The Simplest Stocky Replacement for Small Shopify Stores

Stocky is being shut down, and if you search for replacements, you'll find plenty of options. The problem is that most of them are designed for large-scale operations — enterprise pricing, complex dashboards, features you'll never use. If you're running a small or medium Shopify store with a few hundred SKUs and a handful of suppliers, you don't need all that. You just need to know what to reorder and when.

That's exactly the problem we built Sensible Forecasting to solve.

What Stocky Actually Did for Most Merchants

Stocky had a lot of features on paper — purchase orders, stock transfers, stocktakes, supplier management, basic forecasting. But in practice, most small merchants used it for one thing: figuring out when to place their next order.

You'd open Stocky, look at which products were running low, see a rough estimate of when you'd run out, and create a purchase order. It wasn't sophisticated, but it beat staring at a spreadsheet or guessing.

The forecasting was basic — min/max thresholds rather than actual demand forecasting — and it was locked behind POS Pro. But for the merchants who had access, it was good enough. And crucially, it was included in the subscription. No extra monthly fee.

The Problem with Most Stocky Alternatives

Now that Stocky is gone, the market has responded with alternatives. But look at the pricing:

• Fabrikatör starts at $99/month and is designed for Shopify Plus stores with complex supply chains
• Inventory Planner charges $249/month+ and targets mid-market to enterprise
• Full ERP solutions like Cin7 or TradeGecko can run $350-$1,000+/month

These are great tools if you're doing millions in revenue and managing warehouses across multiple countries. But if you're a small Shopify store doing $10K-$100K per month with 2-3 suppliers, spending $100+ on inventory software doesn't make sense. That's money that could go toward actual inventory.

And the complexity is a problem too. Enterprise tools come with enterprise onboarding. You'll spend hours configuring settings, learning dashboards, and setting up workflows you don't need. For a small team where the store owner is also the buyer, the marketer, and the customer service rep, time is the scarcest resource.

What a Small Store Actually Needs

Strip away the enterprise features and a small Shopify store needs exactly four things from an inventory tool:

1. Know what's running low — which products are approaching reorder point based on current sales velocity
2. Know when to order — factoring in supplier lead times so you order early enough to avoid stockouts
3. Know how much to order — based on how fast things are actually selling, not a gut feeling
4. Get alerted before it's too late — so you don't have to check manually every day

That's it. You don't need AI-powered demand sensing. You don't need multi-warehouse orchestration. You don't need backorder management or landed cost calculations. You need a tool that looks at your sales, looks at your lead times, and tells you "order this product in 5 days."

How Sensible Forecasting Works

We built Sensible Forecasting specifically for this use case. Here's what it does:

It connects to your Shopify store and reads your sales history. No manual data entry. Within minutes of installing, you have a full product table showing every SKU, its current stock level, its sales rate, and when it's expected to run out.

It calculates when to reorder each product. Based on your chosen sales period (14, 30, 60, or 90 days — or a weighted average), Sensible Forecasting projects forward and tells you the reorder date for every product. Products are sorted by urgency, so the ones that need attention first are at the top.

It accounts for lead time. If your supplier takes 3 weeks to deliver, Sensible Forecasting factors that in. The reorder date it shows you is the date you need to place the order, not the date you'll run out. That distinction is the difference between having stock arrive just in time and having a two-week gap where your best seller is out of stock.

It handles multiple suppliers. If you work with different vendors for different products, you can filter by vendor tag and create separate orders for each supplier. No need to manually sort through a combined list.

It sends you regular reports. Set up daily or weekly email reports and Sensible Forecasting will tell you what's running low, what needs ordering, and what's overstocked. You can scan the email in two minutes over your morning coffee and know exactly where things stand.

It exports to CSV and XLSX. When it's time to place an order, export the data and send it to your supplier. No complicated purchase order workflows — just the product list, quantities, and supplier info in a format anyone can read.

What Sensible Forecasting Doesn't Do (And Why That's the Point)

Sensible Forecasting doesn't do warehouse management. It doesn't do barcode scanning, bin locations, or pick-pack-ship workflows. It doesn't integrate with Amazon, WooCommerce, or other channels. It doesn't have AI demand sensing or predictive analytics dashboards.

We left all of that out on purpose. Every feature that doesn't serve a small Shopify merchant is a feature that adds complexity, slows down the interface, and drives up the price. We'd rather do one thing well — tell you when to restock and how much — than do twenty things at a mediocre level.

If you're a Shopify Plus store doing $10M in revenue with warehouses on three continents, Sensible Forecasting isn't for you. But if you're a growing Shopify store that just lost Stocky and needs a straightforward way to stay on top of inventory, it's exactly what you need.

The Price Difference

Sensible Forecasting costs $29/month. That's it. One plan, all features included, unlimited products. There's a 30-day free trial with no credit card required, so you can see if it works for your store before you pay anything.

Compare that to the $99-$349/month you'd pay for most Stocky alternatives, and the math is simple. Over a year, that's $348 versus $1,188-$4,188. For a small store, that difference buys a lot of actual inventory.

Switching from Stocky Takes 5 Minutes

There's no complicated migration. Sensible Forecasting reads your product and sales data directly from Shopify — the same data Stocky used. Install the app, configure your lead times and safety stock settings, and you're up and running.

The one thing you should do before Stocky shuts down: manually record your supplier information (contacts, lead times, MOQs). Stocky doesn't let you export supplier data, so if you have that configured in the app, write it down now. Everything else — your products, sales history, stock levels — lives in Shopify and transfers automatically.

If you want a step-by-step walkthrough, we've written a setup guide that takes under 5 minutes. You can also see exactly what Sensible Forecasting does and doesn't replace on our Stocky alternative page.