Stocky Is Shutting Down (Aug 31, 2026): What It Actually Did and What You Actually Need

Stocky is going away. Here's what that actually means for your store.

Shopify announced that Stocky, the free inventory management tool bundled with Shopify POS, will be shut down on August 31, 2026. If you've been using Stocky for purchase orders and demand forecasting, you're now being pushed toward third-party apps that start at $59/month and can quickly push to $1000.

Before you sign up for anything, it's worth understanding what Stocky was actually doing under the hood. The answer might surprise you: it was simpler than you think.

What Stocky's "demand forecasting" actually calculated

Stocky offered six forecast modes when generating a Purchase Order. Here's what each one did, per Shopify's own documentation:

Forecast Mode	What It Actually Did
Last X days	Total units sold in a sample period, divided by number of days, multiplied by a "Suggest for" window you set.
Custom date range	Same math as above, but you pick a specific historical window (e.g., a past sale event).
Same period last year	Looks at orders placed during the same date range last year and suggests ordering that same amount.
Fill shelves	Orders up to a static shelf limit you set per product. No calculation involved.
Fill shelves (if below min)	Same as above, but only triggers if stock is below a minimum level you manually set.
Target stock level	You enter a number; Stocky tells you the gap between current stock and that number.

That's it. The "forecasting" was a simple average: total units sold over a sample period, divided by days, projected forward. No standard deviation. No service level factor. No safety stock formula. No Economic Order Quantity.

The min/max levels were static numbers set manually by the merchant, not dynamically calculated from demand variability or lead time.

What Stocky did NOT do

It's equally important to understand what Stocky's forecasting didn't include:

No safety stock calculation. There was no buffer for demand variability or supply uncertainty.
No reorder point formula. It didn't tell you when to order, only how much to order for a period you specified.
No lead time integration in the forecast. Per-product lead time was stored in supplier records, but it wasn't automatically factored into the suggested quantity. You had to manually set the "Suggest for" days to cover your lead time.
No Economic Order Quantity (EOQ). There was no balancing of ordering costs vs. holding costs.
No demand variability measurement. It didn't track how much your daily sales fluctuated, which is the entire basis of intelligent safety stock.

What Stocky DID do well

Let's be fair. Stocky had one genuinely valuable feature that a spreadsheet can't replicate: the forecast-to-PO pipeline.

When you generated a Purchase Order in Stocky, it:

Applied your chosen forecast method
Auto-populated the PO with product line items and suggested quantities
Let you review and edit quantities
Emailed the PO directly to your supplier as a PDF or CSV

That workflow, from forecast to sent PO in one click, was Stocky's real value. It wasn't the math. It was the execution layer.

What you actually need (and what costs $0/month)

If you have a relatively small number of SKUs (under 500) and a handful of suppliers, the math Stocky was doing can be replicated and improved in a well-structured spreadsheet.

Here's what a proper inventory planning spreadsheet should calculate that Stocky never did:

Average daily demand: same as Stocky, but the foundation for everything else
Demand variability (standard deviation): how much your daily sales fluctuate
Safety stock: a statistically-derived buffer based on your desired service level AND both demand and lead time variability
Reorder point: the exact inventory level at which you should place an order
Days of supply: how many days your current stock will last at current demand
Days to stockout: factoring in incoming inventory
Economic Order Quantity: the mathematically optimal order size balancing ordering and holding costs

A spreadsheet running these formulas gives you better planning intelligence than Stocky ever provided. The tradeoff is the execution step: you'll export your reorder list and either build the PO in Shopify Admin or send it to your supplier manually.

For most stores with a handful of suppliers, that's a 5-minute step once a week.

When you DO need an app

A dedicated app earns its keep when:

You have dozens of suppliers with different lead times and MOQs, and you're generating POs weekly or more frequently
You need multi-location inventory planning across warehouses or retail locations
You want automated PO drafting so the system builds suggested orders for you to review and approve before sending
Your SKU count exceeds 500 and manual data paste becomes unwieldy

If that's you, an app makes sense. But even then, the pricing should reflect the actual complexity of the work. SKU count is what drives planning complexity, not order volume, not user count.

The bottom line

Stocky's shutdown feels urgent, but the math it was doing was not sophisticated. Before you commit to $59 to $250 or more per month in recurring fees, ask yourself:

How many SKUs do I actually need to plan?
How many suppliers do I order from?
How often do I place orders?

If the answers are "under 500," "a handful," and "weekly," you don't need an enterprise inventory platform. You need a well-built spreadsheet and 10 minutes every Monday.