Shopify reorder alerts when your old inventory app is gone
The inventory app you used inside Shopify admin is no longer doing the job, and nothing is watching your stock between logins. This page answers the questions merchants ask next, in order: where your data sits, what to check in Shopify itself, and what covers reorder alerts now.
Where this page stands
We are not going to put a shutdown date or an official statement on this page. We cannot source one, and a wrong date helps nobody. For the current status of any app on your store, open your Shopify admin, then Shopify's Help Center. That is the only authoritative answer.
What we can be useful about is the gap. Strip out the news and the practical problem is the same three things, in this order:
- Nothing watches stock between logins. The counts are in Shopify. Nothing tells you when a SKU crosses the line where you should be placing an order.
- The reorder maths moved back into a spreadsheet. Sales velocity times supplier lead time, plus whatever cushion you add for the items that sell in bursts, redone by hand, usually on a Sunday night.
- The tools suggested as replacements answer a bigger question. Full planning and forecasting suites are built to model demand across a catalogue. That is more machinery than a store needs to know what to order on Monday.
Restoc is being built for the first two problems only: a reorder point per SKU, an alert when stock crosses it, and a weekly list of what to order. The questions below cover the rest. If you want the rebuild in order rather than in answers, our guide to rebuilding reorder alerts on a Shopify store walks through it step by step, and our page on what happens when you connect your Shopify store covers the install itself.
What to sort out this week
- Export anything you would hate to retype
Your product catalogue, variant inventory levels and order history live in Shopify and stay there. Supplier records, cost prices, purchase orders and receiving history sat inside the app, and they leave with it. Pull CSVs now, while access is easy, not after.
- Write down one lead time per vendor
Days from your order landing in their inbox to stock on your shelf, including the slow ones. Every reorder calculation, in any tool or any spreadsheet, needs this number. Restoc reads each SKU's vendor from Shopify on its scheduled sync and has a vendor lead times screen, so the number goes in once per vendor and fills every SKU without a lead time of its own. Most merchants have these in their head rather than on record, and that is where they get lost.
- Decide how much cushion the burst sellers need
An average-based reorder point is fine for a SKU that sells evenly and late for one that sells in bursts. Restoc applies a store-wide safety stock percentage on top of lead-time demand in the reorder point calculation, and shows the resulting safety stock in units on the dashboard, the weekly report and the CSV export, so the number is visible rather than buried in a formula.
- Decide who is watching stock until a tool is
A calendar reminder and a weekly inventory export is a worse system than an alert, but it is a system. Name the person and the day. The expensive gap is not the missing app, it is the three weeks where nobody was checking.
Questions
Why did my Shopify inventory app stop working, and can I still use it?
Nobody outside Shopify can tell you, and we will not invent a date or quote an announcement we cannot source. Open your Shopify admin, then Shopify's Help Center, for the official position on any app on your store. If it still opens for you, treat that as borrowed time and export while access is easy. Then treat the practical question separately: something needs to be watching stock levels, and that is what the rest of this page is about.
What happens to my inventory and sales data?
Your catalogue, variant inventory levels and order history stay in Shopify, because that is where they live. Anything an app layered on top, purchase orders, supplier records, cost prices, receiving history, goes with that app, so export a CSV of whatever you would be annoyed to retype. What Restoc is built to hold is narrow: your store's .myshopify.com domain and its Admin API access token server-side, tracked SKU records (title, your own SKU code, Shopify variant id, current stock, lead time and computed reorder point), sales quantities and dates per SKU with the Shopify order reference, your alert settings, and which setup steps your account has reached. No customer names, addresses or payment details.
Do I have to enter a lead time for every SKU?
No. Restoc pulls each SKU's vendor from Shopify on its scheduled sync and shows that vendor on the dashboard and the weekly report. A vendor lead times screen in settings lists every distinct vendor on your store, so you type one number per vendor and it fills every SKU that does not carry a lead time of its own. A SKU with its own lead time keeps it, and that per-SKU figure always wins. That matters at 200 SKUs and it decides the thing at 2,000.
If I ever leave, how do I get my data out of Restoc?
The weekly reorder report exports as CSV in the app, so the working numbers are yours to take at any point. Settings > Account deletes your account and everything stored about your store in one action: the Shopify connection and its access token, every SKU, sales record, alert and report, with any active Shopify charge cancelled first. Uninstalling from your Shopify admin also ends billing, and Shopify's data-erasure request about 48 hours later deletes the store's data here automatically. We would rather tell you the exit now than after you have wired a tool into your week.
Does Shopify tell me when stock is low on its own?
It shows you counts. Whether your plan includes automation that can notify you on a condition you set is worth checking in Shopify's current documentation rather than taking our word for it, because those capabilities change. Either way, a count is not a reorder point. The reorder point depends on how fast that SKU sells, how long your supplier takes to deliver and how much cushion you keep, and an alert at zero arrives too late to act on.
What does Restoc actually do?
One job: it tells you when to reorder. It is built to connect through Shopify's OAuth install, or by pasting an Admin API access token from your own custom app, then read inventory levels and sales history through webhooks plus a scheduled sync job. From there it calculates a reorder point per SKU from a sales velocity window you choose, 7, 14 or 30 days, the lead time for that SKU or its vendor, and a store-wide safety stock percentage on top, with the safety stock shown in units on the dashboard, the weekly report and the CSV. When a SKU crosses its reorder point it fires an email alert, sent through Amazon SES, with a Slack alert through an incoming webhook on Growth and above, delivered by a background job built to be idempotent so one crossing is one alert and not five. The dashboard shows current stock, days of inventory remaining and reorder status per SKU. No purchase orders, no
Will the dashboard be empty for weeks after I connect?
It should not be, and that was a real risk worth fixing rather than glossing over. The install is built to backfill roughly the last 30 days of sales alongside the catalogue pull, so velocity, days of inventory remaining and reorder points have history to work from on day one rather than accruing slowly from new orders. After that, webhooks and the scheduled sync keep stock and sales current. The honest limit: that install path has been built and tested but has not yet run against a live store, which is one of the things the waitlist exists to put right.
What does it cost, and when can I get it?
Restoc is not live yet. It is in build, and the waitlist is how you hear first; we would rather say that plainly than sell you a launch date we cannot hold. Planned pricing is Starter at $29 a month for up to 200 tracked SKUs with email alerts, Growth at $59 for up to 1,000 SKUs adding Slack alerts alongside email, and Pro at $99 for up to 2,000 SKUs with a per-SKU velocity window override. One location per plan. Paid yearly it is $290, $590 and $990: ten months' price for twelve. Every plan carries a 60-day free trial, long enough that at least one full weekly reorder cycle completes before the first charge, and the subscription is billed by Shopify on your Shopify invoice rather than by a separate card payment.