Stocky Alternatives: Which One Replaces Your COGS?

Shopify retires Stocky on 31 August 2026, and the "Stocky alternatives" lists are everywhere. Read a few and you will notice they compare the same things: forecasting accuracy, reorder suggestions, purchase order workflows. All real, all worth comparing.

Almost none of them mention the job that turns into a crisis weeks later, when the September accounts are due: for thousands of stores, Stocky was the only system recording what inventory actually cost. Not what to reorder. What the units you already sold cost you, which is the number behind your gross margin, your inventory value and the COGS line your accountant posts.

This guide is the missing half of the comparison. It covers what disappears on shutdown day, which class of alternative actually replaces the cost side, and how to rebuild a cost baseline if you find this article too late. For the forecasting half, the roundups already out there do a good job, and we point you to the best of them below rather than repeating it.

First: What Actually Happens on 31 August 2026

Shopify delisted Stocky from the App Store on 2 February 2026, which means it cannot be reinstalled, and removes it from all stores on 31 August 2026. After that date the app and everything inside it is permanently inaccessible.

The loss is uneven, and the cost data is on the wrong side of it. Your core store data is safe, because it never lived in Stocky. The cost history mostly did:

Stocky Was Five Apps in One. Alternatives Replace Four of Them.

Stocky shipped free with POS Pro, so it was built broad and shallow: a purchase order tool, a demand forecaster, a stocktake tool, a transfer manager and a cost reporting layer wearing one interface. The 2026 replacements have each picked a lane:

The forecasting lane is genuinely crowded with good options, and it is the lane most roundups rank. StockTrim's Stocky alternatives roundup is the most thorough comparison of that side we have read, covering the planning tools from SMB-priced through to mid-market. If reordering decisions are your main Stocky loss, start there.

If the cost side is your loss, read on, because the forecasting roundups (understandably) do not cover it at all.

What Stocky's Cost Side Actually Did

Three quiet jobs, invisible until they stop happening:

• It kept cost history per receipt. Every PO recorded what you paid for that batch, at that time, from that supplier. Shopify's own cost per item field holds exactly one current number; update it and the old cost is gone. History is what makes a real COGS calculation possible, and after 31 August, Stocky's copy of it is deleted.
• It valued your inventory. Stock on hand times cost is the inventory asset figure on your balance sheet, and the starting point for any conversation with a lender, a buyer or your accountant.
• It costed your stocktake variances. A stocktake that finds 12 missing units is an inventory write-down in dollars, not just a quantity fix. Stocky connected the count to the cost.

Here is the timing trap: the shutdown lands on 31 August, but the pain lands in September and October, when quarterly accounts and (for Australian stores) the BAS need a COGS number, and the system that could have produced one no longer exists. The merchants who handle this well are treating the shutdown as two tasks: export the history now, and stand up whatever replaces the cost tracking before the new quarter starts, so there is no gap in the record.

How Each Class of Alternative Handles Costing

Shopify's Built-In Tools: one field, no history

Shopify admin keeps products, per-location stock levels and the single cost per item field that feeds its profit reports. For a store that never opened Stocky's reports, that may be enough, and it is free.

But a single current number cannot do cost accounting. When your supplier raises prices and you update the field, every report reprices your entire history at today's cost. No per-receipt layers, no FIFO, no inventory valuation your accountant would sign off on. We cover why Shopify cannot produce a real COGS number on its own in detail; the short version is that COGS needs a history and Shopify stores a snapshot.

Forecasting & PO Apps: excellent at their lane, and costing is not it

This is the biggest cluster of Stocky replacements, and the quality is high:

• StockTrim has done AI demand forecasting for small and mid-sized businesses since 2017: seasonality, per-location planning, supplier lead times, and bill-of-materials forecasting for businesses that manufacture or assemble, which almost nothing else at SMB pricing does. Like Landara, it works alongside Shopify rather than replacing it, so adopting it is a connection, not a migration.
• Prediko is Shopify-native and covers the widest slice of Stocky's daily operations: demand planning plus a proper raise-send-track-receive purchase order workflow.
• Inventory Planner (part of the Sage/Brightpearl family) is the heavyweight planning option for larger retailers with a buying function.
• Fabrikatör is a Shopify-embedded operations app centred on POs and replenishment, with workflow extras like turning incoming stock into backorders.

