Inventory management app for a sporting goods store on Shopify
Restoc is the reorder-alert app built for Shopify stores selling outdoor and sports gear, from a 200-SKU bike shop to a 2,000-SKU gear catalogue. It sets a reorder point per SKU from your own sales velocity, the lead time you give each supplier and a safety stock buffer, then shows you which SKUs are close to running out.
How a gear store tracks stock today
Most outdoor and sports stores keep stock in three places at once. Shopify's inventory list for the current number, a spreadsheet the buyer keeps for preseason orders, and the memory of whoever last spoke to the distributor. That holds together at eighty SKUs. It starts to fail somewhere past a few hundred.
The way it fails is specific to this trade.
- Demand moves with the season. A thirty-day average taken in October says very little about a base layer in December, and a running average taken in July says very little about a trail shoe in September.
- Lead time belongs to the brand, not the SKU. One domestic distributor ships in days. A technical brand building overseas quotes months. Both sit in the same catalogue, and every SKU from a given brand waits the same number of days.
- Stock sells in bursts. A cold snap, a race weekend, a club order. A line can clear in two days and an average-based reorder point never sees it coming.
- The catalogue is lumpy. A four-figure bike and a bin of inner tubes both need reordering. The tubes are the ones that quietly reach zero.
- Size and length runs multiply everything. Skis in five lengths, shoes in a dozen sizes, harnesses in three. Each is its own SKU with its own run rate, and the run rate is not evenly spread across the run.
- Consumables are invisible until they are gone. Wax, chalk, gels, tubes, cartridges, grip tape. Nobody counts them on a busy Saturday.
None of that calls for a full planning suite. It calls for something that watches the numbers already sitting in your Shopify admin and names the SKUs about to run out, early enough that the order can still land. That is the whole job Restoc is built to do.
Season turns and the velocity window
Restoc works out each SKU's reorder point from how fast it has been selling and how long its supplier takes. The sales velocity window is yours to choose, 7, 14 or 30 days, set for the store.
That choice matters more in gear retail than in most categories.
- At a season turn, shorten it. A 7-day window follows a change in demand quickly, so reorder points on the lines that just woke up move up within a week of the weather changing.
- Mid-season, lengthen it. A 30-day window smooths out the Saturday spikes and the one-off kit purchase, so you are not chasing noise on a steady seller.
- On Pro, override it per SKU. The Pro plan adds a per-SKU sales velocity window, so the fast consumables can run on a short window while the slow hardgoods run on a long one.
Be straight about where the numbers come from. Restoc's record of your sales starts the day you connect your store. It reads orders from that moment forward, through order webhooks and a scheduled sync job, and there is no retroactive pull of last year's trading. So a 7-day window has a figure to work with after a week of selling, and a 30-day window after a month. A SKU with no recorded sales in the window shows as having no sales rather than a guessed rate, and the calculation handles that case without inventing a number.
The practical consequence for a seasonal shop: connect before the season turns, not in the middle of it. The window you want is the one with real trading behind it.
And be clear about what this is. A trailing measure of what your store has actually sold, applied against your stated lead time. Restoc does not forecast next season, does not model a preseason buy, and does not know that a cold snap is coming. It tells you the truth about the rate you are selling at now and how many days of cover that leaves.
Bursts, and the safety stock percentage
An average is a poor guide to a line that sells in bursts. The standard reorder point calculation handles that by adding a safety buffer on top of lead-time demand, and Shopify's own guidance on safety stock works the same way.
Restoc now takes a store-wide safety stock percentage and feeds it into the same tested reorder point function. The percentage lifts every SKU's reorder point above bare lead-time demand, and the dashboard, the weekly report and the CSV each show the buffer in units, not just as a percentage, so you can see what it is actually asking you to hold.
Use it the way a buyer would. A shop where club orders and weather swings regularly clear a line sets a larger percentage and accepts the extra cash tied up. A shop with a distributor two hours away and steady weekday trade sets a smaller one. One number, applied across the store, visible in units on every row.
It is one percentage for the whole store today, not a per-SKU setting. If that changes, we will say so here.
