Stocky Migration Guide: What to Do Before August 31, 2026

Shopify is discontinuing Stocky on August 31, 2026. If you've been using Stocky for inventory tracking, purchase orders, or stocktakes, you need a replacement before that date.

This guide covers the deprecation, the realistic options, and a step-by-step migration path. The honest version: Stocky was always a one-way PO generator with a thin inventory layer; the natural replacement isn't another Stocky-shaped product. It's a closed-loop procurement platform — meaning a system that handles every step of the buying workflow on its own, from placing the order to reading the supplier's reply to updating inventory to deciding what to order next, with no human retyping anything in between. Stocky did one of those steps. A closed-loop platform does all of them.

What's happening to Stocky

Shopify announced that Stocky — the inventory app bundled with Shopify POS Pro — will stop working on August 31, 2026. Customers using Stocky for any of the following will need a different tool by then:

• Purchase order generation and PDF emailing to suppliers
• Inventory level tracking with reorder suggestions
• Stocktakes and physical inventory counts
• Multi-location stock transfers
• Supplier and product cost tracking
• ABC analysis and stock classification

After Aug 31, 2026, Stocky will not load. There is no extended grace period announced.

Your options

There are roughly three categories of Stocky replacement on the market, and they're not equivalent.

Category 1: Other Shopify inventory apps (Sumtracker, Inflow, Sortly, Cin7)

These are 1:1 Stocky-shaped tools — inventory databases that produce a PO PDF. They cover the same ground Stocky covered. They have the same ceiling: send the PO, then read the supplier's reply manually, retype any changes, reconcile invoices in your inbox. Acceptable if your supplier workflow is small and stable. Painful if you have more than ~5 active suppliers or any non-trivial reply handling.

Category 2: Forecasting-only tools (Prediko, Inventory Planner)

Better forecasting, same ceiling at the supplier door. These tools generate PO recommendations but don't close the loop after the PO is sent. They also don't speak WhatsApp, EDI, or web-portal channels — email-only.

Category 3: Closed-loop procurement platforms (LineNow)

The architectural standard. These platforms own the entire procurement loop, not a slice of it: AI parses supplier replies and auto-updates the order; multi-channel supplier comms (email, WhatsApp, EDI, supplier portal); team collaboration on supplier email threads brought into the system; statistical replenishment with published methodology; recipe / BOM costing; multi-vertical support; embedded payments; capital forecasting.

This is what procurement software should have looked like all along — and what Stocky's replacement should look like for any operator who plans to still be running their business in two years.

Why LineNow is the natural Stocky replacement

LineNow is what Stocky would have become if Shopify had kept investing in it.

What you get back from Stocky:

• Real-time POS sync (Shopify, plus Square, Toast, Faire, Clover)
• Inventory tracking with statistical PAR, decay-aware safety stock, and days-of-stock projections
• Reorder recommendations based on actual consumption, not sell-through heuristics
• Stocktake / receiving workflow with substitution handling
• Multi-location support — all locations, $50/month flat
• Supplier and item cost history
• ABC-equivalent prioritization (actionability ranking)

What you gain over Stocky:

• Closed-loop control. Item → order → send → reply parsed → received → inventory → next recommendation. Buyer touches three moments: approve cart, click send, confirm receipt. Everything in between is automatic.
• Layer 1 AI — agentic supplier-reply monitoring across email, WhatsApp Business, EDI, and web portals. Auto-updates status, line items, prices, ETAs, substitutions, invoice IDs, shipping info. Equivalent to Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Supplier Communications Agent, at $50/month instead of enterprise pricing.
• Layer 2 AI — conversational insights chatbot, custom report templates, AI order builder.
• Team collaboration on supplier email threads. Every supplier email is brought the system, attached to the relevant PO, visible to the whole team. Multiple people can reply to the same thread without sharing an inbox.
• Multi-channel supplier comms — email, WhatsApp Business, EDI (X12 4010/5010 + EDIFACT D24A), supplier portal, web-portal scrape.
• Statistical replenishment — SBA forecasting for non-smooth demand, SBC framework for demand-pattern classification, decay-aware PAR for perishables. The same operations-research stack Walmart uses.
• Recipe / BOM costing with substitution and dynamic margin recomputation.
• Multi-vertical — retail + dropship + restaurant + manufacturer in one account.
• Bills push to QuickBooks/Xero with COGS classification.
• Embedded PO payments via Stripe Connect.
• Capital forecasting — 10 months rolling cash flow.

