Shopify Just Killed Stocky: What Enterprise Merchants Should Use Now

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-02

If you ran your purchase orders through Stocky, this week is not a fun one. Shopify pulled the app from its store in February and switched it off for good on August 31, 2026. Supplier records could not be exported, so a lot of merchants spent August retyping lead times and contact details into a spreadsheet at eleven at night. I have had three of those conversations already. The upside is that being forced to choose again is a decent thing. Most stores were using Stocky because it came bundled with POS Pro, not because it fit. So before you install the first replacement that ranks well in the app store, answer one question: whose inventory are you actually managing? ## Two Jobs Wearing the Same Name Shopify merchants use the phrase inventory management software for two problems that barely overlap. The first is owned stock. You bought it, it sits in your warehouse or your 3PL, and the work is forecasting, reorder points, purchase orders and landed cost. Get it wrong and you either tie up cash in dead SKUs or sell out of your hero product in week two of Q4. The second is inventory you never bought. Partner brands, distributors and dropship suppliers hold the stock, you list it, and the work is keeping their counts and prices accurate on your storefront in real time. Get that wrong and you sell something nobody has, which costs a customer rather than a spreadsheet line. Same phrase, different software. Here is what fits each. ### 1. Carro: For Catalog You Sell But Do Not Stock This is the one most Shopify merchants overlook, usually because they think of dropship as a side experiment rather than a category strategy. At enterprise scale it is neither. Carro connects partner brands directly into your Shopify store. Their products appear in your catalog, sell through your checkout, and ship from their warehouse. Carro's inventory management for Shopify keeps stock levels, pricing and product data in sync across every connected supplier in real time, which is the piece homegrown dropship setups almost never get right. I have watched merchants try to run this on CSV feeds refreshed nightly. It works fine until a partner has a good day, sells through, and your store keeps taking orders for six hours against stock that no longer exists. The rest of the workflow comes with it: supplier onboarding, catalog ingestion, pricing rules, automated order routing to the fulfilling brand, tracking, supplier payouts and SLA monitoring across the partner network. Larger partners connect over EDI, API or SFTP rather than a portal, which is where most Shopify-native apps stop. - The network holds roughly 1.5 million products - Account managers hand-match retailers with brands that suit their category and price point - You are not cold-emailing suppliers to fill a gap in your range Pricing is 5% of sales through the channel with no upfront license. Carro reports retailers reaching up to 3x catalog size and up to 180% higher average order value. **Best for:** Shopify and Shopify Plus retailers widening their range without buying stock, and brands looking for retailer distribution. **Less suited to:** forecasting and purchase orders for inventory you own. ### 2. Inventory Planner: For Forecasting What You Buy If your problem is capital rather than catalog, this is the category you want. Inventory Planner, now part of Sage, does demand forecasting, replenishment recommendations and purchase order creation on top of Shopify sales history. It reads seasonality, lead times and stock cover, then tells you what to reorder and when. For merchants who were using Stocky purely for POs and low stock alerts, it is the closest upgrade, though it costs meaningfully more than the free bundle you just lost. The real value here is that it stops the guesswork. Instead of relying on gut feel when you review your best sellers, you get a data-backed answer on exactly how many units to order before the next peak season hits. **Best for:** stores with real working capital tied up in owned inventory. **Less suited to:** anyone managing supplier-held stock or multi-vendor catalogs. ### 3. Cin7: For Multi-Channel Operations Once you are selling across Shopify plus wholesale, retail and marketplaces, you need a system that treats every channel equally. Cin7 is built for that. It syncs inventory across every sales point, so a sale on your wholesale channel immediately updates what you show on Shopify. No more overselling because two channels drew from the same pool without talking to each other. It also handles complex pricing rules, batch tracking and serial numbers, which matters if you sell goods with expiry dates or need to trace a product back to its source. The tradeoff is that Cin7 has a steeper learning curve and a higher price tag than most Shopify-native apps. You are paying for enterprise-grade flexibility, not a plug-and-play solution. **Best for:** growing brands that need a single source of truth across multiple selling channels. **Less suited to:** simple single-store operations that just need basic reorder alerts. ## Making the Switch Painless Whichever tool you pick, do not rush the migration. Export your historical sales data, clean up your SKU list and remove dead stock before you import anything into the new system. Test the integration with a small batch of products first. And most importantly, talk to your team about how they actually use the software day to day. The best tool in the world fails if your warehouse staff refuse to scan every outgoing order. The Stocky shutdown is an inconvenience, but it is also a chance to fix the underlying problems you have been ignoring. Take the time to match the tool to the job, and you will come out of this with a leaner operation and fewer late nights spent on spreadsheets.