Setting it up for a gear catalogue
- Connect the store
Install through Shopify's OAuth flow. Restoc reads inventory levels and sales data from your store through webhooks plus a scheduled sync job. Sales recording starts at the connection, so the first week of trading after you connect is the first week of velocity. It is a web app, so there is no mobile app and no browser extension to manage.
- Let the catalogue sync run
The sync reads your products and inventory levels from Shopify and tracks them up to the SKU cap on your plan. It also reads each product's vendor from Shopify, so the brand name travels with the row. The cap is enforced server-side at sync time, with a banner on the dashboard and the billing screen as your tracked SKU count approaches the limit, so you hear about it before lines go untracked.
- Choose your velocity window
Pick 7, 14 or 30 days for the store. Short for a season turn, long for a steady mid-season stretch. You can change it whenever the trade changes.
- Set a lead time per supplier
The vendor lead times screen lists every distinct vendor in your catalogue. Enter the number of days that brand actually takes, once, and it fills every SKU from that brand that has no lead time of its own. Thirty brands is thirty numbers, not a thousand rows.
- Override the lines that are different
A SKU with its own lead time keeps it, so the one item a brand airfreights can carry a shorter wait than the rest of its range. There is also a store default lead time you can apply across SKUs as a starting point before you refine by brand. It applies the number you type in, so treat it as the control for setting a new default rather than for re-applying the one already saved.
- Set your safety stock percentage
Add a store-wide safety stock percentage on top of lead-time demand, for the lines that sell in bursts rather than evenly. The buffer shows in units on the dashboard, in the weekly report and in the CSV.
- Point the alerts somewhere you read
An alert fires when a SKU crosses its reorder point, through a background job that will not re-fire the same crossing twice. Email on every plan, sent through Amazon SES, and a Slack incoming webhook from Growth up, which is how a shop gets it in front of the whole floor rather than one inbox.
- Work the weekly reorder report
Once a week, Restoc lists every SKU below its reorder point with a suggested order quantity, its vendor and its safety stock in units. Read it in the app or export the CSV and use it as the buy list you send your distributors.
What matters in outdoor and sports retail
Days of inventory remaining, per SKU
The dashboard shows current stock, days of inventory remaining and reorder status for every active SKU. For a size run, that means you can see which lengths and sizes are thin while the run as a whole still looks healthy.
The urgent lines sort to the top
The SKU list sorts by days of inventory remaining and reorder status, soonest to stock out first. On a catalogue of a thousand rows you read the top of the screen, not the whole table.
A reorder point built from your own numbers
No category averages, no benchmarks. The reorder point comes from your store's recorded sales velocity over your chosen window, the lead time on that SKU and your safety stock percentage, calculated by one tested function with no hidden adjustments.
A buffer for lines that sell in bursts
The store-wide safety stock percentage lifts every reorder point above bare lead-time demand, and the units it adds are shown on the row, so a race weekend does not empty a line before the alert arrives.
One lead time per brand, not per SKU
Set a brand's lead time once on the vendor lead times screen and it covers every SKU from that brand without its own number. The two-month overseas label and the distributor shipping this week then get very different warning windows from the same rule set.
The supplier name travels with the row
Each SKU's vendor is read from Shopify during the sync and shown on the dashboard and in the weekly report, so a buy list can be read brand by brand rather than reassembled from product titles.
The small consumables stop slipping
Wax, tubes, chalk and gels sell steadily and get forgotten. They cross a reorder point like anything else, and the alert does not care how cheap the line is.
A buy list, not a dashboard to interpret
The weekly report lists SKUs below their reorder point with a suggested quantity against each. Export the CSV and it is already most of the way to a purchase order.
Alerts in the channel the floor watches
Email alerts on every plan; Slack alerts through an incoming webhook on Growth and Pro, so a reorder crossing lands where your staff already talk.
A record of what fired
The dashboard keeps a list of the most recent alerts showing which SKUs crossed, which channel the alert went to and whether it has been delivered yet, so a missed reorder is something you can check rather than guess at.
