Comparisons

Restocio vs Shopify's own inventory tools, for importers

Shopify's admin now records most of the paperwork of buying from abroad. What it leaves to you is the date and the route, and for an importer those two decide the bill.

Marcus VolstedCo-founder, Restocio Published 10 October 202613 min read

Competitor facts are quoted from each company's own public pages, read on 2 October 2026, and dated in the Sources section at the foot.

If you import, Shopify's built-in inventory is enough to record what you buy and not enough to decide when to buy it or how it should travel. Its Help Center, read on 2 October 2026, does not describe an order date worked out from a supplier's lead time, or one order split across sea, rail and air. Restocio adds that planning on top of the stock and orders Shopify already holds. The rest of this page is the detail behind that answer, with every claim about Shopify quoted from Shopify's own pages.

Two neighbouring pages cover ground this one skips. What the admin took over from Stocky when it closed is tabled in Stocky vs Shopify's built-in inventory tools, and what the Incoming, Committed and Available figures mean is in why incoming stock is missing from your Shopify numbers. Here the comparison is today's admin against Restocio, for one kind of store: one that buys from a factory overseas and waits weeks for the goods.

What the admin now does for a store that imports

More than its reputation suggests. A purchase order in the admin carries a supplier, a destination, payment terms and the supplier's currency, and Shopify's purchase order page says it helps you “track inventory costs, payment terms, and supplier information”. Once the supplier confirms, you link an inventory transfer to the order, and the transfer is where the goods actually move.

That transfer is closer to an importer's reality than many people assume. It can hold several shipments, and Shopify's page on creating and processing transfers gives each one a carrier, a tracking number and an Expected arrival date. Freight and duty have a home as well. The page on transfers created from purchase orders notes that shipping costs, customs duties and other fees “often aren't known when you create a purchase order”, so you add them to each shipment as cost adjustments and compare the agreed cost with what receiving the goods really cost.

Some of the deciding has arrived too. Shopify's Stocky migration page says Sidekick, the admin's assistant, “recommends items based on sales data and drafts the purchase order or transfer for you”, and that you can use it “to help you forecast demand, identify which products need replenishing”. Among the inventory reports sits one called Inventory remaining per product, which estimates how many days each variant's stock will last.

So the record-keeping is solid, and the admin will now suggest what to reorder. What follows is where that stops short for someone whose goods spend two months on a boat.

Where the admin and Restocio differ

Each Shopify cell below says what Shopify's Help Center describes, read on 2 October 2026. Where a cell says something is not described, that is all it means. The Help Center is not a full specification, and Sidekick in particular may do things its pages do not spell out, so read those cells as “Shopify does not say”, never as “Shopify cannot”.

What an importer needs	Shopify admin, per its Help Center on 2 October 2026	Restocio
An order date that allows for the lead time	Lead time can be stored in a custom field, which Shopify calls information for your reference. An order date worked out from it is not described	An order deadline per product: days of stock, minus the door-to-door time of the slowest route you use, minus your spare days and the supplier's days until it ships
Factory time before the goods leave	Not described as an input to any reorder figure	Days until it ships, on each supplier card, counted ahead of every route
Choosing how the order travels	Each shipment records a carrier, a tracking number and an expected arrival. Choosing between routes, or splitting one order across them, is not described	Boat, train, plane and truck, each with its own switch. The main order goes on the slowest route you use, and faster ones carry only the units needed before it lands
A sales rate that skips days with nothing to sell	One report divides by the days in the period, another by the days the variant was active. Leaving out days with no stock is not described	Units sold over up to 60 days, divided by those days minus the days stock was recorded at zero
Stock already on its way taken off the order	Incoming units are recorded on each transfer. Subtracting them from a suggested quantity is not described	Open purchase orders in Restocio come off the recommendation once, route by route. An overdue order stays counted until you receive or cancel it
A quantity to order	Sidekick recommends items and drafts the purchase order. How it sizes the quantity, and whether lead time enters it, is not described	A quantity per route, from the sales rate, each route's travel time and what is already on the way
Cost per item after the goods land	One static cost per variant that stays fixed when you receive. For an average or landed cost, Shopify points to a third-party app	A running average of landed cost per product, updated from each delivery you count in. Writing it back to Shopify is built and gated, see below
Duty on each delivery	Customs duties can be added to each shipment as a cost adjustment	Not in the per-unit landed cost yet. Shopify is ahead on this row

The date is the decision the admin leaves to you

Shopify's migration page lists the supplier details you might want to keep per variant, and a lead time in days is one of them, stored as a metafield. The sentence after that list is the one that matters here: these metafields “store information for your reference. They're independent of purchase order ordering and receiving calculations.” The admin can hold your lead time. On its own pages, nothing reads it to tell you when to order.

