Restoc vs Brightpearl by Sage: a reorder alert app, or a retail operations platform

Restoc is a reorder alert app for Shopify stores with roughly 50 to 2,000 SKUs. It works out a reorder point for each SKU from your sales velocity and the lead time you enter. When a SKU crosses that point, it alerts you by email, and to a Slack webhook on Growth and Pro. Once a week it hands you a reorder report with a suggested order quantity, exportable as CSV. Plans are $29, $59 and $99 a month, charged on your Shopify invoice through Shopify's own billing, not by a separate card payment. Every plan has a 60 day free trial.

One thing before you read further. Restoc is not launched. It is on a waitlist while we finish the build. Everything on this page describes what it is built to do, not something you can install this afternoon. We would rather say that in the first paragraph than in the last.

Brightpearl by Sage sits in a different category. It is publicly described as a retail operations platform. We have not captured Brightpearl's own wording, and we have not verified its order, fulfilment or back office capabilities ourselves, so we are not going to describe their feature set as settled fact. Read brightpearl.com for their positioning. Then ask them what a store your size would pay.

So this is not a feature bake off. If you need a platform, a $29 alert app will not stand in for it. If the only gap in your week is knowing when to reorder, a platform is a much bigger commitment than the one signal you came for.

Most merchants searching for a Brightpearl alternative for a small business sit somewhere between two poles.

The platform pole

One system holds inventory, orders, purchasing and fulfilment. It is usually bought with a demo, a scoping conversation and a rollout. That is a sensible purchase in two situations. Your operation has genuinely outgrown the tools you have bolted together. Or several people need the same record of truth, every day.

The single-purpose pole

An app does one job and gets out of the way. Merchants who used to run their reorder maths through a Shopify-native tool tend to land here. What they lost was one job, not a platform. The plain version of the question sounds like this: I do not need a full ERP, I just want to know when to reorder.

Restoc was built for that second pole on purpose. It is not a smaller platform with features stripped out. It watches stock, calculates a reorder point, and tells you. Everything in the price list serves that one loop.

If you are not sure which pole you are at, the sibling guide in this pillar walks through the decision without a product pitch. If your worry is multi-channel and marketplace control rather than retail back office, the Cin7 comparison in this pillar is the closer read, and the alternatives page lines up the narrower apps side by side.

A platform is the right purchase when

Your problem is bigger than reordering. You sell across several channels, or into wholesale. Orders and fulfilment need to live in one place. More than one person touches the same stock record daily. Your back office already breaks in the joins between tools. In that situation a narrow alert app fixes one symptom and leaves the rest. Book the demo. Ask the pricing question early. Judge the platform on the whole workflow it owns.

Restoc is the right purchase when

You run one Shopify store. Your catalogue sits somewhere between 50 and 2,000 SKUs. The failure you keep having is specific: a product ran out and nobody noticed until a customer did. You do not want a rollout. You want a reorder point per SKU, an email or a Slack message when something crosses it, and one weekly list of what to order. At $29 to $99 a month, that decision is small enough to make on a Tuesday and reverse if it is wrong.

If it is genuinely close

Write down the last three times inventory cost you something. Were those incidents about not knowing when to reorder? Then the narrow tool is the honest fit. Were they about orders, returns, fulfilment or reconciliation? No amount of alerting will touch them, and a platform conversation is the better use of your week.

A platform purchase comes with a contract conversation. A $29 app should be able to answer the same questions in a paragraph, so here they are.

Billing

The three tiers run through Shopify's native billing API, so the charge lands on your Shopify invoice and your payment details stay with Shopify. Annual billing is surfaced as an option at signup, at ten months' price for twelve. The billing screen shows your trial end date, the days left in the 60 day trial and the date of the first scheduled charge, with a reminder in the week before the trial ends. The trial is built so at least one full weekly reorder cycle completes before that first charge.

What we store

Your name, email address and a hash of your password. Your store's .myshopify.com domain, its Shopify Admin API access token and the app's API secret key, held server-side and never shown in the app. Sync bookkeeping: when your store last synced, how much of the catalogue it read and any sync error, so a partial sync can be seen rather than quietly showing you stale stock. Tracked SKUs: title, your own SKU code, the Shopify variant id, current stock, lead time and the computed reorder point. Sales quantities and dates per SKU with the Shopify order reference, and no customer names, addresses or payment details. Your alert settings, your plan tier and the state of your Shopify charge. Sales history is kept while your account is open, because it feeds the velocity calculation.

Where it runs, and how to end it

The app and its Postgres database run on Amazon Web Services in a single region, with pages served through CloudFront. Reorder alert and account email goes out through Amazon SES, and Slack receives alerts at a webhook you configure. Sign-in is email and password: there is no single sign-on, no two-factor authentication, no independent audit such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001, and no choice of data region. If you need a signed data processing agreement, ask. Settings and Account deletes your account and everything stored about your store at once, cancelling any active Shopify charge first, and uninstalling from your Shopify admin ends billing, with Shopify's erasure request about 48 hours later clearing the store's data here automatically.

We would rather you find this out here than after you install.

• No purchase orders. You get a weekly list with suggested quantities and a CSV. Raising the order with your supplier is still your job.
• One location per store, on all three plans. If you need different reorder points per warehouse today, this is not the tool.
• Slack is a Growth feature. Starter sends email alerts only. If Slack is where your team actually looks, start at $59.
• No forecasting suite. The reorder point comes from your recent sales velocity and your lead time. It is arithmetic you can check, not demand modelling.
• Web app only. There is no mobile app and no browser extension. Alerts arrive by email and Slack, not as a push notification.
• No orders, fulfilment or accounting. That is the platform's territory, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
• Not live yet. As said at the top, Restoc is on a waitlist. The 60 day trial is designed so at least one full weekly reorder cycle completes before the first charge, because a reorder tool you have not seen run a week is a tool you cannot judge.

Catching reorder points early is how merchants avoid the cost of running out. We are not going to put a revenue figure on that for your store. We cannot know it. A separate page in this pillar sets out what a small store actually pays on Starter, line by line, and another covers the trial and the first charge in detail.