The best Shopify inventory apps for a 50 to 2,000 SKU store, compared

"Inventory management app" covers at least four jobs on Shopify. The apps that do all four are priced like they do all four.

• Seeing what you hold right now, per variant and per location.
• Being warned before a SKU runs out.
• Planning how much to buy, and when, across a season or a catalogue.
• Running purchasing, suppliers, warehouses and other channels end to end.

Most stores in the 50 to 2,000 SKU range want one of two of those. Either a best seller sold out four days ago and nobody noticed, which is an alerting problem. Or cash is sitting in the wrong stock, which is a planning problem.

Buy the wrong category and you pay every month for a forecasting suite while still missing reorder windows, because nothing in it taps you on the shoulder.

Below is every option we see merchants use, described plainly. We do not rank them. We do not quote other vendors' prices or feature lists, because we have not verified them and they change. Every vendor named is linked in the sources at the foot of this page. Our sibling guide, how to choose a Shopify inventory app when you don't need an ERP, works through the decision itself.

The most common inventory system in this size of store is a Google Sheet or an Excel file, refreshed from a Shopify export, with reorder quantities worked out by hand. Plenty of merchants went back to it when the app they relied on was withdrawn.

The arithmetic is not hard, and merchants post it to each other in the Shopify Community: reorder point equals average daily sales multiplied by supplier lead time, plus safety stock. Their worked example is three units a day on a fourteen-day lead time, so forty-two units of lead-time demand, safety stock at twenty per cent is nine, reorder point fifty-one.

It costs nothing in cash and it bends to anything, including the supplier quirks no app knows about. It has one structural weakness, and it is the same one every time. The sheet never speaks first. It is accurate on the day you update it and quietly stale every day after.

The reorder decision only happens if you remember to open the file. The weeks you most need to open it are the weeks you are busiest.

It suits a slow catalogue, a merchant who enjoys the numbers, or a store where one person places every purchase order and holds the whole picture in their head.

The store you already have is the first option, and it costs nothing extra.

Shopify documents what its admin shows and which reports come with which plan in its Help Center. Read those pages rather than a summary of them here, ours included, because the detail moves and your plan decides what you get. The inventory manual is linked in the sources.

On alerting, Shopify's own blog is direct: its core admin does not include a native low-stock alert feature, so notifications need an add-on. So the question is not whether the admin is good. It is whether visibility is what you are missing. A screen you have to remember to open solves a different problem from a message that arrives when a number crosses a line. If you check inventory daily anyway, you may need no app at all. We would rather say that than sell you something.

Shopify Flow is Shopify's own automation tool, and its App Store listing prices it at free. Shopify's blog names it as one of the two routes to low-stock notification, and says Flow lets you build a custom workflow that triggers an email or message once stock drops below a chosen level. Which triggers your plan includes is a question for Shopify's current Flow documentation, so check there first.

For a merchant comfortable building a condition and an action, a free workflow is the strongest objection to paying anything at all, and it is a fair one.

The threshold is the trade-off. Twelve units left means one thing for a candle you sell forty of a week. It means something else for a spare part you sell twice a year. That is fine when velocities and lead times are similar. It gets noisy, or silent, when they are not.

You also own the maintenance. New SKUs need new thresholds, and nobody is reviewing them.

There is a sub-category of Shopify apps built to do one thing: tell you when stock crosses a threshold. Merchbees Low Stock Alert is one name in it. Search the Shopify App Store for low stock alert and you will see the current field, with a pricing tab and a review count on every listing.

This is the closest neighbourhood to Restoc, so read it carefully. The distinction to look for is how the threshold gets decided. Some tools ask you for the number. Others work the number out from how fast the SKU sells and how long the supplier takes. Neither is wrong.

Stable catalogue, numbers you already know: a fixed threshold is less machinery. Velocities that move: a static number becomes a maintenance job you stop doing by month three. Our page Restoc vs Merchbees Low Stock Alert takes that one trade-off apart on its own.

We will not put a price band on this group. We have not verified what any of them charges today, and each listing's pricing tab answers it faster than we could.

One step up in scope sit the planning tools sold to Shopify and direct to consumer brands. Inventory Planner by Sage, Prediko, Assisty and Cogsy are the names that come up in this bracket.