With a supplier who delivers in three days, that hardly matters. With a container that spends seventy days at sea after a month in the factory, the order has to go in while the shelf still looks healthy, and the admin's days-remaining report will not raise it, because it measures how long the stock lasts and not how long the next delivery takes. Restocio sets those two numbers against each other and counts down the difference. The arithmetic, with a worked example, is in Shopify replenishment, end to end.

That deadline is only as good as the lead time behind it, which is a weakness on our side of the row. Restocio measures how long your suppliers actually took, from your received orders, and once it has three of them within a year it offers to update that supplier's days until it ships, but only when the measurement and your number are a week or more apart. It never changes the number without your click, so a lead time nobody revisits produces a confident and wrong date.

One order, more than one route

The admin records a route after you have picked it. A shipment gets its carrier and its expected arrival, and a transfer can be split into several shipments when part of the goods is ready first. The choice itself is what the Help Center does not describe: how many units have to fly because the boat lands after the shelf empties, and how many can wait for the boat.

For an importer that choice is often the largest single cost of the year. Restocio makes it per product. The main order goes on the slowest route you have switched on, and when the shelf will run dry before it lands, a smaller order by train, truck or plane covers the empty days, added on top of the main order rather than carved out of it. Switch a route off in Settings and the plan is worked out without it. Why splitting beats upgrading the whole order is argued in sea, rail or air, and why the answer is often all three.

Which days a sales rate should count

Shopify's inventory reports page defines a daily rate in two places. Inventory sold daily by product is the quantity sold “divided by number of days in the time period”. Inventory remaining per product looks at the last 28 days, and its per-day figure is the quantity sold “divided by the number of days that the product variant was active during that time period”. The page does not define active, and neither definition says that a day with no stock is left out.

For a domestic product that rarely sells out, the gap is small. An import that sat empty for three weeks waiting on a boat is a different case, because every empty day pulls its rate down and the next order comes out smaller. How that loop buries a best seller is shown on the replenishment page, so it is not repeated here.

Restocio takes the days with a recorded zero stock out of the divisor. The limit sits in the word recorded. Restocio keeps its own daily stock record from the day you connect your store, and a day before that counts as a normal selling day. A product that was empty for a month before you installed it is measured as slower than it is until that month drops out of the window.

Stock that is already on the water

The admin keeps stock on its way in its own field, and how that field relates to Available and On hand is covered on its own page. The question here is narrower. Does anything subtract it from what you are about to buy? The Help Center describes Sidekick drafting purchase orders from sales data and does not say whether incoming units come off first. It may. The pages we read do not say.

Restocio subtracts its own open purchase orders, once and route by route, before it suggests anything. Here is the catch, and on this page more than any other it deserves saying plainly. Restocio does not read Shopify's purchase orders or transfers, so an order you raised in the admin has to be entered in Restocio as well before it can be netted. Counting a delivery in on Restocio does not change Shopify's stock level today either, which means the receiving still happens in Shopify. Run both and you keep two records of the same order, and that is a real cost to weigh against everything above.

What happens to the cost when the goods land

Shopify is direct about this one. Its migration page says each variant has “a single static Cost per item field. This cost stays fixed when you receive a purchase order or transfer”, and for weighted-average costing or landed cost allocation it suggests a third-party app. The cost per item you typed last year is the one your margin reports use today, whatever this container cost.

Restocio keeps a running average per product instead. Each delivery you count in is blended with the stock you already had, at landed cost, meaning the goods plus their share of the freight, and the history sits under SKU Manager, Stock valuation. That average is what Restocio values your stock at.

Writing a cost back into Shopify is built, and it stays off until you turn it on. Under Settings, Freight & Margin, one switch called Allow Restocio to update Shopify covers everything the app may change in your store, and beneath it a separate box updates the cost per item to the new average when goods arrive. Only the supplier-price average goes into Shopify, because Restocio reads that field as the supplier price and adds freight itself, so a landed figure there would count the freight twice. That is also why the box only works when your cost prices are set as supplier prices. Both start switched off, and until you turn them on, the new cost is typed into Shopify by hand.

