Shopify Multi-Location Inventory Management After Stocky

If you hold stock in more than one place — a warehouse and a shop, two warehouses, a 3PL — Shopify tracks it all natively, on every plan. That half has not changed. What did change is the planning: Stocky, the app that quietly handled forecasting and purchase orders for POS Pro merchants, stopped working on August 31, 2026.

This guide covers both halves: how native locations, limits, and order routing actually work, and exactly what replaces each Stocky feature now that it is gone. Deciding whether native Shopify is enough or you need an app? Go straight to the three routes at a glance. Here because Stocky went away? Jump to where you stand now. Weighing separate storefronts or selling abroad? Skip to locations vs stores vs Markets.

What Multi-Location Inventory Means in Shopify

Shopify's definition is deliberately broad: a location is any physical place where you sell products, fulfill orders, or stock inventory. Assign inventory to each location and the platform tracks those quantities independently, so the same product page can draw stock from a warehouse for online orders and from a shop's back room for in-person sales — without you keeping two separate systems in sync by hand.

If some of those locations are physical shops, running the storefront side — staffing, hardware, omnichannel selling — is its own subject; our guide to running a retail business on Shopify goes deep there. This article stays on the inventory layer that sits underneath all of it.

What counts as a location

Shopify names warehouses, retail stores, and pop-ups as locations, and adds that some apps — dropshipping and third-party logistics services — are treated as locations too. That last group matters for your plan limit, which we get to next.

Location Limits by Plan

Every plan supports multiple locations, but the ceiling rises as you move up. Find your row — this single number decides how many warehouses, shops, and fulfillment points you can keep active at once.

That deactivation rule is handy for seasonal selling: a holiday pop-up you switch off after the event stops counting toward your limit, freeing the slot for next time. If temporary retail is part of your plan, our guide to running a Shopify pop-up shop covers the setup end to end.

How Orders Pull Stock: Order Routing

Once you have two or more active locations, order routing decides which one fulfills each order, automatically, based on rules you set. It's the difference between a system that always ships from the right place and one where you reassign orders by hand all day. Whether a given sales channel follows those rules is worth checking channel by channel — for TikTok Shop, see which location a TikTok Shop order deducts inventory from.

A location that ships part of the catalog from a different warehouse or store may need rates of its own, because the journey differs — see when you need a second shipping profile.

The five routing rules

Shopify documents five built-in routing rule types. You stack them in a priority order — click and drag to move a rule up or down — and the platform works through them from the top.

Moving and Counting Stock Natively

Transfers between locations

Moving stock is built in. You can create inventory transfers to move and track inventory between your store locations, or to and from external locations such as suppliers. That covers the everyday need — shift units from the warehouse to a shop, or receive a supplier delivery into the right location — without an app. A supplier delivery usually has a purchase order behind it, and the two objects record different things. The shipping and duties you add to that shipment are a third record again: a cost adjustment leaves Cost per item where it was.

A supplier delivery that arrives in batches can still be one transfer: a transfer can carry more than one shipment.

Counting stock and its limits

Counting has a native home after Stocky. With inventory stock counts, you choose a location and the products to count, staff record quantities with a barcode scanner or by hand, and a manager can review and approve the results before your inventory levels change. At locations with a Shopify POS Pro subscription, staff can also run the count in the POS app, which needs Shopify POS v11.16 or later.

Know the limits before you plan a count. A stock count covers one location, so counting several locations means a separate count for each. You create and manage counts in the admin on a desktop browser, not in the Shopify app or POS. You can't duplicate or export a stock count, and neither approving a count nor completing one without a review can be undone.

One native improvement helps regardless of method: every inventory adjustment now records the source, destination, who made the change, and when — a full audit trail you can trace when two counts disagree.

Life After Stocky: Where You Stand Now

If you fulfilled and forecasted through Stocky, this part of your workflow has already changed. Shopify delisted Stocky on February 2, 2026, and the app stopped working on August 31, 2026. What is left is a read-only window and one decision: what does the planning now.

Worth knowing where the rest of Stocky lives: it was included with Shopify POS Pro subscriptions, and free for stores that installed it before May 4, 2020. The in-store, day-to-day retail side of what Stocky touched still belongs with POS Pro; this guide is about the inventory-planning half it leaves behind.

What Replaces Each Stocky Feature

Stocky did several jobs, and they don't all land in the same place now. Some move to native tools, some to an app — and the two people worry about most, supplier management and custom reporting, land natively but leave migration gaps behind. Here's the honest map.

