and has a clean interface that's easier to learn. However, it's less suited to businesses with complex supplier networks or multi-step production processes. Pricing is similar to Inventory Planner.

Canopy (currently in development) is being built specifically to address the gaps that Stocky left. It focuses on weeks cover as the core metric, includes supplier lead time modelling, and is designed for brands with large SKU counts and long supply chains. The interface is built for founders and ops managers who don't have inventory management degrees. Early access pricing will be significantly lower than both Inventory Planner and Prediko.

Stocky being retired forces a conversation that most Shopify merchants should have had years ago: are you actually managing your inventory, or are you just creating purchase orders and hoping for the best?

Proper inventory management means understanding your weeks cover for every SKU. It means knowing which products are dead stock before they've been sitting for 12 months. It means having reorder points that account for real supplier lead times, not the optimistic numbers your supplier quoted you two years ago.

Stocky couldn't do any of that. Its replacement should. Whatever tool you choose next, make sure it gives you visibility into the metrics that actually prevent stockouts and reduce carrying costs — not just a digital notepad for purchase orders.