Automating purchase orders from sell-through

Stocky, the app many Shopify brands used for purchase orders and demand forecasting, won't be available after August 31, 2026, and Shopify tells merchants to move to the inventory features in the admin. Purchase orders now live there.

A native Shopify purchase order has:

• A supplier, which is required, and a destination location, which you need before marking the order as ordered.
• Products with quantities, an optional supplier SKU, and cost and tax per line. Cost fills in from your last purchase order with that supplier, or from the variant's cost per item if there isn't one.
• Optional payment terms, supplier currency, a reference number, a note to the supplier, and tags.
• A cost summary, converted to your store currency when the supplier bills in another one.

You add products by search, by barcode scan, or by CSV import, matched on SKU or barcode. Only products that already exist in your store can go on a purchase order.

There are two statuses. Draft is editable and deletable. Ordered means it's gone to the supplier, and Shopify says marking an order as ordered can't be reversed. You can still edit an ordered PO, but you can't delete it, only archive it. To send it, export a PDF from the order and share it with the supplier.

Receiving happens on an inventory transfer linked to the PO. For each line you accept, reject, or cancel units. Accepted units become available at the destination. Rejected units are logged but never become available, and canceled units are removed. If a supplier ships in batches, you receive each batch as it lands, and the transfer stays In progress until every unit is accounted for, then changes to Transferred.

Stocky could build a purchase order from its own suggestions, after you picked how many days of stock it should cover. A native PO starts with whatever products and quantities you give it, so the reorder math has to come from you, a spreadsheet, or an app.

Automated purchase orders are only as good as the quantity behind them. The method in the inventory forecasting guide gives each SKU a forecast weekly demand, safety stock, a reorder point, and an order-up-to level. That's enough to draft orders.

1. On a fixed day each week, pull unit sales and on-hand, committed and incoming quantities for every active SKU.
2. Flag every SKU where on hand plus on order is at or below its reorder point.
3. For each flagged SKU, order up to cover lead time plus the review period plus safety stock, then apply the MOQ and round to the case pack.
4. Group the lines by supplier and destination, so each supplier gets one PO per location.
5. Create the POs as drafts, with the forecast and weeks of cover behind each line attached as a note for the reviewer.

The free inventory forecasting template does steps 2 and 3 in Excel. A script or an inventory planning app can do all five against live data.

Between weekly runs, Shopify Flow can handle the alerts. Its Inventory quantity changed trigger fires whenever a variant's inventory changes, whether from an order, a manual adjustment, or an app, and Shopify ships templates that email you, post to Slack, or open a task when a variant drops below a threshold. Point those at the SKUs where a stockout hurts most.

Drafting can be fully automatic. Marking a PO as ordered commits cash and, in Shopify, can't be undone, so that step needs rules. A workable starting point, to tune for your own margins and suppliers:

• A repeat SKU with a steady forecast, at or under the last order's quantity and unit cost, goes through with a quick review by whoever owns the supplier.
• A line where the suggested quantity is well above the last order, or would leave more than a set number of weeks of cover after it lands, gets a second look. A spike in sales from a promotion that already ended is the usual cause.
• Any unit cost that differs from the last PO with that supplier gets flagged. Shopify pre-fills cost from the previous order, so the change is easy to spot if someone looks.
• A PO above a dollar threshold, or one that pushes the month's committed purchasing past the cash plan, goes to finance or the founder.
• New SKUs, new suppliers, and the first order after a launch always go to a person.

Record who approved what. When a SKU ends up overstocked six months later, you'll want to know whether the math or the override caused it.

The PO is the start of a conversation with the supplier. The parts worth automating are the ones that are the same every time:

• Send the PDF with the reference number, payment terms, currency, and requested ship date filled in, so the supplier has nothing to ask about.
• Ask for confirmation of quantities, price, and ship date, and chase it after a set number of days without one.
• When a ship date is confirmed, update the expected arrival and recheck weeks of cover. A two-week slip on a SKU with three weeks of cover is a stockout you can still prevent.
• Receive partial shipments as they arrive, and reject damaged units on the transfer, so they never show as available.

Negotiation, quality problems, and anything that needs the supplier to bend a rule stay with the person who owns the relationship.

A reorder system handles repeat orders of known products from known suppliers. It does badly with anything that has no history or depends on a decision nobody has written down. Keep a person on:

• Launches and new SKUs, where there's no sales history to forecast from.
• Planned promotions and wholesale orders, which the system won't know about unless someone tells it.
• Discontinuing a product, which should stop reorders before the last unit sells.
• Any order where the MOQ is far above what the forecast needs. Buying a year of stock to hit a minimum is a cash decision.
• Cases where the inventory count itself is wrong. Bad counts make the system reorder stock you have or skip stock you don't; the inventory discrepancies guide covers how to catch them.

In the Zero Hire Org Chart, this is why a $50M brand's two demand planners become one: forecasts and draft POs come from sell-through, and the planner approves them and handles suppliers. The org chart roast runs the same exercise on your team.