Stocky Migration Playbook: Export, Map, Cut Over Before August 2026

Do the export first, before you evaluate any replacement. It costs you two to six hours and removes all time pressure from the rest of the project.

• Purchase orders (CSV, one at a time). Stocky has no bulk PO export. Go to Purchases, open each PO, and download it as CSV (PDF works too, but CSV is what you'll re-import later). For a store with 200+ historical POs, budget a half day or export only the last 24 months — that's what any forecasting tool will actually use.
• Completed purchase order reports. Stocky's reporting section lets you pull aggregated PO history as CSV. Export this even if you exported individual POs — it's your cross-check.
• Stocktake history. Export every stocktake as CSV. This is your audit trail for inventory shrinkage; German merchants doing an Inventur for year-end accounts will want this archived for the retention period anyway.
• Cost data. Historical unit costs live in Stocky's PO lines. If you use weighted-average costing, export enough PO history to reconstruct it — Shopify native tracks a single cost per SKU, not a costing method.
• Suppliers — manually, because there is no export. This is the one that catches people. Stocky offers no export function for supplier records. Supplier names, contact emails, lead times, minimum order quantities, case packs, payment terms — if they only exist in Stocky, you retype them into a spreadsheet by hand or they're gone on August 31. For 30 suppliers that's an afternoon. Do it this week.
• Forecast parameters. Screenshot or note your reorder settings per SKU group: lead times, days-of-stock targets, seasonal adjustments. No tool imports these; you'll re-enter them, and remembering your own calibration is worth real money.

Store everything in one folder with a date stamp. Total effort: 2–6 hours depending on PO count and supplier count.

Four object types, four different answers.

Transfers → Shopify native, done. Since May 2025, transfers live in Shopify admin under Products > Transfers, with multiple shipments per transfer, barcode receiving, and packing slips. This is genuinely better than what Stocky had. Nothing to build, nothing to buy. If you run transfers between two or more locations, you've probably been on the native flow since July 2025 anyway.

Purchase orders → Shopify native, with three real gaps. Shopify admin now has native POs: create, manage, and receive stock against a supplier. But as of June 2026: (1) you can't email a PO to a supplier from admin — you export a PDF and send it yourself; (2) there's no multi-supplier relationship per product — Shopify suggests metafields as the workaround; (3) there's no landed-cost or weighted-average costing. Also note: historical Stocky POs cannot be imported into Shopify's native POs. Your CSV archive is for reference and forecasting, not re-import into admin.

Suppliers → no native object exists. Shopify has a free-text supplier field on POs, not a supplier entity with lead times, MOQs, price lists, and contacts. Your options: (a) live with the free-text field plus product metafields for supplier SKU and case pack — workable under ~15 suppliers; (b) keep supplier masters in a SaaS tool; (c) make suppliers a first-class table in a custom module, which is exactly the kind of narrow, stable data model that custom code handles well.

Forecasts → nothing native, full stop. Shopify admin gives you stock levels and low-stock views, not demand forecasting, reorder-point suggestions, or ABC analysis. This is the gap the entire replacement-app market is built on, and it's the honest reason "just use Shopify native" is incomplete advice for any store reordering across 200+ SKUs.

If you need forecasting and supplier management on September 1, a SaaS app is the fastest bridge — and for many stores it's the permanent answer, not a bridge. Real pricing as of June 2026:

• Prediko — revenue-based tiers: $49/month up to $100K annual revenue, $119/month up to $500K, $199/month up to $2M, quote-based above that. All tiers include unlimited SKUs and users, AI forecasting, and PO management. 14-day trial.
• Fabrikatör — $99/month (SEED) for stores up to $500K annual revenue, $149/month to $1.5M, $199/month to $2.5M, Enterprise quote above that; $79/month effective price if you commit to annual billing. Watch the add-on: backorders bill $0.75 per order after the 50 free per month — a per-order fee of exactly the kind we catalogue in our per-order fees breakdown.
• Inventory Planner by Sage — the Essentials tier on the Shopify App Store runs $119.99/month; Standard, Premium, and Enterprise are quote-only, typically on a 12-month contract, with pricing pegged to your revenue. Merchants report renewal quotes climbing steeply as revenue grows — roughly doubling in some published accounts.

Our honest read: if you're under $500K revenue and Prediko at $49 or Fabrikatör at $99 covers your workflow, take the SaaS and stop reading — that's the right call. $588–$1,188/year is cheap for working forecasting, and no custom build pays back against it.

