Shopify's native inventory covers most of what Stocky did. What it does not replace is the schedule around your stock count, and that absence starts costing you at five stores in a way it never did at one.
Stocky stops working after August 31, 2026, and its APIs stop the same day. Shopify's guidance is to move your inventory workflows into Shopify admin and Shopify POS. That advice is sound. It is also incomplete in one specific place, and the place it is incomplete is the one that scales with your store count.
The short answer: The best Stocky replacement depends on store count. One-store retailers can usually move to Shopify native inventory and Quick Count. Multi-store retailers usually need Shopify native inventory plus an operations layer for scheduled cycle counts, staff assignment, reorder points, landed cost and store-to-store transfer workflows.
That is where the Stocky replacement question gets more specific. If you run one store, Shopify Quick Count may be enough. If you run multiple stores, the likely replacement is Shopify native inventory plus an operations layer for the work around the count: who owns it, when it happens, what is still open, and what becomes a purchase order or transfer when the work is done.
What does Shopify's native inventory actually replace?
Most of it. Purchase orders, inventory transfers, stock adjustments and in-store counts are all native now, and they work. Shopify's June 2026 changelog says purchase orders now create linked transfers, with receiving in admin or POS and partial deliveries tracked as separate shipments. Quick Count shipped in October 2025 so staff can scan on-hand quantities on a POS device and sync them straight to admin. If your Stocky usage was purchase orders, receiving and the occasional count, you will land on your feet.
Shopify's own migration guide is candid about what did not come across. Min and max reorder points need custom metafields or a third-party app. A product carries a single Vendor field, so a SKU you buy from two suppliers needs metafields as well. Weighted-average costing needs a third-party costing app. Historical purchase orders cannot be imported at all, so whatever supplier history you want to keep, you export before the 31st or you lose it.
Merchants working through the change have named more. In Shopify's own community thread on the sunset, a high-volume art supply retailer lists what native purchase orders do not carry: a default tax rate, so you enter one per line across hundreds of variants; a pack size field, so bulk ordering has nowhere to live; automatic currency conversion; the ability to merge two purchase orders; and columns that show sales and stock levels while you are deciding what to order.
Those are real gaps, and the market has noticed. The quieter gap sits underneath them: the operating rhythm around inventory work.
Why does the count get harder at five stores than at one?
Because Quick Count is a counting tool, and Stocky gave you a counting process. Quick Count handles up to 1,000 variants in a session and syncs on submit. There is no schedule attached to it, no way to assign it to a named staff member, and no record of a count as a job that was planned, worked and closed.
Shopify is straightforward about what that means at scale. Its guidance for stores past 5,000 variants is to count across multiple days, by zone, with three or more people, and to decide whether you pause inter-location transfers while the window is open. That is correct advice. It is also a project plan, and Quick Count does not hold the plan for you. Someone does, usually in a shared calendar and a spreadsheet, once per store, four times a year.
Ward Bates, who owns Winter Park Cycles, put the arithmetic plainly in Shopify's case study on his shop: "One pair of shoes can have six colors, and then you've got 12 sizes." That is 72 variants from one product. A specialty retailer clears the 1,000-variant session cap in a single aisle, and clears it again in the next store.
At one location, a manager absorbs the coordination and nobody feels it. At eight, the plan itself becomes the work. The count still gets done, because you have run this business for years and you know what happens to a store that stops counting. What changes is that the schedule now lives outside the system, so nobody can see from admin which stores are current, which are mid-count, and which variances were recounted rather than accepted.
What replaces Stocky's stocktakes and reorder points?
WorkMate is Teifi's operations layer built on top of Shopify POS and Shopify admin. Operational work stays tied to Shopify inventory records rather than becoming a detached parallel system. It closes the specific gaps above, and each one is dated in WorkMate's public changelog.
WorkMate was not built because Stocky is ending. It was built because specialty retailers had already outgrown Stocky-style workflows. Transfer orders shipped in July 2024, cycle-count scheduling and employee assignments followed in August 2024, and reorder-point workflows were live by October 2024. The sunset changes the deadline, not the product thesis.
Counts you can schedule and assign. WorkMate's August 27, 2024 changelog says its cycle count deployment added advanced scheduling, employee assignments, status tracking, and sorting and filtering for cycle counts. Since May 2026, unscheduled purchase orders, special orders, stock transfers and cycle counts can be dragged into the calendar the same way work-order tasks can. The count becomes a job with a name on it, visible from admin, across every location.
Reorder points that draft the purchase order. WorkMate's October 15, 2024 changelog says merchants can import and set reorder points, or min and max numbers, that auto-create draft purchase orders. This is the capability those community threads name most often, and it is the reason a buyer's Monday morning starts with a queue to approve rather than a report to read.
True cost at the moment you receive. WorkMate's November 18, 2025 changelog says users can adjust unit costs during receiving to incorporate freight, shipping and duties, and assign serial numbers as products are received. Its February 17, 2026 changelog says weighted average cost recalculates when new inventory is received, uses a configurable rolling window that defaults to twelve months, and can include received and sold items. Shopify's migration guide sends you to a third-party costing app for this.
