Restoc vs Cin7: do you need multi-channel inventory ops, or a reorder alert?

You are not shopping for a platform. You are weighing a tool built for multi-channel inventory operations against one Shopify store. A few hundred SKUs. Stock in one place. One question every week: what is about to run out, and what do I order.

Restoc answers that question and nothing else. It installs on your store through Shopify OAuth. It pulls your live inventory levels and your sales history. It works out a reorder point per SKU from your sales velocity, the lead time behind that SKU and a safety stock percentage you set once. It emails you when a SKU crosses that line. On the higher plans it posts to Slack as well. It does not run warehouses, raise purchase orders, manage suppliers, sync marketplaces or touch your accounting.

Cin7 publishes its Core plans openly, which makes the shape of the decision easy to see. Standard is listed at $349 a month and described on that page as ideal for small businesses starting their inventory management journey. Pro is $599, Advanced is $1,199, and Omni is custom priced. Those are the figures our research captured on 9 October 2026, and we re-checked the same page on 17 October 2026. Everything we say about Cin7 below is either one of those quoted lines or an honest note that we captured nothing on that dimension.

Two different questions

• "How do I keep stock straight across Shopify, a marketplace, wholesale and a fulfilment partner?" That is an operations platform question. A reorder alert will not answer it, whoever builds the alert.
• "Which SKUs are about to run out, and when should I have placed the order?" That is an alerting question. A platform can answer it, but you carry the rest of the platform to get there.

Be honest about your operation first. Price it second. A single-purpose alert app is the wrong answer, from us or from anyone, if these describe your week.

• Stock sits in more than one place. A unit counted in the wrong location is a real problem, and you need one number across all of them.
• You sell through Shopify plus a marketplace, a retail counter or a wholesale channel. Inventory has to reconcile across them, not just be watched in one store.
• Purchasing is a workflow, not a decision. You raise purchase orders, track them against suppliers, receive partial deliveries and cost the stock in.
• Inventory has to land in your accounting or your warehouse system without a person retyping it.
• You need someone to configure it for you, and to own the integration afterwards.

That is the work an operations platform exists to do, and it is the category Cin7 sits in. If three of those five points are yours, evaluate platforms and read the Core plan descriptions on cin7.com/pricing against your own order volume. Treat the monthly figure as the cost of replacing a process, not the cost of an app.

The other case is just as common, and it is the one Restoc is built for. One Shopify store. Stock in one place. Between 50 and 2,000 SKUs. Most of them steady, a handful of them the ones that pay the rent. Purchasing is an email to a supplier you have used for years, and the lead time is a number you already know.

In that shape of business nothing in a platform is failing you. The failure is attention. Nobody watches the shelf between Monday and Thursday, the hero SKU quietly goes to zero, and you find out from a customer. Merchants on the Shopify community forum describe the fallback plainly: "a lot of us are doing reorder math by hand again", with the formula written out as average daily sales multiplied by supplier lead time, plus safety stock. That is exactly the arithmetic Restoc runs for every SKU, every day, and the reason safety stock is a field rather than a guess.

The money side is not subtle. Starter is $29 a month for up to 200 tracked SKUs, Growth is $59 for 1,000, Pro is $99 for 2,000, and Cin7's published entry plan is $349 a month. The two numbers are not buying the same thing, which is the whole point of this page. One is an alert on a single store. The other is a platform with order management across channels.

So the trade is plain. You give up multi-channel sync, warehouse control, purchase orders and forecasting. You get one number per SKU, a message when that number is crossed, and a weekly list of what to order. If that is genuinely all you need, the larger system means paying for a surface you will not open. If it is not all you need, Restoc will leave real gaps, and we would rather you found that out here than in month two.

Still working out which category you belong to? Our guide to choosing a Shopify inventory app when you don't need an ERP walks the same decision without a vendor attached. If catalogue size is the sticking point, the page on an inventory app for a large Shopify catalogue, 1,000 to 2,000 SKUs, covers where the caps bite, and the page on what a small store actually pays breaks the Starter bill down line by line.

We would rather lose the signup than have you discover this after installing.

• One location per plan. Every tier, Starter through Pro, covers a single location. Multi-warehouse stock is not something Restoc handles.
• No purchase orders. Restoc names the SKUs below their reorder point and suggests a quantity. Raising, sending, tracking and receiving the order stays with you.
• No supplier or cost management. Vendor lead times exist so your reorder points are right; there are no supplier records, no landed cost and no accounting sync.
• No multi-channel sync. Restoc reads one Shopify store. It is not a hub between Shopify and other sales channels.
• No demand forecasting. The reorder point comes from a recent sales velocity window, your lead time and your safety stock percentage, not from a seasonality model.
• No Slack on Starter. Slack alerts start on Growth. Starter sends alerts by email.
• Web app only. No mobile app, no browser extension. Alerts reach your phone by email and Slack, not by push.
• Email and password sign-in. There is no single sign-on and no two-factor authentication today, and no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification. If any of that is a requirement for your team, say so before you plan around us.

If the money side is what you are weighing, our page on how you pay, billed by Shopify on your Shopify invoice, sets out where the charge lands and what happens at the end of the trial.