The Stocky migration checklist: every step, in order, before the shutdown

Shopify retires Stocky on August 31, 2026. If you make what you sell, the thing you cannot afford to lose is not your stock count. It is your cost history: the record of what every material actually cost you, purchase by purchase, across months.

This is the whole move, in order, from the freeze two weeks out to the checks that tell you it worked. Work down it once and you are done. Nothing here needs an account with us, and the first half is worth doing even if your numbers end up in a spreadsheet.

Not coming from Stocky? This checklist is written around one deadline. The same running order, for any tool you are leaving, is switching costing tools without losing your numbers.

What you are racing

After August 31, 2026:

• Stocky can no longer be used to manage inventory.
• Stocky's APIs stop working the same day, so anything wired into it goes quiet.
• Shopify keeps read-only access so you can export for at least 90 days afterward. After that window, it is gone.

Two facts decide what you can keep, and both come from Shopify's own transition guidance:

1. Historical purchase orders cannot be imported into Shopify. The CSV you export is the copy you keep.
2. Suppliers cannot be exported from Stocky at all. That list has to be copied out by hand.

If you only have one hour: export the completed purchase-order report, copy your supplier list into a spreadsheet, and save both in two places. That is the part that cannot be redone later.

(Source: Shopify Help Center, "Transitioning from Stocky." Verified July 2026. Shopify updates its help pages, so confirm the current steps and menu names there before you rely on any one detail.)

If you want the plain-English version of what the shutdown means before you start clicking, read what makers need to do before the shutdown first. This page assumes you have decided to move and want the running order.

How long this takes

Budget an hour for the exports, an evening for the rebuild, and a week of ordinary use before you trust a margin. Those are three separate sittings, and only the first one has a deadline. Do the exports early, while Stocky still works properly; decide where the files land at your own pace.

Phase 1: two weeks out, freeze and decide

1. Stop opening new purchase orders in Stocky about two weeks ahead of the date. This is Shopify's own advice, and it is the difference between a clean final export and one missing your last supply run.
2. Record any purchases from here on somewhere you control. A plain spreadsheet with date, vendor, item, quantity, and price is enough. Those rows go into your new home by hand later.
3. Get a rough answer on where you are going. Shopify's built-in inventory tools suit a business that buys finished stock and resells it. A maker costing tool suits one that builds products from raw materials and needs true per-product cost. The honest roundup of the options weighs both, including who should skip us. You do not need a final answer before exporting.
4. Put the export hour in your calendar, and put it before the last week. Deadline weeks are when export buttons get slow and support queues get long.

Phase 2: export, in this order

The order matters because the first file is the one you cannot recreate from anywhere else. If you get interrupted after step one, you have still saved the important thing.

1. Your completed / received purchase-order report, as CSV. This is your cost history: what you paid, to whom, and when. It is the backbone of every true cost you will ever calculate, and it is the priority file.
2. Your stocktake or count history, as CSV. Less irreplaceable than cost history, but the fastest way to seed accurate starting counts wherever you land.
3. Any historical cost or valuation report Stocky offers you, as CSV. Between this and the purchase-order report, you want a clear answer to "what did each material cost me, over time" sitting in a file you own.
4. Your product and variant list, as CSV. This is the bridge between old item names and the material names you will use next, and it is the file that makes matching rows up later a lookup instead of a memory test.

We are deliberately not printing the exact column list for each of these. Export shapes change, and a column list we published in one month can quietly stop being true in the next. The check is what stays true, so run it on every file the moment it downloads:

• Open the file. It should have a header row and real rows underneath it.
• Find the cost column. Values should be populated, not all zeros and not blank.
• Find the date column. Dates should be readable and span the period you expect.
• Find the quantity and unit columns, and note what a "unit" means in this file.
• Note anything you expected to see and cannot find. That gap is the list for the next phase.

An export that came out empty is worse than no export, because you will not notice until the door has already shut. Two minutes of looking is the entire insurance policy. The click-by-click version of these four exports is in the export walkthrough.

Phase 3: copy out by hand what will not export

Some of what you rely on is not in any of those files. Open a fresh spreadsheet and copy it across yourself, now, while the screens still load:

• Your supplier list. Stocky cannot export it. Vendor name, contact, website or login, what you typically buy there, usual order size, any price break you have earned, and rough lead time. Ten minutes now saves reconstructing your supply chain from memory later.
• Purchase orders still in flight at the freeze, with what you expect to receive and what you expect to pay.
• Anything from your Phase 2 "cannot find" list. If you used it every week and it is in none of the four files, it exists only in Stocky, and only until the window closes.

