Shopify Multi-Location Inventory & Life 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. The harder question in 2026 isn't whether Shopify does multi-location inventory; it's what happens to your planning now that Stocky, the app that quietly handled forecasting and purchase orders for POS Pro merchants, is being retired.

This guide covers both halves: how native locations, limits, and order routing actually work, and exactly what replaces each Stocky feature before the shutdown. Here only because Stocky is retiring? Jump to the retirement timeline. 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.

The five routing rules

Shopify offers five 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.

Counting stock and its limits

Counting is where merchants trip up after Stocky. There is no single native full-audit stocktake tool; instead, three native or recommended paths cover different needs.

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: The Retirement Timeline

If you fulfilled and forecasted through Stocky, this is the part that changes your workflow. The retirement is staged across two dates, and the details — especially which date the export window counts from — are easy to get wrong.

Worth knowing where the rest of Stocky lives: it originally shipped as a perk of Shopify POS Pro. 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 a chore behind. Here's the honest map.

The forecasting and reorder work goes to Sidekick, Shopify's built-in AI assistant, which Shopify names as the successor for demand forecasting and replenishment prompts — and it can draft 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. The one report that genuinely isn't there is total purchase-order spend by supplier — Shopify tells you to export the Analytics data or roll it up in an external tool. 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 — not from Shopify, which doesn't publish an official reorder method.

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.

Source: Shopify App Store listings (observed July 2026). Inventory Planner doesn't publish a public price grid; the ~$119.99 entry point is one agency's figure, not a Shopify or vendor list price. Confirm current pricing on each listing before installing.

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.

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.

The Bottom Line

Multi-location inventory itself is a solved problem on Shopify — every plan tracks stock across locations and routes orders automatically. The thing that actually needs a decision in 2026 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