Plans against catalogue size
| Plan | Tracked SKUs | Price | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 200 | $29 / month, or $290 / year | A focused range: one category, a single discipline, a small shop |
| Growth | 1,000 | $59 / month, or $590 / year | A full gear catalogue with size and length runs; adds Slack alerts |
| Pro | 2,000 | $99 / month, or $990 / year | A large catalogue; adds a per-SKU sales velocity window override |
What Restoc does not do yet
We would rather you find the limits here than after you install.
- No forecasting and no preseason buy planning. Restoc measures what has sold, adds your safety stock percentage and applies your lead time. It does not predict next season's demand.
- Sales history starts at the connection, not before. Restoc records what sells from the day you connect your store onwards, so there is no comparison against last winter and the velocity window fills as you trade.
- Safety stock is one percentage for the store. There is no per-SKU safety stock setting today.
- Vendor lead times depend on Shopify's vendor field. The screen lists the vendors your products actually carry, so products with that field left blank still need a lead time set on the SKU.
- One location. Every plan tracks a single location. If your shop floor and a back warehouse are separate Shopify locations, Restoc is not the tool for splitting stock between them today.
- No purchase orders. You get a suggested order quantity and a CSV. Sending it to the distributor is still your email.
- Web app only. There is no mobile app and no browser extension. Alerts reach your phone by email or Slack.
- Sign-in is email and password. There is no single sign-on and no two-factor authentication yet.
- Billing runs through Shopify. Your subscription appears on your Shopify invoice rather than as a separate card payment, and every plan carries a 60-day free trial that will not take a first charge before one full weekly reorder cycle has completed.
If sizes and colourways are the bulk of your catalogue, the apparel page goes deeper on size runs. If you are past a thousand SKUs, the large-catalogue page covers how the alerts hold up at that count, and the security page sets out exactly what Restoc reads from your store, where it is kept and how to delete it.
Questions
Will it handle a sporting goods catalogue of 1,500 SKUs?
That is the Pro plan, which tracks up to 2,000 SKUs at $99 a month. Growth covers up to 1,000 and Starter up to 200. The cap is enforced server-side at sync time, with an in-app banner on the dashboard and the billing screen as your tracked SKU count approaches it, so you find out before lines go untracked rather than after.
Can I set a different lead time for each supplier?
Yes, and that is the quickest way to set up. The vendor lead times screen lists every distinct vendor read from your Shopify products, and the number you enter against a brand fills every SKU from that brand that has no lead time of its own. A SKU you have already given its own lead time keeps it. There is also a store default lead time you can apply across SKUs when you want to change that number, as a starting point before you refine brand by brand.
What does the safety stock percentage do?
It adds a buffer on top of lead-time demand in the reorder point calculation, which is what stops a line that sells in bursts from running out before an average-based reorder point is reached. It is a single percentage for the store, and the units it adds show on the dashboard, in the weekly report and in the CSV export.
Will the dashboard show anything useful in the first week?
From the first sync you get current stock, vendor and reorder status for every tracked SKU. Sales velocity is a different matter: the record starts at the connection and builds forward, so a SKU with no recorded sales yet shows as having no sales rather than an invented rate, and a 7-day window is the quickest route to a usable figure. Connect ahead of a season turn rather than in the middle of one.
Does it know that ski season is coming?
No. Restoc calculates from trailing sales velocity over a 7, 14 or 30 day window plus your safety stock percentage, not a seasonal forecast. What you can do at a season turn is shorten the window to 7 days, which makes reorder points follow the change in demand within a week. On Pro you can override the window for individual SKUs.
I have a shop floor and a warehouse as two Shopify locations. Does that work?
Not yet. Every plan tracks a single location, so Restoc is not the right tool today if you need separate reorder points for two locations. We will say so plainly here when that changes.
Can the alerts go into Slack for the whole shop to see?
Yes, from the Growth plan up, through an incoming Slack webhook you configure, alongside email. Starter sends email alerts only, delivered through Amazon SES. Either way the delivery job is idempotent, so one crossing sends one alert rather than a repeat every time the job runs.
Is there an app for my phone?
No. Restoc is a web app, with no mobile app and no browser extension. Reorder alerts reach you on your phone as email or as a Slack message, and the weekly report is read in the app or exported as CSV.