The forecasting and reorder work goes to Sidekick, Shopify's built-in AI assistant, which Shopify points you to for demand forecasting and replenishment prompts — and it can create the purchase order for you.

Reporting is better served than merchants expect: Shopify Analytics builds custom explorations for inventory adjustments and for transfers and shipments, on top of unlimited inventory history, and Shopify's migration guide links a purchase order cost report that groups ordered quantity, supplier cost, tax, and average unit cost by purchase order, supplier, destination location, and line item for export. What it still doesn't have is a dedicated native report for total purchase-order spend by supplier — Shopify tells you to export Analytics data or use external tools for that roll-up. And reporting still only tells you what already happened, not how much to reorder next — our Shopify Analytics guide covers reading those reports well.

The native workflow after Stocky

If you stay fully native, the replenishment loop looks like this — four steps, all built into Shopify today, no Stocky and no extra app.

The Reorder Math Stocky Used to Do

Underneath any forecasting tool sits one piece of arithmetic: the reorder point — the stock level at which you place a new order so you don't run out during the supplier's lead time. The standard formula is average daily sales × average lead time in days, plus safety stock, where safety stock is peak daily sales × worst-case lead time − average sales × average lead time. It comes from general operations references such as NetSuite and university operations courses, and Shopify's blog publishes the same formula.

For example, take a location selling 20 units a day with a 7-day average lead, spiking to 30 a day and a 10-day worst case. Cycle stock is 20 × 7 = 140; safety stock is (30 × 10) − (20 × 7) = 160; so the reorder point is 140 + 160 = 300 units. The calculator opens on those exact figures — change any input to fit your store.

Which Post-Stocky Path Is Yours?

You've seen the math and the native tools. The real decision is who does the reordering work now — Shopify alone, a forecasting app, or a custom build. Here's the shape of each route before you answer.

Not sure which row is you? Answer five quick questions for a recommendation you can act on.

Forecasting & Purchase-Order Apps After Stocky

If the quiz pointed you to an app — or you just want richer forecasting than native Sidekick — four tools lead the category. They differ mainly on price and whether they automate purchase orders.

The quick read: Sensible is the cheapest and does forecasting only; Prediko and Fabrikatör add purchase-order automation for growing brands; and Inventory Planner is the quote-based option built for larger, multi-warehouse operations. Match the tool to your revenue and to whether you need automated POs — the two levers that separate them.

When Native Shopify Isn't Enough: Custom Integration & ERP

At some point native locations plus a forecasting app stop being enough, and a custom integration or an ERP connector becomes the right call. Shopify doesn't publish a numeric threshold — no SKU count, no order volume — so treat the following as observations from integrators, not an official Shopify line.

That's the point where a custom inventory integration or ERP connector earns its keep — and where it's usually worth bringing in help rather than wiring it yourself. Our guide to hiring a Shopify developer walks through when you actually need one and how to scope the work.

If the system on the other side is a named ERP — NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Acumatica, SAP Business One — the choice between a certified connector app, an iPaaS platform and a custom build, with year-one costs for each, is worked through in our Shopify ERP integration guide. Location mapping, routing and transfers stay here.

If that system is Zoho Inventory, check one thing before you connect it: Zoho sends Shopify a single total across all warehouses, so Shopify never sees your warehouses individually.

Multi-Location vs Multiple Stores vs Markets

Three concepts get tangled because they all sound like “selling in more than one place.” They're distinct, and mixing them up leads to buying the wrong thing.

Running genuinely separate storefronts is a different decision with its own costs and trade-offs — our guide to running multiple Shopify stores covers when that beats a single store with several locations.

And if the goal is simply selling across countries from one catalog, that's what Shopify Markets is for — audiences and localization, not extra stockrooms. You can layer all three: one store, several locations, selling into multiple markets — and, on POS Pro or the Plus plan, a retail market can give a POS location its own prices.

How the Stocky Retirement Played Out

Kept here as a record rather than a countdown. The dates still matter for one practical reason: they tell you which window you are in and how long your export access has left.

The Bottom Line

Multi-location inventory itself is a solved problem on Shopify — every plan tracks stock per location, and once you have two or more active locations Shopify assigns orders to them automatically by rules you set. The thing that still needs a decision is what replaces Stocky's planning, and for most merchants that's Sidekick for light needs or a forecasting app for real ones.

Frequently Asked Questions