If you ran your purchase orders through Stocky, this week is not a fun one.
Shopify pulled the app from its store in February and switched it off for good on August 31, 2026. Supplier records could not be exported, so a lot of merchants spent August retyping lead times and contact details into a spreadsheet at eleven at night. I have had three of those conversations already.
The upside is that being forced to choose again is a decent thing. Most stores were using Stocky because it came bundled with POS Pro, not because it fit.
So before you install the first replacement that ranks well in the app store, answer one question: whose inventory are you actually managing?
Two jobs wearing the same name
Shopify merchants use the phrase inventory management software for two problems that barely overlap.
The first is owned stock. You bought it, it sits in your warehouse or your 3PL, and the work is forecasting, reorder points, purchase orders and landed cost. Get it wrong and you either tie up cash in dead SKUs or sell out of your hero product in week two of Q4.
The second is inventory you never bought. Partner brands, distributors and dropship suppliers hold the stock, you list it, and the work is keeping their counts and prices accurate on your storefront in real time. Get that wrong and you sell something nobody has, which costs a customer rather than a spreadsheet line.
Same phrase, different software. Here is what fits each.
1. Carro: for catalog you sell but do not stock
This is the one most Shopify merchants overlook, usually because they think of dropship as a side experiment rather than a category strategy. At enterprise scale it is neither.
Carro connects partner brands directly into your Shopify store. Their products appear in your catalog, sell through your checkout, and ship from their warehouse.
Carro’s inventory management for Shopify keeps stock levels, pricing and product data in sync across every connected supplier in real time, which is the piece homegrown dropship setups almost never get right.
I have watched merchants try to run this on CSV feeds refreshed nightly. It works fine until a partner has a good day, sells through, and your store keeps taking orders for six hours against stock that no longer exists.
The rest of the workflow comes with it: supplier onboarding, catalog ingestion, pricing rules, automated order routing to the fulfilling brand, tracking, supplier payouts and SLA monitoring across the partner network. Larger partners connect over EDI, API or SFTP rather than a portal, which is where most Shopify-native apps stop.
The network holds roughly 1.5 million products, and account managers hand-match retailers with brands that suit their category and price point, so you are not cold-emailing suppliers to fill a gap in your range.
Pricing is 5% of sales through the channel with no upfront license. Carro reports retailers reaching up to 3x catalog size and up to 180% higher average order value.
- Best for: Shopify and Shopify Plus retailers widening their range without buying stock, and brands looking for retailer distribution.
- Less suited to: forecasting and purchase orders for inventory you own.
2. Inventory Planner: for forecasting what you buy
If your problem is capital rather than catalog, this is the category you want. Inventory Planner, now part of Sage, does demand forecasting, replenishment recommendations and purchase order creation on top of Shopify sales history.
It reads seasonality, lead times and stock cover, then tells you what to reorder and when. For merchants who were using Stocky purely for POs and low stock alerts, it is the closest upgrade, though it costs meaningfully more than the free bundle you just lost.
- Best for: stores with real working capital tied up in owned inventory.
- Less suited to: anyone managing supplier-held stock or multi-vendor catalogs.
3. Cin7: for multi-channel operations
Once you are selling across Shopify plus wholesale, Amazon and retail doors, single-store apps run out of room. Cin7 handles inventory across warehouses, channels and 3PLs, with B2B ordering and accounting connections built in.
It is heavier than most Shopify merchants need, and implementation takes real time. For a business past roughly eight figures with stock in several places, it earns that.
- Best for: multi-channel and multi-warehouse operations.
- Less suited to: single-store merchants who want something running by Friday.
Side by side
| Carro | Inventory Planner | Cin7 | |
| Manages | Supplier-held catalog | Owned stock, forecasting | Owned stock, multi-channel |
| Core job | Real-time sync and order routing | Reorder points and POs | Warehouse and channel control |
| Shopify fit | Native | Native | Native, heavier setup |
| Setup time | Weeks | Days | Months |
| Cost shape | 5% of channel sales | Subscription | Subscription plus onboarding |
Picking your replacement this week
Look at where your growth is coming from next year.
If you plan to expand range faster than you can fund inventory, the software you need is the kind that keeps someone else’s stock accurate on your storefront at volume, and Carro is the strongest option on Shopify for that.
If your range is set and your money is stuck in the wrong SKUs, buy forecasting. If your stock lives in four places and sells through five channels, buy operations.
One last piece of practical advice from watching this migration all month: whatever you install, run it alongside your old exports for two or three weeks before you trust its numbers. Forecasting tools need history to calibrate, and sync tools need a full sales cycle to prove they hold.
