Shopify is retiring Stocky, the inventory app that came bundled with Shopify POS Pro. If you've used it to plan purchase orders, forecast demand, or track suppliers, you have a firm deadline and some data you need to rescue before it's gone. This guide lays out the timeline, exactly what to export, and — if you sell apparel or footwear — what to look for in whatever you move to. It's written to be useful whether or not you ever look at our own app.
What's happening, and when
Shopify has confirmed a phased retirement of Stocky. These are the dates that matter, per Shopify's own migration documentation:
7 July 2025 — first features removed
Inventory transfers between locations and min/max forecasting were switched off. If your replenishment relied on these, that workflow already changed over a year ago.
2 February 2026 — delisted from the App Store
Stocky was removed from the Shopify App Store. No new installs, and — this is the one that catches people out — no reinstalls. If you uninstall it, you generally can't get it back except by contacting Shopify Support, who may not be able to help. Until you've migrated, don't uninstall Stocky.
31 August 2026 — full shutdown
Stocky stops functioning entirely and all of its APIs cease to work. Any third-party tool or custom dashboard wired into Stocky's API will break on this date. After shutdown, Shopify says you'll keep read-only access to export your data for at least 90 days — but you can no longer use the app to manage inventory.
The practical takeaway: 31 August 2026 is the hard stop, but the read-only export window afterward is limited and not guaranteed indefinitely. Treat the deadline as the date your data needs to already be out.
What does not come with you
The single biggest misconception is that switching to Shopify's native inventory tools carries your history across. It doesn't. A few specifics worth knowing before you plan your exit:
- Historical data doesn't auto-migrate. Old purchase orders, stocktakes, and inventory records stay in Stocky. They do not move into Shopify. If you want them, you must export them manually using Stocky's built-in reports.
- Suppliers can't be exported at all. Supplier records — the contacts, lead times, minimum order quantities, and case-pack terms you've built up — cannot be exported from Stocky. If you don't write them down, they're gone permanently on shutdown.
- Forecasting settings can't be exported. Reorder points, safety-stock levels, min/max thresholds, and the forecasting logic you tuned live only inside Stocky. There's no export for them; they have to be documented by hand.
- Historical POs can't be imported into Shopify. Shopify's native CSV upload only creates new draft purchase orders with product line items — it can't restore past PO statuses, received quantities, or supplier links.
Your export checklist — do this before 31 August 2026
Work through this while Stocky still functions. Everything here gets materially harder, or impossible, after the shutdown.
Export your reports to CSV
In Shopify admin, go to Apps › Stocky › Reports and export what you'll want later — purchase order history, stocktakes/adjustments, historical stock-on-hand, best-sellers, and ABC analysis. Most reports are available as CSV and PDF. Save them somewhere durable (cloud storage), not just a laptop.
Tip: before exporting, confirm the staff account has app access under Settings › Users and permissions, and that Stocky's time zone matches your business — mismatched time zones cause date discrepancies in the exported reports.
Manually document your suppliers
Since supplier data can't be exported, build a simple spreadsheet capturing, per supplier: contact details, lead time, minimum order quantity, whether that MOQ is per style or per colourway, and case-pack size. These are the terms that drive every buying decision — recreating them from memory later is painful and error-prone.
Write down your forecasting logic
For your priority styles, note the reorder points, safety-stock levels, and the reasoning behind them — the forecasting mode you relied on and why. This is the knowledge that makes a replacement productive on day one instead of starting from a blank slate.
Close out in-flight purchase orders
Shopify recommends you stop creating new POs in Stocky about two weeks before the deadline, and receive and close any open, in-transit POs before cutover. For anything still open at the switch, recreate only the remaining quantities in your new system.
Clean up before you export
Run a final inventory check and fix negative stock, duplicate SKUs, and outdated locations before your final export, so the data you carry forward is clean. If your new tool keys on SKUs, make sure every variant has a unique one.
Where your inventory planning goes next
Broadly, Shopify merchants land in one of two places. Shopify's native inventory tools in the admin and POS now cover the basics — location-based stock tracking, transfers, adjustments, low-stock alerts, basic purchase orders, and syncing across channels. For simple operations, that may genuinely be enough, and it keeps costs down.
What Shopify's native tools don't replace is the planning layer many merchants relied on Stocky for: demand forecasting from your sales history, automated reorder points, and structured supplier/PO workflows. If you need those, most brands adopt a hybrid setup — Shopify admin stays the system of record for inventory levels, and a dedicated planning tool sits on top to handle forecasting and purchasing.
Which path is right depends entirely on how much of Stocky you actually used. If it was just stock counts and the odd transfer, native may cover you. If forecasting and purchasing were the point, you'll want a dedicated replacement.
If you sell sized products: what to look for in a replacement
Here's the part most generic migration advice skips. If you sell apparel, footwear, or anything else that comes in a size run across colours, your inventory problem is fundamentally different from a single-SKU store's — and not every replacement is built for it. Rather than tell you which tool to pick, here are the questions worth asking of any option you evaluate:
- Does it forecast at the size level, or just the style level? A style can look healthy while its bestselling sizes are sold out. Ask whether recommendations come per size and colour, or as one number for the whole style that you're left to split yourself.
- Does it detect broken size runs? When your core sizes (say M, L, XL) are gone but the style still shows plenty of total stock in the tails, will the tool flag that — and tell you which specific sizes to top up?
- Does it handle your size curve when reordering? A reorder shouldn't be one quantity spread evenly across sizes. Ask whether it works out a per-size quantity based on how each size actually sells.
- Can it handle MOQs the way your suppliers actually quote them? Minimums applied per style versus per colourway change the maths fourfold. Ask whether you can set the basis per supplier, and whether it rounds to case packs.
- Does it clean up its own demand signal? Weeks when you were out of stock look like low-demand weeks unless the tool accounts for them, and promotions distort the baseline. Ask how it handles stockout and promo periods when learning demand.
- Will migrating your data actually be workable? Given nothing imports automatically from Stocky, ask how you get your supplier terms and history in, and how quickly you'll be productive.
Every one of these is a place where a tool built for apparel behaves differently from a general-purpose inventory app. You don't need anyone to tell you which is "best" — ask these questions, and the right fit for a sized-product catalogue becomes obvious quickly.
A sensible timeline
You don't need to do everything today, but "I'll deal with it in August" is how people end up rebuilding in a panic with no clean export. A calmer sequence:
- Now: export your Stocky reports and document suppliers and forecasting settings. This protects your data regardless of what you choose next.
- Over the next few weeks: decide native vs. dedicated, and if dedicated, trial a replacement on real data so you're comfortable with it before you depend on it.
- Well before 31 August: run parallel for a short period, validate that stock, transfers, and reorders behave, then switch over — leaving a buffer before the shutdown, not the day of.
Built for apparel, if that's what you sell
Stovura is a Shopify app for apparel and footwear brands. It forecasts demand per size and colour, catches broken size runs, handles MOQs per style or colourway, and turns it into a clear buy list. If the questions above resonate, it's built to answer them — and there's a free trial to try it on your own data.
See Stovura on the Shopify App StoreThis guide summarises publicly available information about Shopify's Stocky retirement, including Shopify's own migration documentation, and is provided to help merchants plan. Dates and details are Shopify's and may change; always check Shopify's current Help Center guidance for the authoritative timeline before acting.
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