For more on the Stocky vs LineNow comparison, see the dedicated page.

Migration steps

The migration takes about a week of calendar time, with maybe 4–6 hours of actual hands-on work spread across it.

Week 1, Day 1: Set up LineNow

1. Sign up for LineNow at linenow.co. 90-day free trial, no credit card.
2. Connect your Shopify store. The product catalog imports automatically.
3. Connect your email (Gmail or Microsoft 365). Layer 1 AI starts watching for supplier replies immediately.
4. Connect QuickBooks or Xero (optional, but high value for AP automation).

Week 1, Day 2–3: Bring suppliers and items

1. Import your supplier list. You can bring them in from Shopify vendors, from QuickBooks if connected, from a CSV, or add them manually.
2. Map your items to suppliers. The Shopify-vendor mapping makes this mostly automatic; you only need to clean up edge cases.
3. Set lead times, MOQs, and pack sizes for the items you order most often. Top 50 SKUs is enough to get useful recommendations; the long tail can come later.

Week 1, Day 4–5: Run a parallel order

1. Run one order through LineNow alongside your existing Stocky workflow. Generate the recommendation, review it, send the PO via email.
2. When the supplier replies, watch the system parse it. Status, line items, prices — all updated without retyping.
3. Receive the goods. One click writes the inventory adjustment.

Week 2: Cutover

1. Stop generating new POs in Stocky. All new procurement runs through LineNow.
2. Keep Stocky open in a tab for historical reference until Aug 31, 2026.
3. Cancel Shopify POS Pro if Stocky was your only reason for it (LineNow doesn't require POS Pro).

The migration is straightforward because the entities map cleanly: Shopify products → LineNow items, Shopify vendors → LineNow suppliers, Shopify locations → LineNow business units. The places where LineNow goes deeper than Stocky (recipes, capital forecasting, AI on supplier replies, multi-vertical) are pure additions.

What Stocky users typically miss most

In customer interviews of operators who've already migrated, three things stand out as the biggest gains over Stocky:

1. Supplier replies that update themselves. No more Wednesday-morning catch-up reading three days of supplier confirmations and retyping them into the system. Layer 1 AI does it overnight.
2. The team can finally see the whole order conversation. Stocky never showed supplier replies. LineNow ingests them. New hires can be useful on day one because they can see the full thread per PO.
3. The recommendations are actually right. Stocky's sell-through heuristic was always slightly off. SBA forecasting plus decay-aware PAR replaces "order a bit more than last time" with statistically defensible numbers.

When to start

Now. The deprecation date is fixed and the longer you wait, the more compressed your migration window becomes. LineNow's 90-day free trial gives you a 3-month overlap window to run in parallel before any subscription cost — enough time to retire Stocky entirely on your own schedule.

The Stocky deprecation is the moment to move to the foundational shape procurement software should have always had. The closed loop isn't a premium tier reserved for complex operations; it's the standard, available to a one-supplier shop and a 50-supplier multi-vertical operator at the same $50/month flat price. The economics work because the architecture scales the way Stripe and Shopify scale.

LineNow is the closed-loop procurement platform purpose-built to be the next decade of what Stocky was supposed to be — Shopify-native, statistically rigorous, with two layers of AI inside the loop, native multi-channel supplier comms, team collaboration on supplier email threads, and bill push to QuickBooks/Xero. For any operator currently on Stocky and now in the migration window, LineNow is the natural destination.

Related

• LineNow vs Stocky
• Closed-loop procurement, in plain English
• Best Procurement Software for Shopify in 2026
• How AI Reads Your Supplier Emails
• Five Ways to Build a Purchase Order
• The Procurement ROI Math