On costing, all of them stop at the same line, and it is worth being fair about why: it is a different job. Forecasting answers what should I buy? COGS answers what did the units I sold cost?, which needs per-receipt cost layers, an accounting method applied to every sale, and a journal at the end. None of these apps track cost layers, allocate landed costs or produce accounting output, and none of them claims to. If you pick one, and for reordering pain you should, the cost side still needs an answer.

A Full IMS: real costing, at the cost of a migration

Full inventory systems do proper perpetual costing. Cin7 covers multi-channel retail, warehousing and B2B; Katana is the manufacturing-first option. Both replace every Stocky job at once, cost tracking included.

The trade-off is structural: an IMS takes over inventory. Shopify stops being the source of truth for stock; the IMS is. That means a migration project measured in weeks, retraining, monthly pricing that starts in the hundreds, and a system your team must keep feeding forever. If you need warehousing, B2B or manufacturing anyway, that price buys a lot. Buying an IMS only to get a COGS number back is the overcorrection we see most often in Stocky migration threads.

A Cost Ledger Beside Shopify: purpose-built for the orphan job

The fourth option keeps Shopify in charge of stock and adds only the missing layer: a ledger that records what every unit cost. This is the lane Landara is built for, and since it is our product, weigh this section accordingly.

Landara replaces Stocky's cost side like this:

1. Every receipt becomes a dated cost layer at the price you actually paid. The PO CSVs you export from Stocky before shutdown can be imported as historical layers, so your cost history survives the app that made it.
2. Every Shopify order is costed as it ships, oldest layer first (FIFO) or by moving average, with an audit trail from each sale back to its source documents.
3. Stocktakes are back, with barcode scanning, and the variance posts as a costed adjustment: shrinkage valued FIFO, found stock added at cost.
4. Importers get landed cost. Upload the freight and duty invoices behind a shipment and the import costs fold into each unit's layer, so margins reflect what stock truly cost, not just the supplier invoice. Stocky never did this.
5. Month end produces the journal: a ready-to-post Dr COGS / Cr Inventory entry for Xero or QuickBooks. You review and post it yourself; nothing is written to your books unasked.

Where Landara falls short: it deliberately does not forecast demand, suggest reorder quantities or send POs to suppliers, and it is not an inventory system. If replenishment planning was your main Stocky use, you want a forecasting app from the section above, either instead of or alongside Landara. There is a free tier, so you can see your real numbers before paying anything.

The Cost-Side Comparison Nobody Publishes

The Two-App Answer

For most ex-Stocky stores the strongest setup is two focused tools, not one broad one. Every non-IMS option here leaves Shopify as the source of truth for stock, so they read the same data and never fight over it. Split the replacement along the two questions Stocky used to answer:

• "What should I buy?" goes to a forecasting tool. StockTrim if you want the deepest forecasting for the money (or you manufacture); Prediko or Fabrikatör if you want PO workflows attached.
• "What did it cost me?" goes to a cost ledger. Landara tracks the landed cost of every unit, runs the stocktakes, and hands your bookkeeper the monthly COGS journal.

Two focused subscriptions typically still land well under a full IMS, with no migration project and no new system for your team to live in. Because each connects to Shopify independently, you can adopt them one at a time, in either order.

If You Miss the Export Deadline

Found this after 31 August, or never exported? The per-receipt history is gone, and nothing can bring it back. But a cost baseline can still be rebuilt from what Shopify kept: your current stock levels and the cost per item field. Landara syncs both as an opening position, so cost layers, COGS and the monthly journal run correctly from today forward, and takes about 20 minutes. You lose the ability to audit history that predates the baseline; you do not lose the ability to have correct books from here on. Do it before the quarter you care about starts, and September's COGS is a report, not an archaeology project.

Frequently Asked Questions

Whatever you choose, do the export first. Every option on this list is still available on 1 September. Your Stocky data is not. Grab the export checklist, get the files out, then pick your lane.