A Stocky alternative for the part Shopify's native inventory does not do

Most articles about the Stocky sunset are written by companies that would like to sell you something, and they tend to describe the native tools as thinner than they are. They are not thin. Transfers, purchase orders, manual counts, adjustment reasons and inventory reporting are all built into the Shopify admin and POS.

If Stocky was how you raised purchase orders and moved stock between locations, migrating to Shopify's native tools is the whole answer and you can stop reading here. That path recommends nothing you have to buy.

They record. They do not decide.

Shopify's inventory management tells you what you hold, what you have ordered and what moved. It does not forecast how each product will sell, size a safety buffer against how unpredictable that product is and how reliably its supplier delivers, or tell you which SKUs to reorder this week and in what quantity.

For a small catalog that gap is fillable with a spreadsheet and good instincts. It stops being fillable somewhere around the point where you have more products than you can hold in your head, several suppliers with different lead times, and enough seasonality that last month is a poor guide to next month.

Athory is the decision layer, not a replacement for Shopify's inventory management. It connects to your store, learns how each product actually sells, and turns that into a reorder recommendation — what to buy, how much, from which supplier, by when.

It sizes each product's buffer against that product's own demand variability and its supplier's real delivery reliability, rather than applying one weeks-of-cover rule across a catalog containing very different products. And it weighs the cost of ordering against the cost of holding, accounting for stock already inbound, so the recommendation is an economic call rather than a threshold alert.

You keep using Shopify for transfers, receiving and counts. Athory answers the question those tools were never built to answer.

Since Stocky will not export suppliers, you will be holding a spreadsheet you assembled by hand. Athory takes that directly: supplier SKU, product name, unit cost, minimum order quantity and pack size import as a CSV or Excel file, so the constraints that decide what a correct order looks like do not have to be re-keyed a second time.

Lead times are the part you do not need to bring. Athory derives them from how each supplier actually delivers against your real purchase orders, rather than from a figure someone typed in a year ago — so the number sharpens as you trade instead of going stale. Catalog, inventory and order history come across automatically when you connect the store.

Copy your supplier records out of Stocky by hand. Shopify's documentation states that "suppliers can't be exported from Stocky", so the minimum order quantities, pack sizes, contacts and terms sitting in there have no export path at all.

Those constraints are the input any reorder decision depends on — ours or anyone else's, software or spreadsheet. They are also the only part of the whole migration you genuinely cannot recover afterwards. If you do one thing this month, do that one.