Stocky Is Gone: What Shopify Merchants Should Do Now
Updated: Sep 14
Stocky stopped working on 31 August 2026. The app is gone, and so are its APIs, which means anything you had connected to it stopped at the same moment.
Most of the advice written about this was published before the deadline, aimed at merchants with time to plan. That audience no longer exists. In this post, we deal with where things actually stand now: what you can still recover, what Shopify's built-in tools do and don't cover, and how to choose a replacement properly rather than grabbing whatever installs fastest.
First, The Thing That's Still On A Clock
Shopify said read-only access to your Stocky data would remain available for a limited period after shutdown. Limited is the operative word. Treat it as a window that is closing, not an archive.
If you haven't already pulled your data out, do that before you read the rest of this:
Purchase order history — it does not migrate into Shopify automatically.
Stocktake records — same.
Product and cost data — export it while you can still cross-check it.
Suppliers — this one is different, and worse. Supplier records could never be exported from Stocky at all. If you had vendor contacts, terms and lead times configured in there, they have to be rebuilt by hand from whatever you can still see on screen.
Screenshot the supplier list if that's all that's available. It is a tedious hour that saves a genuinely painful week.
What Actually Broke, And For Whom
Stocky was never one product. It quietly absorbed several separate jobs, and which ones you lost depends on what your team used:
Purchasing — raising POs, sending them to suppliers, tracking what's on order.
Receiving — booking stock in, part-receipts, updating cost prices on arrival.
Supplier records — contacts, terms, lead times, catalogues.
Stocktakes — counted or barcode-scanned counts, adjusted back into Shopify.
Replenishment — reorder suggestions based on sales history.
Reporting — historical purchase orders and stocktake records.
Worth remembering that Stocky had been winding down for over a year. Inventory transfers and min/max forecasting were pulled back in July 2025, and the app was removed from the App Store on 2 February 2026. If you were still using it in August, you were already running a reduced version.
Work out which of those six jobs your team actually touches each week. That list, not a feature comparison table, is your requirements document.
Where Shopify's Native Tools Land
For a fair number of businesses, the built-in tools are enough, and we would rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need.
Shopify has pulled purchase orders, transfers, receiving, inventory adjustments and supplier management into the admin, and store teams can handle much of it from POS. Single Shopify store, straightforward stock, no manufacturing: start there. It costs nothing extra.
Where businesses are coming unstuck:
Stocktakes — Shopify's own guidance notes that some Stocky-specific features may work differently or may not yet be available. From what we are seeing, the dedicated stocktake workflow is the one merchants miss most. If your team runs barcode-driven counts, test this properly rather than assuming it's covered.
Demand forecasting and replenishment — not a native strength.
Multi-channel — if you also sell on Amazon, eBay or through wholesale, Shopify alone will not hold the single source of truth.
Landed costs — freight, duty and FX apportioned across a shipment is not covered.
One thing worth separating out. If you manufacture or assemble, note that Stocky never handled that either: no bills of materials, no raw materials, no production costs. Shopify's native tools don't either. If you've been running production on spreadsheets alongside Stocky, fixing that is a genuinely useful project, but it is a separate requirement and it points at a different class of system. Decide up front whether you're solving one problem or two.
Why "What's The Best Stocky Alternative?" Is The Wrong Question
There isn't a single best replacement, and any article that gives you one is guessing about your business.
We've implemented inventory systems for Australian retailers, wholesalers and light manufacturers for years, and the pattern is consistent: the right system follows the operating model, not the SKU count.
One distributor we worked with had fewer than 250 products. On SKU count alone, a lightweight Shopify-first tool looked obvious. But roughly 750 of their monthly orders were B2B and only about 250 came through Shopify. They needed structured sales-order processing, warehouse workflows, carrier integration and proper accounting control. The small catalogue was the least relevant fact about them.