Then the row where the admin is ahead. Duty is not inside Restocio's landed cost yet, so the average comes out short by whatever duty you pay, and the stock value and cost of goods panels say so on screen. The admin lets you record customs duties against each shipment. If duty is a large share of your cost, keep that record in Shopify whichever planner you use.

When the admin is enough on its own

If your goods arrive within days of ordering, most of the rows above stop mattering. A short lead time leaves little gap between the days-remaining report and the order date, there is no second route to weigh, and a Shopify Flow low-stock alert, which the migration page suggests, gives you time to act. The reasons a threshold alert fails on a long lead time are in why a low stock alert fires too late.

The same holds if you plan each warehouse separately, since Restocio plans the store's stock as one pool. That and the other mismatches are listed on who Restocio is not for, which is worth two minutes before any trial.

Running both

Restocio does not replace the admin. It reads your stock and your orders from Shopify, and with the switch off it writes nothing back. Your products, prices and stock keep living in Shopify. The date, the quantity and the route get decided in Restocio, at $149 a month for up to 500 products or $299 a month for any number.

If you are weighing it, take one product that came in by sea this year. Find the day you ordered it, then the day an order would have had to go in to land before the shelf emptied, counting the factory time. If those two dates were weeks apart, that gap is the part of the job the admin's pages do not describe.

Common questions

Is Shopify's built-in inventory enough if I import?

For the record-keeping, mostly yes: purchase orders, transfers with several shipments, expected arrival dates, and duties and freight as cost adjustments are all in the admin. For the planning, its Help Center, read on 2 October 2026, does not describe an order date worked out from your lead time or a split of one order across sea, rail and air. Those are the parts an importer usually adds an app for.

Can I store supplier lead times in Shopify?

Yes, as a metafield on the variant. Shopify's own migration page gives a lead time in days as an example, and adds that these metafields store information for your reference and are independent of purchase order calculations. Nothing on its Help Center describes the admin using that number to tell you when to order.

Can Sidekick tell me what to reorder?

Shopify says it can. Its migration page says Sidekick recommends items based on sales data and drafts the purchase order or transfer, and can help you forecast demand. The pages we read do not describe how it sizes a quantity, or whether your lead time or stock already on its way enters the answer, so check that with your own products before relying on it for a container.

Does Shopify's days of inventory remaining ignore out-of-stock days?

Its Help Center does not say so. The Inventory remaining per product report uses the last 28 days and divides units sold by the number of days the variant was active, without defining active. The Inventory sold daily report divides by every day in the period.

Does Restocio read my Shopify purchase orders?

No. Restocio reads your stock and your sales orders from Shopify, but not its purchase orders or transfers. Orders on their way have to be entered in Restocio to be subtracted from what it recommends, and counting goods in on Restocio does not change your Shopify stock level today.

Will Restocio change the cost per item in Shopify?

Only if you allow it. Under Settings, Freight & Margin, one switch called Allow Restocio to update Shopify governs every change to your store, and a separate box beneath it writes the new average supplier price to the cost per item when goods arrive. Both start switched off, so until you turn them on, the cost in Shopify changes only when you type it.

Sources

Every statement about another company's product on this page comes from that company's own public pages, read on 2 October 2026. Products change often; if a detail matters to your decision, check the current page before deciding. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

Shopify Help Center, Migrating from Stocky to Shopify inventory management (read 2 October 2026)
Shopify Help Center, Creating and managing purchase orders (read 2 October 2026)
Shopify Help Center, Creating an inventory transfer from a purchase order (read 2 October 2026)
Shopify Help Center, Creating and processing inventory transfers (read 2 October 2026)
Shopify Help Center, Inventory reports (read 2 October 2026)

All product and company names are the trademarks of their respective owners. Restocio is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with any product named on this page. No comparison is exhaustive, and we have not tested these products; we compare what each vendor publishes.

Marcus Volsted

Co-founder, Restocio

Marcus co-founded Restocio and works on it daily with a Swedish importer who plans their purchasing in it every working day. Restocio is built in Sweden by two founders, one Swedish and one Danish, and Marcus is the Danish one. Why we are building it.