What is unrecoverable once the door shuts

• Cost history you did not export. Shopify cannot import historical purchase orders back in, so there is no second copy waiting for you inside Shopify's tools.
• Your supplier list, which never had an export path to begin with.
• Anything still only inside Stocky when the read-only window ends. The window is a grace period for exports, not a storage plan.

One thing you are not losing: recipes. Stocky is a retail stock tool, so it never held the materials-into-product build for a candle or a soap. There is nothing to rescue there, and also nothing to bring, which is why the rebuild below has a step for it.

Phase 4: store the files like receipts

Put everything in one folder with an obvious name, such as stocky-export-august-2026. Save that folder in two places: your computer and a cloud drive you own. Add a plain-text note listing each file, which report it came from, and the day you pulled it.

Then leave the originals alone. Every clean-up, split, or rename happens on a copy, so there is always an untouched version to go back to when an import surprises you.

Phase 5: rebuild, in this order

1. Materials and their costs first. Everything downstream is computed from these, so a wrong material cost quietly poisons every product that uses it.
2. Decide the unit for each material once, and never mix. Grams or ounces, each or case, but one per material, forever. Unit drift is the most common way an imported cost history ends up wrong by a factor of twelve.
3. Then products and their recipes. The wax, the fragrance, the jar, the wick, the label. This is the step Stocky never had, and it is where your real margins come from.
4. Then on-hand counts. A fresh physical count on the day you switch beats an imported number from three months ago.
5. Then vendors, from the spreadsheet you copied out in Phase 3.
6. Then a week of ordinary purchases, entered as they happen, before you trust the numbers for a repricing decision.

The file-level mechanics of step one, the columns that matter and the breakages to expect, are in the companion guide: how to import your cost and pricing history into a new tool.

Phase 6: prove it landed

This is the phase people skip, and it is the one that decides whether you are running your business on real numbers or on a confident-looking screen. All eight checks take about twenty minutes.

1. Count the rows. Distinct items in your export against materials created in the new tool. A big gap means a mapping dropped something.
2. Spot-check three materials against a real invoice. Not the export, the actual invoice. Unit cost should match to the cent, or you should be able to say why.
3. Recompute one product by hand. Add up its parts on paper and compare with what the tool shows. When they disagree, it is nearly always a unit.
4. Look at the extremes. Sort materials by unit cost, top and bottom. A wick that costs more than a jar, or a fragrance costing a fraction of a cent, is a decimal or a pack-size problem announcing itself.
5. Check the date span. Earliest and latest purchase dates in the new tool should match the file you imported. A truncated span means part of your history did not arrive.
6. Hunt zero-cost and blank-cost materials. Every one of them will make some product look more profitable than it is.
7. Confirm your supplier list made it across from the Phase 3 spreadsheet.
8. Export from the new tool and open the file. Call it the leave-test. If you cannot get your data back out on day one, you have traded one dead end for another.

After August 31

Read-only access lasts at least 90 days. Treat it as one more chance to pull a file you missed, not as storage. Set a reminder for a couple of weeks before it ends, use it to fill any gap your Phase 6 checks turned up, then archive the folder and stop thinking about it.

How Batchnook receives these files

If the maker path is yours, here is the honest version of the landing, with nothing dressed up (the Stocky comparison page lays the same move out side by side):

• You bring the CSV in through a generic column mapper. Paste your export or upload the file, then match your columns to the right fields. There is no dedicated Stocky preset, so this is a short manual mapping step, not a one-click button.
• A dry run shows the result before anything is saved. How many materials and products will land, and any conflicts. Nothing is written until you approve it.
• Then costing takes over. Each material carries a moving-average cost that re-averages on every new purchase, so your product shows what it costs today rather than what it cost a year ago. Snap a supplier receipt and the scan reads the lines, and you approve them before anything counts.
• The import is undoable for 24 hours if the mapping was wrong the first time.
• Recipes get built once, here. Stocky had none to bring, so you enter each product's build a single time and the cost maintains itself from then on.

FAQ

Do the exports while Stocky still works. Then take your time on the rest: the import guide covers getting the files in cleanly, and the alternatives roundup covers where they should go.