The structural problem sits higher up. Every option above prices on your revenue, not on their costs — which means your inventory tooling bill is designed to grow with you regardless of whether the tool does anything new. A store crossing $2M in revenue looks at quote-tier pricing of roughly $400–$800/month (our estimate — quote tiers aren't published), or $5K–$10K/year, for what is functionally a CRUD app with a reorder formula. That's the point where the true cost of app subscriptions math flips.

A custom Stocky replacement is not a full ERP. It's a small embedded Shopify app owning exactly the four things Shopify native doesn't:

• Supplier master — suppliers with contacts, lead times, MOQs, case packs, per-supplier price lists, and supplier-SKU mapping. One table, done right.
• PO lifecycle — draft → sent (emailed to the supplier as PDF directly from the app, closing Shopify's gap) → partially received → closed, with receiving that writes stock into Shopify via the inventory APIs and captures unit costs for weighted-average costing.
• Reorder engine — reorder point per SKU from trailing sales velocity, supplier lead time, and a safety-stock factor. This covers what Stocky's min/max forecasting did for 90% of merchants. It is deliberately not machine learning — a transparent formula your team can argue with beats a black box for most sub-€5M stores.
• Stocktakes with approval — counted-vs-expected sheets, a review step, then adjustments written back to Shopify. Useful for the German Inventur workflow where a second pair of eyes signs off.

Effort estimate, from scoping this repeatedly: €9K–€18K fixed price, 4–8 weeks elapsed, then €40–€120/month hosting. Suppliers and POs are the cheap half; the reorder engine and stocktake flows are where the range widens. You own the source code, and the module can later feed your invoicing, your returns workflow (restocked returns flowing straight back into available-to-promise), or an ERP — integrations SaaS tools charge extra for or don't offer.

The break-even math is blunt. Against a $99/month app: roughly a decade — don't build. Against a $199/month tier: 4–7 years — still don't build on cost alone. Against quote-tier pricing at $500+/month — in practice, stores crossing roughly $2M in revenue or a few thousand orders a month — or against SaaS-plus-manual-workarounds because the SaaS doesn't fit your DACH-specific flow (bundles/Stücklisten, ERP handoff, Inventur sign-off): 18–30 months, and every year after is savings. What you keep is different in kind, too: the code is yours, the price never re-pegs to your revenue, and no per-order meter runs in the background. Our build-vs-buy framework walks the general version of this decision; for Stocky specifically, the trigger is almost always revenue-based pricing crossing ~€5K/year, not features.

Whatever target you picked — native, SaaS, or custom — the sequence is the same. Done calmly, it's about six weeks. Started in early July, that still beats the August 31 deadline with buffer; started mid-August, it doesn't. Do not schedule the final phase into your peak season.

Week 1 — Export and freeze reference data. Complete the full export checklist above. Build the supplier spreadsheet by hand. From this point, treat Stocky as a system you're leaving: any new supplier gets created in the target system too.

Weeks 1–2 — Confirm transfers and adjustments on native. If any staff member still opens Stocky for stock corrections out of habit, retrain now. Native transfers and adjustments have been the only supported path since July 2025 — this phase is usually verification, not migration.

Weeks 2–4 — Parallel-run purchase orders. Every new PO is created in the target system. Every PO already open in Stocky runs to receipt in Stocky. Shopify's own migration guidance says to stop creating new POs in Stocky at least 14 days before August 31 — put that date in the calendar now. Never migrate open POs mid-flight — receiving against a half-migrated PO is how stock counts drift. After the last Stocky PO is received, reconcile stock on hand between systems once, in writing.
Weeks 4–6 — Recalibrate forecasting, then compare. Load 12–24 months of sales history into the target (SaaS tools pull it from Shopify automatically; a custom module reads the same order history via API). Re-enter your lead times and safety-stock settings from the week-1 notes. Then run two full reorder cycles comparing the new suggestions against what you'd have ordered by gut. Only cut the cord when the suggestions stop surprising you.

Cutover checkpoint, before you uninstall anything: all suppliers exist in the target; zero open POs in Stocky; one clean stock reconciliation on record; two reorder cycles reviewed; export archive stored outside Shopify. Keep the read-only Stocky access as a fallback, but plan as if it ends the day the app does.

If you're not sure which side of the break-even line you're on, we do a 30-minute app-stack audit: we go through your Stocky exports, your order volume, and your current app bill, and you leave with a fixed-price quote if custom makes sense — or an honest "keep the SaaS" if it doesn't. Book the audit here.