We are not going to describe their feature sets. We have not verified them, and a second-hand paraphrase is worth less to you than thirty seconds on the vendor's own site. All four are linked in the sources, and so are their prices, which only they can state accurately. We keep a separate page for each of those four if you want the scope question handled one vendor at a time.

What we can tell you is the question this category answers: how much to commit, and when. It may suit you if you buy in large committed quantities, carry real lead time risk with suppliers, or need a forecast your team can argue over. It is a heavier fit if you want one signal and no new weekly process.

At the far end sit the operations platforms. Cin7, Brightpearl by Sage and Linnworks are the usual reference points at this end of the market.

Take their scope from them, not from us. We have not verified what any of them covers today, and the answer depends on modules and plan. Our Cin7, Brightpearl and Linnworks pages set each one beside a reorder alert so you can see the size difference.

What we will say is when this end becomes the right conversation. Several sales channels. Stock in more than one warehouse. Wholesale alongside retail. A single Shopify store with one stock location is far less than platforms of this size are built to carry.

Pricing here is not always published. If a vendor does not list a number, ask for it in writing, with the billing period and the volume assumptions attached.

Three more approaches are worth naming. Plenty of merchants in this range use them, and they are legitimate.

Carrying more safety stock

Hold a deeper buffer and the reorder window stops being sharp. This works. It also turns an attention problem into a cash problem, because the buffer is your money sitting on a shelf. The comparison is not app price against free. It is app price against working capital parked in stock you did not need yet. Worth knowing before you decide: safety stock is also a number a calculated reorder point can carry for you, which is a different thing from holding a deeper buffer on every SKU and hoping it covers the fast ones.

A person doing a weekly stock review

A virtual assistant, an ops coordinator or a fulfilment agency running a recurring "what is running low" task is the human version of an alert. It is flexible, and it catches things software misses. You pay for hours, and the review happens when it is booked, not at the moment the number crosses.

A fixed reorder calendar with your supplier

Order on the first Monday of the month regardless, or work from your 3PL's stock report. For a slow catalogue with a patient supplier, this removes the software question entirely. It struggles the moment one SKU behaves unlike the rest.

Restoc is built for one job on that list: the warning. It is made for Shopify merchants running 50 to 2,000 SKUs who do not want an ERP and do not want a new planning process. They want to know before they run out.

What it is built to do

• Install through Shopify OAuth. The install reads inventory levels and historical sales data from your store. Both stay current through Shopify webhooks plus a scheduled sync job.
• Calculate a reorder point per SKU. It uses a sales velocity window you choose, 7, 14 or 30 days, the lead time for that SKU, and a store-wide safety stock percentage added on top of lead-time demand, for the items that sell in bursts rather than evenly. The velocity window is store-wide on Starter and Growth. Pro adds a per-SKU override.
• Take lead time per supplier, not SKU by SKU. Each SKU carries the vendor from your Shopify product, shown on the dashboard and in the weekly report. A vendor lead times screen in settings lists every vendor in your catalogue, so you set a lead time once per supplier and any SKU without its own lead time uses it. A store-wide lead time can be applied to all SKUs in one go.
• Alert you when a SKU crosses that point. Email on every plan, sent through Amazon SES. A Slack incoming webhook alongside email from Growth upwards. The job is idempotent, so a re-run does not fire the same alert twice.
• Produce a weekly reorder report. In the app and as a CSV export, listing everything below its reorder point with a suggested order quantity and the safety stock units behind it.
• Show a dashboard with current stock, days of inventory remaining, safety stock in units and reorder status for each active SKU.
• Hold your catalogue to your plan's cap. Tracked-SKU limits are enforced server-side at sync time, so you know which ceiling you are working under.

What it is not

It is not a forecasting tool. It does not raise purchase orders, and it holds nothing about a supplier beyond the vendor name Shopify gives it and the lead time you set. It does not manage other sales channels. It is a web app only: no mobile app, no browser extension. If those are the jobs you need, one of the planning or operations tools above is the honest answer, and we would rather you bought it.

Each plan covers one location today. If you need different reorder points per location, Restoc is not there yet. We will say so on this page when that changes.

Subscriptions run on Shopify's own billing, so a charge lands on your Shopify invoice rather than a separate card payment, and no payment details reach us. Four sibling pages go deeper: how you pay through Shopify, what a small store actually pays on Starter, what annual billing saves, and what the 60-day free trial covers before the first charge lands. If your catalogue is nearer the top of the range, the 1,000 to 2,000 SKU page is written for that.