Do I need an inventory app for Shopify?

Most stores don't. Shopify's native inventory handles stock levels across locations, transfers, purchase orders, adjustments, cost per item and demand forecasting — it's free, it's already in your admin and POS, and it's one fewer tool to maintain. You need more than native when you have to keep purchase-order history that Shopify can't import, when you manage suppliers as real relationships rather than names, or when you need per-order profit after ad spend and fees.

Is Shopify's native inventory good enough to replace Stocky?

For the day-to-day workflow, largely yes. Shopify has moved Stocky's core features into admin and POS: purchase orders, transfers, stock adjustments and demand forecasting all have native equivalents. The gap isn't the workflow, it's the history — Shopify's own guide says historical purchase orders can't be imported and suppliers can't be exported from Stocky at all.

What does Shopify native inventory not do?

It won't import your Stocky purchase-order history. It has no real supplier records — no lead times, payment terms, contacts or on-time-delivery tracking. It won't tell you the margin on an individual order after ad spend and processor fees. And it won't attribute ad spend to products at all. If none of those matter to you, native is the right answer.

How much does Ops Console cost compared to Shopify native inventory?

Shopify's native inventory is included with your Shopify plan at no extra cost. Ops Console is free during our private beta; when billing starts it's $29/mo Starter (500 orders, 1,000 SKUs), $59/mo Growth (2,000 orders, 10,000 SKUs) and $119/mo Scale (unlimited). If native covers your needs, the correct price to pay is nothing.

Comparison

Shopify native inventory vs Ops Console

You're here because Stocky ends on 31 August 2026 and something has to replace it. The most likely correct answer is nothing — you move to Shopify's built-in inventory, pay no one, and get on with your day. We sell an inventory app and we still think that's true for most stores. Here's how to tell if it's true for yours.

The short version

Shopify native is free, already installed, and now covers nearly everything Stocky did day-to-day. It falls down on exactly four things: importing your purchase-order history, supplier depth, per-order margin, and ad-spend attribution. If those four don't describe a problem you actually have, close this tab and use native. You'll be right.

What Shopify native genuinely does well

This list has grown a lot, which is precisely why Stocky is being retired — Shopify absorbed it. Anyone telling you native inventory is a toy is selling something.

Stock levels across every location, live, in the same admin as your orders — no sync lag, no second source of truth to reconcile.
Transfers between locations, including receiving them, natively in admin and on POS.
Purchase orders: create them, send them, receive against them. This used to be the headline reason to run Stocky.
Stock adjustments and stocktakes, with an audit trail, done on the POS by the person holding the scanner.
Cost per item stored on the variant, feeding Shopify's own profit reporting.
Demand forecasting — native now, not a Stocky-only feature.
It's free with your Shopify plan, and there is real, unpriced value in having one fewer tool, one fewer login, one fewer vendor with an API key, and nothing to migrate when it changes.

Where it stops

Four gaps, and the first two are Shopify's own words from their migration guide, not our characterisation:

"Historical purchase orders can't be imported into Shopify."

Native POs start from zero on day one. Everything you ordered before the cutover exists only as a CSV in a folder. If you've never once looked back at an old PO, this costs you nothing.

"Suppliers can't be exported from Stocky."

And there's not much waiting for them on the other side either — native treats a supplier as a name on a purchase order, not a record with lead times, payment terms, contacts and a reliability history.

No per-order margin

Shopify knows your cost per item, so it can tell you gross margin. It doesn't subtract the ad spend that won the order or the processor fees that cleared it — so it can't tell you which orders actually made money. Stocky never did this either.

No ad-spend attribution

Native inventory has no concept of what you paid to sell a unit. Product-level profitability after acquisition cost is simply outside what it's for.

The decision guide

Use Shopify native if…

You've rarely or never needed to look up what you paid for a SKU two years ago.
You buy from a handful of suppliers you know well — the lead times live in your head and that works fine.
You reorder on judgement and a low-stock alert, and it hasn't burned you.
Your margins are stable and roughly uniform across the catalogue, so a blended number tells you what a per-order one would.
You don't run paid acquisition, or you already track its profitability somewhere else.
You're a single location, or a small number of locations with simple transfers.
You value having fewer tools more than you'd value the extra numbers. This is a legitimate, often correct trade.

If most of these are you: export your Stocky CSVs for the records, move to native, spend nothing.

Consider Ops Console if…

Your purchase-order history is a working record you query, not an archive — price creep, supplier reliability, real lead times.
You have enough suppliers that "who is chronically late, and by how much" is a question you can't answer from memory.
You run paid acquisition and suspect some of your best-selling products are your worst-earning ones.
Your margins vary enough across the catalogue that a blended average hides the answer.
You're buying on lead times long enough that getting a reorder wrong costs real money.
You need the numbers for someone else — a lender, an accountant, a board — and "it's in a folder of CSVs" isn't an acceptable answer.

If several of these are you: the history is worth importing, and it has to happen before 31 August 2026.

Side by side

Capability	Shopify native	Ops Console
Stock levels, multi-location	Yes — the source of truth	Reads Shopify's
Transfers	Yes, admin + POS	No — use native
Create / send / receive POs	Yes	Yes
Demand forecasting	Yes	Yes, rolling-velocity
Stocktakes on POS	Yes	No — use native
Cost per item	Yes	Yes, with history
Import Stocky PO history	No — can't be imported	Yes
Supplier records (lead times, terms, on-time %)	No	Yes
Per-order margin after ads + fees	No	Yes
Ad-spend attribution	No	Yes
Price	Free with your plan	Free in beta; $29 / $59 / $119

Note the "no" rows on our side. Ops Console sits on top of Shopify rather than replacing it — Shopify stays the source of truth for stock, and transfers and POS stocktakes are jobs native already does better than a third party can. We're not trying to be your whole inventory system.

How Ops Console connects

No App Store install, no OAuth consent screen. You create a read-only Custom App API key in your own Shopify admin and paste it in, so Ops Console reads products, orders, inventory and fulfilments and can do nothing else — you can see the exact permissions on the key you made, and revoke it yourself whenever you like. The one exception is receiving stock against a purchase order, which writes back; that module asks for the permission explicitly and up front, and margin and reconciliation stay fully read-only.

Not sure? Let the data decide

The checker is genuinely diagnostic rather than a lead form with extra steps: it parses your supplier, cost-price and purchase-order CSVs, cross-checks the SKUs against your live Shopify catalog, and tells you what's actually in your export. If you upload three sparse files and the answer is "there's nothing here worth migrating, use native" — that's the answer it gives you.

Free Stocky export checker

Row-by-row compatibility report in about 60 seconds. No account, nothing stored.

Check my Stocky export → The migration checklist