Is there a direct replacement for the forecasting app Shopify retired?

No single product maps onto it one for one, because it bundled forecasting with purchase orders, receiving and supplier records. Most merchants split the job: a planning suite for purchasing, or a narrow alert app for reorder timing. Decide which half you actually used before you buy.

Can Shopify Flow handle reorder alerts on its own?

It can send a notification when a variant drops below a number you set, which is fine for a few hero SKUs. The limit is that a fixed number ignores how fast the SKU sells and how long your supplier takes, so alerts arrive too early on slow movers and too late on fast ones. Maintaining thresholds per variant by hand gets old quickly.

Do I need demand forecasting, or just alerts?

If you place large, infrequent orders with long lead times and real capital at risk, forecasting earns its price. If you reorder regularly from a handful of suppliers and your problem is noticing in time, alerts tied to velocity and lead time cover the decision you are actually making.

Can I set a reorder point without buying anything?

Yes. Average daily sales multiplied by supplier lead time in days, plus a safety buffer, gets you a workable number per SKU. The maths is simple, and the hard part is keeping it current as velocity and lead times change.

What merchants use now that Shopify's forecast app is gone | Restoc, reorder alerts for Shopify store

Most merchants who lost that app went one of four ways, and you can usually guess which by SKU count and lead time. Back to a spreadsheet, fed by a weekly export of inventory and sales. Into Shopify Flow, with a workflow that emails or pings Slack when a variant drops under a fixed number. Up into a full planning suite with demand forecasts, purchase orders, receiving and multi-location transfers. Or sideways into a narrow alert app that watches stock, says when to reorder, and does nothing else.

None of those is a one-to-one swap, and anyone selling you one is overselling. The retired app bundled forecasting with purchasing and receiving, and it came from Shopify itself, so price was barely part of the decision. Every option above trades something instead. The spreadsheet trades your Monday morning. Flow trades accuracy for being free. The suite trades money and setup time for coverage you may never configure. The alert app trades breadth for being something you can actually keep current. Here is how each one has held up.

The spreadsheet holds up longer than people admit

A weekly export, a velocity column, a lead-time column, a formula. It works. For a store under about fifty SKUs with one supplier and a steady two-week lead time, it is still the right answer, and buying software for it would be theatre.

It breaks in two places. First, it is only as fresh as the last export. A SKU can cross its reorder point on Tuesday and you find out on Sunday, which is five days of cover you did not know you were spending. Second, the maintenance is invisible until it lapses. Lead times drift, a supplier slips from 14 days to 35, a product turns seasonal, and nobody updates the sheet because nothing looked broken. The stockout that follows is a real financial hit, and it usually lands on your best seller, because that is the SKU that burns through cover fastest.

Shopify Flow is free, and the fixed threshold is the catch

Plenty of merchants replaced the alert half with a Flow workflow: when inventory quantity for a variant drops below X, send an email or post to a channel. It is free, it lives inside the admin, and for a handful of hero SKUs it is genuinely enough.

The catch is X. A fixed threshold ignores the two numbers that decide when you should place the order: how fast the SKU sells now, and how long the supplier takes. A candle that sells 0.4 units a day and a candle that sells 12 a day cannot share a threshold of 10. One alert arrives months early and gets ignored. The other arrives after the sale is already gone. Merchants who run this properly end up hand-maintaining per-variant thresholds, which is the spreadsheet problem again wearing a different hat.

Planning suites cover everything, including the parts you will not use

The other direction is up. Demand forecasting, purchase orders, receiving, supplier records, transfers between locations, sometimes replenishment across sales channels. If you are buying containers, running three warehouses, or carrying serious capital in stock, this is where you belong and the price follows the value.

The trade is setup and ownership. These tools want clean supplier data, cost prices, per-SKU lead times and one person who owns the process. A two-person team with 400 SKUs can buy a suite and still be eyeballing stock four months later, because onboarding never finished. Coverage you have not configured is not coverage. That is the quiet reason some merchants bought a planning suite, then went back to the sheet.

Narrow alert apps do one job, so ask how they do it

This is where most 50 to 2,000 SKU stores settled, and the category is uneven. Five questions separate a useful one from a noisy one.

What triggers the alert: a number you typed in, or a reorder point calculated from recent sales velocity and your lead time?
Whose lead time: one global default, or per SKU, because your tin supplier and your label printer are not the same.
Where does the alert land: an inbox you skim, or a channel your team actually watches.
Is there a list as well as pings? A weekly report you can take to a supplier beats twelve separate emails.
Does the sync cover your whole catalogue? Ask directly how many products it pulls on install, and what happens to a SKU with no sales history yet.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A brand-new install has no past to work from unless the app backfills sales history, so expect a quiet first stretch from any tool that only listens to orders going forward.

Descriptive comparison: what the retired Shopify app actually did

Named here only to describe function, for readers searching for it: Stocky combined demand suggestions with purchase orders, receiving, supplier records and stocktakes, and it shipped from Shopify rather than a third party. That is why no single product replaces it cleanly.

Split by job, the mapping is honest enough. A spreadsheet replaces the forecast column. Flow replaces the low-stock ping. A planning suite replaces the purchasing and receiving side. A reorder-alert app replaces the timing decision, which is the part that costs you money when it is late. If you used the old app end to end for purchasing, an alert app alone will leave a gap you will feel. If you mostly used it to answer "what do I need to order this week", the alert is the piece you are missing.

Where Restoc sits, plainly

Restoc is the narrow option, and it is not launched yet, so there is nothing to test drive today. When it launches it is built to install through Shopify OAuth, pull real-time inventory levels and historical sales data, then calculate a reorder point per SKU from a velocity window you choose, 7, 14 or 30 days, and the lead time you enter for that SKU. When a SKU crosses that point, it sends an alert by email or Slack webhook. On top of that there is a weekly reorder report, viewable in the app and exportable as CSV, listing every SKU below its reorder point with a suggested order quantity, and a dashboard showing current stock, days of inventory remaining and reorder status per active SKU. Billing is three tiers, Starter, Growth and Pro, with SKU caps enforced server-side.

What it does not do, so you do not discover it in month two: no purchase orders, no receiving, no supplier records, no barcode scanning, and no demand model beyond sales velocity and lead time. Web app only, no mobile app and no browser extension. The free trial runs long enough that at least one full weekly reorder cycle completes before the first charge, and annual billing is offered at signup. If you need the purchasing side, buy a suite. If you need to stop missing reorder windows, that is the one job this is for.