Multi-store movement without the spreadsheet trail. WorkMate supports multi-vendor SKU relationships, barcode scanning across operational records, and guided transfer workflows for picking, sending and receiving. Transfer orders shipped in July 2024, before Stocky's sunset became the story, because multi-location retailers already needed a cleaner way to move stock between stores. Merchants can also raise a transfer straight from a Shopify sales order when the stock sits at another store, with rejected quantities recorded when damaged or incorrect stock arrives.
If you are running counts across several Shopify POS locations, Teifi can assess whether Shopify native inventory is enough or whether you need an operations layer around it.
Who needs a Stocky alternative beyond Shopify native inventory?
- You run three or more Shopify POS locations.
- You carry more than 1,000 variants in a store, department or count zone.
- You need named staff members assigned to count work.
- You buy the same SKU from more than one supplier.
- You need reorder-point workflows, landed cost or weighted-average cost after Stocky.
Which Stocky replacement path fits you?
| If this is true | Likely path |
|---|---|
| You run one store and count it in an afternoon | Shopify native inventory plus Quick Count |
| You run multiple stores and need scheduled counts | Shopify native inventory plus WorkMate |
| Forecasting is the Stocky feature you need most | Planning or forecasting tool plus Shopify |
| You need reorder points, landed cost or multi-vendor SKU workflows | WorkMate assessment |
| You mainly need old Stocky records | Export and archive before the cutoff |
What WorkMate does not replace
Demand forecasting. Stocky suggested order quantities from your sales history and gave products an ABC rating, and WorkMate does not do that. If forecasting is the Stocky feature you will actually miss, pair a planning tool with WorkMate rather than looking for one product that does both. The two jobs are genuinely different. Forecasting decides what to buy. WorkMate runs the stores that receive it, count it, and move it between each other.
We would rather tell you that now than have you find it in month two.
Does WorkMate hold up in production?
Rack Attack is the multi-store version of this problem. The North American vehicle-rack retailer went live on Shopify POS and WorkMate across 50+ locations in Canada and the US, after years on fragmented legacy systems: separate POS, separate fitment data, separate work-order tools and separate messaging.
That is the operational class this article is about. WorkMate supports the in-store workflows around the transaction: vehicle fitment, package selling, work orders, installation flows, customer messaging and back-office synchronization. The question is not whether one store can count inventory. It is whether a multi-location specialty retailer can keep complex store work tied to Shopify instead of rebuilding the old stack around it.
Winter Park Cycles still matters as specialty-retail proof. It migrated off Lightspeed onto Shopify POS with WorkMate and had 15,000 SKUs live in seven weeks. Inside the first 90 days the shop processed $600,000 across nearly 1,000 orders with zero chargebacks and posted a record sales month. Shopify published those numbers, not us.
Shopify also features WorkMate on its own point of sale page for bike shops, where Brandon Waterman, co-owner of Good Weather Bicycles, describes the result as "one platform for in store, online, and work orders that's built to manage our entire bike shop."
What should you do before Stocky shuts down on August 31?
Export your supplier records and your purchase order history out of Stocky this week, because neither survives the cutoff and neither can be imported afterwards. That is true whichever direction you go next.
Use this as the minimum export checklist:
- Supplier records
- Vendor relationships
- Purchase order history
- Open purchase orders
- Reorder point or min/max data
- Cost records
- Count history, if you need an audit trail
- Screenshots or exports for anything Stocky shows but Shopify native inventory will not import cleanly
Then decide honestly how much of Stocky you were actually using. If you run one store and count it in an afternoon, Quick Count may be enough. If you run several, and the thing you are quietly dreading is not the count but the coordination of counts across locations with no system holding the plan, that is the gap we built for.
Book a migration assessment with Teifi
Thirty minutes, your store count and your SKU count, and a straight answer on whether you need us.
Common questions
Does Shopify replace Stocky?
Shopify native inventory replaces many Stocky workflows, including purchase orders, transfers, adjustments and in-store counts. It does not replace every Stocky workflow, and Shopify's own migration guidance points merchants to custom metafields or third-party apps for some gaps.
What happens to Stocky after August 31, 2026?
Stocky stops working after August 31, 2026, and its APIs stop the same day. Export supplier records and purchase order history before the cutoff if you need to keep them.
Can Shopify Quick Count replace Stocky stocktakes?
For a single store with a manageable count, yes. For multi-store retailers, Quick Count is the counting tool, but the schedule, staff assignment, count status and cross-location visibility still have to live somewhere else.
What Stocky features are not in Shopify native inventory?
Shopify's migration guide calls out gaps around min and max reorder points, multi-vendor SKUs, weighted-average costing and historical purchase order imports. Merchants have also raised purchase-order workflow gaps in Shopify's community forum.
Does WorkMate replace Stocky forecasting?
No. WorkMate does not replace Stocky's demand forecasting or ABC analysis. If forecasting is the capability you need most, use a planning tool alongside WorkMate.
What should I export from Stocky before the cutoff?
Export supplier records and purchase order history before August 31. Those records matter whichever Stocky replacement path you choose.