Another client (a beauty business with around 10,000 SKUs, five Shopify stores live and two more ready to launch) moved off a lighter cloud inventory system for the opposite reason. Their sync lag across storefronts was slow enough to cause overselling, and their scanning workflow required staff to open each order, type the order number, scan, save and repeat. Volume and warehouse throughput drove that decision, not catalogue size.
So the useful question is: what does my business actually do, and which system is built for that?
The Systems We Implement
These are the three inventory platforms we deploy and support. We've included where each one stops being the right answer, because that is usually the more useful half.
1. Sumtracker: Shopify-first merchants who need purchasing and bundles
Sumtracker is our preferred platform for ecommerce businesses whose main problems are inventory synchronisation, purchasing and bundling. It syncs stock across Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Walmart, handles purchase orders and supplier records,
manages bundles and kits, and does barcode-driven stocktakes. It is quicker to deploy than an ERP and easier to train people on, which matters if you're already operating without Stocky.
Two things worth understanding before you commit, because they shape how it's set up:
Your store owns the catalogue, Sumtracker owns the stock. Sellable products are created in Shopify and sync across automatically. Only internal items such as components and packaging are created directly in Sumtracker.
Bundle stock is derived, never set. A bundle's available quantity is however many complete sets its components can make. You cannot receive a bundle on a purchase order, you receive the components.
Where it stops being right: Sumtracker deliberately sits lighter than an ERP. There is no assembly, no nested bundles and no native manufacturing. It is also lighter on landed costs and inventory accounting depth, so we generally pair it with A2X and Xero rather than asking it to carry the accounting. If you're running multiple warehouses, wholesale price tiers or device-driven picking, you're into Cin7 Core territory.
One thing to check before you commit: Sumtracker's plans are tiered by annual order volume, and purchasing, supplier records, stock transfers and forecasting sit on the higher tier rather than the entry one. Since purchasing is precisely what most Stocky refugees are shopping for, confirm which plan includes what before you sign up.
2. Cin7 Core: manufacturing, wholesale and operational depth
Cin7 Core is where we land clients whose operations have genuine complexity. It is a full inventory and order management platform, not a Stocky substitute.
On manufacturing, it is stronger than it is often given credit for. Assembly and disassembly, multi-level bills of materials, batch and serial tracking, auto-assembly kitting and landed-cost allocation that flows properly through to true cost of goods, all inside the same system running your purchasing, wholesale orders and Xero sync.
Material requirements planning steps up through the tiers. For a business that manufactures and sells across retail, online and wholesale, that consolidation matters more than a slicker production screen.
It also brings device-based warehouse scanning, customer price tiers, a B2B portal, partial receipts and split fulfilments, multi-currency purchasing and the API extensibility to handle 3PL, EDI and marketplace workflows.
Where it stops being right: it is overkill for a single-channel store selling bought-in finished goods. Implementation is a real project, typically four to five weeks, driven more by your data readiness than by our configuration time. External integrations consume subscription allowances, so several Shopify stores plus a shipping platform costs more than the headline plan. And it is not a container load-planning tool; if you optimise container fill during purchasing, that still happens outside the system.
3. Unleashed: wholesale-led businesses needing traceability
Unleashed sits between the two on capability. Our reading is that it is stronger than Sumtracker for manufacturing, batch and serial tracking, landed costs and reporting, with a well-established Xero relationship. We would generally put it forward for wholesale and distribution businesses (particularly food and beverage or health and beauty) where batch traceability and expiry matter, and you need to answer "which customers received this batch" quickly.
Where it stops being right: more complexity and a slower deployment than Sumtracker, and less suited to a Shopify-first merchant who simply wants stock to stop overselling. Retail and POS-heavy operations are not its strength.
The Option That Changed While Everyone Was Watching The Deadline
Starshipit is one of the platforms we work with most, and it has historically sat alongside your inventory system handling carriers, labels and tracking rather than replacing anything.
