Shopify Is Retiring Stocky on August 31, 2026: The Gap Your Replacement Won't Fill

# The Short Version

Shopify is shutting down Stocky on August 31, 2026. If you used it for purchase orders, demand forecasting, and stocktakes, you'll need a replacement, and the internet is already full of round-ups pointing you at Prediko, Katana, Inventory Planner, and a dozen others.

Most of those lists miss one thing. Stocky was a planning tool, not a picking tool. It helped you decide what to reorder and when to count, but it never told a warehouse picker which shelf to walk to. As you rebuild your inventory stack this summer, it's easy to overlook the physical-location gap, even though closing it is cheap.

# What's Happening With Stocky?

Stocky was Shopify's own inventory-management app, bundled free with a Shopify POS Pro subscription. For years it was the default answer for merchants who wanted demand forecasting, purchase order creation, supplier management, and periodic stocktakes without paying for a third-party tool. On August 31, 2026, Shopify is retiring it.

That leaves a large base of merchants with a hard deadline and an obvious question: what replaces it? Most agencies and review sites have answered the same way, recommending forecasting and replenishment platforms that recreate Stocky's planning features, usually with more polish and some AI added.

# What Stocky Did, and What It Never Did

Stocky lived on the planning side of your operation. It looked at sales velocity to forecast demand, generated purchase orders to suppliers, tracked incoming stock, and let you run stocktakes to correct your counts. All of that deals with quantities and timing, not with geography.

What Stocky never did was tell you where those units physically live. It had no concept of aisles, racks, shelves, or bins. Like Shopify itself, it treated a Location as a single bucket. If you had 300 units of a SKU split between a pick face and an overstock shelf, Stocky knew you had 300 units. It could not tell a picker that 40 are in Bin A1 and 260 are up on the high shelf.

This was never a flaw in Stocky; it was built for a different job. The catch is that replacing it one-for-one restores the planning features and carries forward the same blind spot on the warehouse floor you had before.

# The Gap Every "Stocky Alternative" List Ignores

Open any current Stocky-alternative round-up and the same categories repeat: demand forecasting, automated reordering, multi-channel sync, supplier and PO management. Those features are useful, and most growing merchants do need a forecasting tool to fill the hole Stocky leaves.

None of them solve bin-level picking, though, because that was never Stocky's job and isn't theirs. You can move to the most capable forecasting platform available and your pickers will still wander the floor looking for stock, because Shopify supports only one bin-location field per SKU. The migration fixes planning and leaves the physical-location gap untouched.

# Why Now Is a Good Time to Fix Bin Locations Too

A forced migration is a hassle, but it is a sensible time to fix related problems. Your team is already re-evaluating tools, re-importing data, and learning a new workflow. Adding a bin-location layer during that reset adds little extra disruption. Bolting it on six months later means changing a workflow your staff has only just settled into.

Try not to treat "replace Stocky" as a like-for-like swap. If the only goal is to restore forecasting and POs, you rebuild the planning half of your operation and carry the same memory-based picking into 2027. The sunset is a good reason to ask a second question alongside "what tells me when to reorder?": what tells my pickers where to go?

# How BinTech Fills the Physical-Location Gap

BinTech is not a Stocky replacement, by design. It doesn't do forecasting, purchase orders, or supplier management. What it handles is the part the alternatives lists skip. It subdivides Shopify's on-hand inventory into exact physical bin locations and routes your pickers along the shortest path.

Pair it with whatever forecasting tool you choose for Stocky's planning side and the two cover different jobs. Your forecasting tool decides what to buy and when. BinTech makes sure that once stock arrives, every unit has a precise address and every order produces a location-sorted pick list. It also handles the accuracy work Stocky did at the count level. Cycle counts with lockable bins reconcile against Shopify when you confirm them, replacing the all-or-nothing stocktake, and a variance bin captures external changes like a POS sale, damaged stock, or a surprise return so your counts don't drift out of sync.

The pricing also suits merchants who just lost a free tool. There's a free tier for a small catalog and one location, then paid tiers that scale by SKU count and number of locations up to unlimited. It's a flat monthly subscription that never charges per order, so the cost stays predictable while you rebuild the rest of your stack. Current prices and limits are on the pricing page .

# What to Do Before August 31

Plan your replacement as two parts rather than one. First, choose a forecasting and purchasing tool to take over Stocky's planning role. Second, decide how you'll track physical bin locations, since no forecasting tool will do it for you and Shopify won't either.

Migrate forecasting without addressing bins and you've closed half the gap. Handle both while your team is already mid-migration, and you'll come out of the Stocky shutdown with faster picking than you had going in, and staff who know exactly where to go.