July 27, 2026 · 9 min read
Stocky is shutting down August 31. Here's what dead stock actually costs you until then.
Stocky stops working August 31, 2026. Most replacements cost $49–$300/month. Here's how to cover the dead-stock half of Stocky for $0 — and what each alternative actually costs.
Shopify pulled Stocky from the App Store in February 2026. On August 31, 2026, it stops working entirely.
If you used Stocky, you used it free. That's the part most replacement plans don't account for. The apps being recommended as "the Stocky replacement" start at $49–$59/month and run past $300 for the ones with real forecasting. As one merchant put it in the Shopify Community thread on the shutdown: they weren't going to pay a thousand dollars a year for an app they'd had free for years.
That's the right instinct. But "wait and use spreadsheets" has a cost too, and it is usually bigger than the app fee. Here's how to think about it.
First: work out what you actually used Stocky for
Stocky did four fairly different jobs. Most merchants only leaned on one or two of them:
- Purchase orders and receiving — creating POs, receiving stock against them
- Supplier management — supplier records, lead times, costs
- Stocktakes — periodic physical counts
- Demand signals — what's selling, what isn't, what to reorder, what's dead
Jobs 1–3 are now partly covered by Shopify's native admin: purchase orders and stocktakes are free in the admin, and inventory transfers work across locations. It isn't as good as Stocky, but it isn't nothing. Job 4 is where merchants get hurt, and it's the one the native admin covers worst.
Before you migrate anything: export your data
This is time-sensitive and it is not reversible. Do it this week — everything else on this page can wait, and this can't.
- Purchase order history — export it now. It does not carry over.
- Stocktake history — same.
- Suppliers — Stocky has no supplier export at all. You will have to recreate these by hand, so screenshot or copy them out before August 31.
What the alternatives actually cost
Prices below are as of July 2026 — check the current listings before you commit, because they move.
- Shopify native admin — free. POs, stocktakes, transfers, basic reports.
- Inventory Surplus — free to 100 SKUs, $15/mo unlimited. Dead stock and slow movers, clearance pricing.
- Stockful — from about $19.99/mo. Forecasting, ABC analysis, dead stock.
- Sumtracker — from about $49/mo. Multi-channel sync, POs, bundles.
- Prediko — from about $59/mo. SKU-level forecasting, PO generation.
- Inventory Planner, Cogsy, Netstock — $200–$3,500/mo. Full demand-planning suites.
Most merchants leaving Stocky do not need a $59/month demand-planning suite. They need to know what to reorder and what's dead — and the second one is where the money is.
The half of Stocky that was actually costing you money
Reordering mistakes cost you a stockout. Dead stock costs you cash you have already spent.
Every unit sitting unsold is money you paid a supplier that is now sitting on a shelf instead of in your bank account. It doesn't show up as a loss on your P&L — it shows up as "inventory," which reads like an asset. That is exactly why it's so easy to ignore for years.
A rough way to size it: take everything that hasn't sold a unit in 90 days and multiply by your unit cost. That's your frozen capital. For a store carrying a few hundred SKUs this number commonly lands somewhere between $10,000 and $80,000, and most merchants running it for the first time are surprised by how big it is.
Then add carrying cost — storage, insurance, shrink, and the opportunity cost of not having that cash to spend on the products that do sell. The standard industry rule of thumb is 20–30% of the inventory's value per year. On $50,000 of dead stock that's $10,000–$15,000 a year you're paying to store things nobody is buying. If you want to run that number properly, we broke the calculation down in our guide to calculating inventory holding cost.
What to do in the next five weeks
- This week: export your Stocky suppliers, POs and stocktake history. Non-negotiable.
- Next week: run a 90-day no-sale report. Shopify's admin can approximate this — sort by units sold ascending over 90 days and cross-reference cost. Get the dollar number.
- Then decide what you're actually buying. If your problem is reordering and supplier workflow, look at Stockful or Sumtracker. If your problem is that too much cash is stuck in stock that isn't moving, that's a different tool and a much cheaper one.
- Set a clearance policy before you need it. Decide in advance: at 90 days, 15% off; at 120 days, 30%; at 180 days, bundle it or write it off. Merchants who set the rule ahead of time recover far more than merchants who discount reactively in December.
Our step-by-step playbook for clearing dead stock on Shopify covers the execution side of that last point in detail, including how to run clearance waves without training your customers to wait for a sale.
Where Inventory Surplus fits
We built Inventory Surplus for exactly one of Stocky's four jobs: showing you what's dead and helping you turn it back into cash.
It reads your Shopify catalogue and sales history, flags slow-moving, excess and returned inventory, and shows you the total dollars sitting frozen — broken down by category, with a health score benchmarked against similar stores. You get per-SKU clearance suggestions you can filter, search and export. It's free up to 100 SKUs forever — no credit card, no trial clock — and Pro is $15/month for unlimited SKUs. It doesn't touch your live storefront and it installs in about 60 seconds.
It does not do purchase orders, supplier management or stocktakes. If those are what you used Stocky for, use Shopify's native admin or one of the paid suites above, and pair it with this for the dead-stock side. Stocky stops working August 31, 2026 — export your data before then.
Keep going
Recover revenue from your dead stock
Inventory Surplus is the Shopify app that finds and clears your trapped capital — free for stores up to 100 SKUs.