Stocky Alternatives (2026): What to Move To Before Aug 31
Stocky shuts down on 31 August 2026. Every “best Stocky alternative” list answers the question as if there is one answer, and there isn’t. We read every Stocky thread in the Shopify Community. That is 95 threads and 619 posts. 61% of them come from merchants whose problem is a retail counter, not a sales channel. Those two groups need different software, and telling them apart before you buy is worth more than any feature comparison.
The other thing the lists miss: the hard part isn’t the purchase order tool. In those 619 posts, receiving came up in 255 and getting your history out came up in 227. Landed cost, the thing most alternatives lead with, came up in 106.
What actually happens on 31 August?
Shopify’s own help page is short about it: “The Stocky app will no longer be available after August 31st, 2026.” It points merchants at Shopify’s native inventory features and gives no migration procedure, with one warning attached: “Data from the uninstalled Stocky app might not be retrievable upon reinstallation of the app.”
That absence is the part merchants are angriest about. One put it plainly:
“If you’re going to sunset an app, at least have the wherewithal to offer a proper alternative to migrate all data correctly to the new system.”
Your purchase order history, supplier records and cost history live inside Stocky. If you want them, export them before the date. That is true no matter which tool you pick next, and it is the single most time-sensitive thing on this page.
Are you a POS shop or a multi-channel seller?
This is the fork, and it decides everything else.
Stocky was attached to Shopify POS, so a large share of the merchants losing it run physical stores. Their day is a counter, a stockroom and a supplier. Here is one of them, describing the loss:
“Now, without Stocky we will have to go through so many steps to do the most basic functions that a POS should be offering for a shop.”
If that is you, SKU.io is the wrong tool and you should stop reading this page. We are built for merchants selling across Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, eBay and TikTok, where the hard problem is one stock number staying true across channels. A single retail location doesn’t have that problem, and paying multi-channel prices to solve it would be a waste. Look at Sumtracker or Fabrikator for straightforward purchase orders and stocktaking, or Inventory Planner if forecasting is the thing you actually miss.
The other group is smaller in that thread count but it is where Stocky’s departure genuinely hurts: merchants who were using it as the purchasing brain for a business that also sells on marketplaces. They have the counter and the channels.
What do merchants say they are actually losing?
Not features. Views.
“It feels like a lot of the frustration isn’t coming from missing individual features, but from losing the condensed operational views people built their daily workflows around.”
That matches what shows up over and over in the threads. Small, specific, load-bearing things. One merchant:
“I can no longer sort my POs by expected receive date which is critical for our business.”
That is a two-word feature and it decides whether someone can plan a week. When you evaluate a replacement, take the three screens you look at every morning and check those, rather than reading a feature matrix.
What breaks in the migration itself?
Three things, in the order they bite.
Your history doesn’t come with you. Purchase orders, supplier terms, cost history. Export to CSV before the 31st even if you have not chosen a tool yet. A CSV you don’t need is cheaper than a history you can’t recover.
Your cost basis arrives wrong. If unit costs come across without freight and duty, every margin number downstream is wrong, and wrong in the direction that flatters the product, which is the worst way to be wrong, because nothing looks broken. Check landed cost on a handful of SKUs against a real supplier invoice before trusting any report.
Receiving is where the new tool actually gets judged. Creating a purchase order is the easy half. What breaks is what happens after: partial shipments, items that arrive damaged, a transfer marked complete when the truck leaves rather than when someone receives it, so for a week both locations think they hold the same units. One operator in the threads:
“For us, the hardest part is keeping transfers and receiving accurate when staff are busy.”
The fix is a property of the software, not of your staff: transfers should stay in transit until the receiving side scans and accepts them, and a stock take should freeze the SKUs it covers so nobody fulfils an order halfway through your count.
What should multi-channel sellers look for?
Four questions, in order of how much they cost you when the answer is wrong.
| Question | Why it matters | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Does one stock number serve every channel? | Oversells happen at the seam between systems | Single source of truth, not per-channel counts |
| Is receiving line-by-line? | Partial shipments are the norm, not the exception | Receive against the PO line, with separate received and outstanding quantities |
| Do transfers have an in-transit state? | Phantom stock at both ends otherwise | Stock leaves origin on dispatch, arrives on scan |
| Is landed cost per unit, including freight and duty? | Margin decisions are made on it | Cost allocated across PO lines, not typed per product |
If a tool can’t answer all four, it is a purchase order form with a nice interface.
Where SKU.io fits
We are multi-channel inventory and order management: Shopify plus Amazon, Walmart, eBay and TikTok, with purchasing, receiving, transfers, landed cost and demand planning in one system. Pricing starts at $1,000/month, which tells you the shape of the business it suits. Merchants where inventory being wrong costs more than the software.
Being straight about the rest of it: we are not a POS-first tool, we don’t do the retail counter, and a single-location shop replacing Stocky will find us heavier and more expensive than the job needs. If you are running one store and a stockroom, take the recommendations further up this page. They are better answers for you than we are.
If you sell across channels and Stocky was the thing keeping purchasing honest, that is the gap we fill. The two weeks before the shutdown are the right time to look, not the two weeks after.
Book a demo and we’ll go through your actual purchase order and receiving flow, not a slide deck.