That is no longer the whole story. Starshipit WMS now covers the full warehouse lifecycle: location structures with barcodes and zones, a catalogue supporting bundles, kits, batch, serial and unit-of-measure, supplier and purchase order management, mobile receiving and staged putaway, order allocation, single and batch picking, packing benches, stocktakes and cycle counts, replenishment, returns and quarantine, plus a handheld mobile app. Inventory writes back to Shopify.
That combination is directly relevant to a Stocky replacement, because purchase orders, receiving, supplier records and stocktakes were exactly what most merchants lost. For a business running purely on Shopify whose real problem is warehouse accuracy and dispatch speed, having inventory, warehouse operations and shipping in one platform is a meaningfully different proposition to bolting three products together.
Fix These Before You Migrate Anything
Being behind schedule makes it tempting to skip straight to installing something. Two things are worth doing first, because neither can be fixed cleanly afterwards.
Sort your SKUs out in Shopify. Duplicate SKUs, blank SKUs and two different physical products sharing one SKU all cause real damage once inventory sync is switched on, because most inventory platforms treat SKU as the identity of a product. This is the single highest-value pre-migration task and it is genuinely awkward to unwind later.
Clean up your open transactions. One client came to us with more than 11,000 unshipped orders and a stocktake that wouldn't reconcile, around 11,400 counted against 10,200 on the system. No amount of configuration would have fixed that. We closed out the outstanding orders first, then realigned stock. Sometimes the implementation task is operational cleanup, not software.
A few other principles that hold regardless of which system you choose:
Don't migrate history just because it exists. Migrate the operational opening position: products, suppliers, customers, opening stock, open purchase orders, open sales orders, BOMs. Keep the exports for reference.
Your readiness sets the timeline, not the software. Clean SKUs, agreed accounting treatment, carrier account numbers and available staff determine whether a four-week plan works.
Decide who owns the opening stock balance and set a clear rule for in-flight orders.
Rehearse before you commit. Raise real POs and run a small stocktake in the new system before you trust it.
Recovery Checklist
Export whatever Stocky data is still reachable, today
Screenshot or manually record your supplier list, since it never exported
List which of the six Stocky jobs your team uses weekly
Audit Shopify for duplicate, blank or shared SKUs
Confirm whether you manufacture, assemble, or only sell bought-in goods
Count your real sales channels, storefronts and warehouse locations
Decide whether Xero entries need to be order-by-order or summarised through A2X
Check which plan tier of your chosen system includes purchasing
Close out stale open orders before taking opening stock
Pro tip: if you're currently holding things together with a spreadsheet, that is not automatically a crisis. A deliberate manual bridge for a few weeks, with a proper implementation scoped behind it, beats a rushed go-live in the run-up to peak season. What causes damage is the undeclared spreadsheet nobody has admitted to yet.
Final Thoughts
Stocky's retirement was never really a software problem. It forced a question most merchants had been deferring: are you managing inventory, or just raising purchase orders and hoping?
If you're reading this from the other side of the deadline, you have one advantage over everyone who migrated in a hurry in August. You can still choose the system that fits how your business actually runs, rather than whichever one installed fastest. The cost of a temporary workaround is far lower than the cost of implementing the wrong platform properly.
Just don't leave the export sitting there. That window is the one thing you cannot get back.
Need help working out which direction fits your business?
We offer a free introduction assessment: a short conversation where we look at how you were using Stocky, what you've lost, and which direction suits your operation. This includes telling you when Shopify's built-in tools are enough, and you don't need to spend anything at all.
At Coconut Consulting, we help Australian businesses integrate inventory systems such as Cin7 Core, Sumtracker and Unleashed with Shopify, marketplaces, B2B portals and Xero, and we always start with how your business actually operates. We are an implementation partner for several of the products named in this guide, and some partner arrangements include referral fees. Our recommendations are based on implementation experience with Australian merchants, not on commercial terms.
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