How to Migrate from Stocky Before August 2026

The Stocky shutdown date is 31 August 2026. That sounds like plenty of time. It is not. Here is the maths. A proper migration requires parallel running — operating both your old and new system simultaneously to verify data accuracy. Best practice is 60 days of parallel running. That means your new system needs to be fully configured and loaded with data by 1 July 2026 at the latest. Before that, you need 2-4 weeks for system setup, data import, and staff training. Before that, you need 2-3 weeks to evaluate alternatives and make a decision. Before that, you need 1-2 weeks to export and clean your Stocky data. Add it up: you need to start the process by mid-April 2026 to have a comfortable migration. If you are reading this in March, you are right on schedule. If you are reading this in June, you are already behind.

The first step is extracting every piece of data you have stored in Stocky. This is non-negotiable — once Stocky is removed from your store, this data is gone permanently. There is no recovery option and Shopify has confirmed they will not provide post-shutdown data exports.

With your data exported and safe, you can take a measured look at the alternatives. The right choice depends on three factors: your SKU count, your supplier complexity, and your budget. If you have under 500 SKUs and one or two suppliers, most tools will work fine. The decision is mainly about price and interface preference. If you have 1,000+ SKUs with multiple suppliers and long lead times — like Bailey & Coco with their 2,845 SKUs and 190-day China supply chain — you need a system that genuinely handles supplier lead time modelling, not just purchase order creation. The main contenders are Inventory Planner (established, powerful, complex, £100-300/month), Prediko (newer, design-forward, DTC-focused, similar pricing), and Canopy (built for weeks cover and long supply chains, early access pricing). Do not choose based on feature lists alone. Request a trial or demo with your actual data. A tool that looks perfect on paper but does not handle your specific variant structure or supplier workflow is worse than useless.

This is where most migrations go wrong. Merchants export messy data from Stocky and import it directly into their new system, carrying over years of accumulated errors. A migration is your one opportunity to clean house. Before importing, audit your supplier list — remove suppliers you no longer use, update lead times to reflect actual recent performance (not the optimistic numbers from two years ago), and verify contact details. Audit your cost prices — compare Stocky costs against your most recent invoices and update any that have drifted. Audit your SKU list — identify products that are discontinued or should be archived. There is no point migrating data for products you will never reorder. The time you invest in data cleaning now will pay dividends in forecast accuracy for the next 12 months. Every incorrect cost price or outdated lead time that makes it into your new system will generate wrong reorder suggestions.

Bailey & Coco had been using Stocky since 2021. Over four years, they had accumulated 847 purchase orders, 23 suppliers (of which only 6 were still active), and cost prices that were an average of 12% below their actual current costs due to supplier price increases that were never updated in Stocky. Their migration took 10 weeks in total. The first two weeks were spent purely on data cleaning — updating every active SKU's cost price from recent invoices, removing 17 inactive suppliers, and archiving 340 discontinued SKUs. The data cleaning alone revealed that their Stocky-based reorder calculations had been understating purchase costs by £8,400 per container order. They had been under-budgeting every shipment for over a year without realising it. The lesson: migration is not just about moving data. It is about discovering how inaccurate your current data has become.

Run both systems simultaneously for a minimum of 30 days — ideally 60. During this period, create purchase orders in both Stocky and your new system. Compare the reorder suggestions. If they differ significantly, investigate why. Common causes of discrepancy: different lead time assumptions, different demand calculation windows (Stocky uses 90-day lookback by default, some tools use 30 or 60 days), and different safety stock buffers. The parallel running period is also when your team builds muscle memory with the new interface. By the time you cut over, creating a PO in the new system should feel as natural as it did in Stocky.

Once your parallel running period confirms data accuracy, you are ready to cut over. Pick a quiet day — not the start of a sale, not peak season, not the day before a supplier deadline. Disable Stocky notifications. Make your new system the single source of truth. Then verify: run a stocktake within the first week to confirm that your new system's stock levels match physical inventory. Check that all open POs transferred correctly. Verify that reorder alerts are triggering at the right thresholds. The first two weeks after cutover require vigilance. After that, you should be running smoothly on your new system with months to spare before the Stocky shutdown date.

Beyond the replacement app itself, you will need a few supporting tools during migration. A spreadsheet programme (Google Sheets or Excel) for data cleaning and comparison. A project management tool or even a simple checklist to track migration phases. Access to your recent supplier invoices for cost price verification. And patience — data migration is tedious work, but it is the foundation of everything your new system will do. Cut corners here and you will spend the next year fighting inaccurate forecasts and wrong reorder points. Do it properly and you will wonder why you did not switch from Stocky years ago.