How does Lightspeed's built-in vendor/purchase-order management map onto Shopify's native tools or Stocky-successor inventory apps?
Shopify now has native purchase orders and supplier records in the admin, added in June 2026, and Stocky was retired on 31 August 2026 (Shopify, September 2026). Neither purchase orders nor suppliers appear in the Admin API, so nothing imports, integrates or migrates automatically. Choose the destination system before you export anything from Lightspeed.
What changed in 2026, because most advice on this question predates it
Two things happened within seven weeks of each other, and they point in opposite directions.
Shopify built the thing. A purchase order in the Shopify admin "lists the products, quantities, costs, payment terms, and supplier details for an order," and the admin lets you "create and manage suppliers with their contact details, payment terms, and currencies" (per Shopify Help Center, September 2026). On 22 June 2026 Shopify connected the two halves: "Purchase orders record what you ordered from a supplier and what it cost. Transfers record inventory movement. The two are now connected," with receiving possible "wherever the shipment arrives" and multiple shipments tracked separately against one transfer (per Shopify changelog, 22 June 2026).
Shopify also removed the old thing. Stocky, the POS Pro inventory app that carried purchase orders for a decade, "is no longer available as of August 31, 2026," was "delisted from the Shopify App Store" on 2 February 2026, and "Stocky APIs stopped working on August 31, 2026" (per Shopify Help Center, September 2026).
So "Stocky-successor apps" is the wrong frame for 2026. The successor to Stocky is Shopify itself for the basic loop, and a paid app or an ERP for everything Stocky did on top of it.
The mapping, module by module
| Lightspeed Retail capability | Shopify native, September 2026 | Where the gap goes |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier record with name, contact, addresses, default markup, description | Supplier record with contact details, address, payment terms and currency | Native covers it. Default markup has no documented equivalent. |
| Supplier bulk import by spreadsheet. X-Series: "Suppliers can be imported, but not edited or exported, via spreadsheet" (Lightspeed, Sep 2026) | No documented supplier CSV import and no Supplier object in the Admin GraphQL API | Manual rekeying, or the app or ERP that will own purchasing |
| Product linked to supplier with a supplier code and supplier price, multiple suppliers per product, primary supplier listed first (Lightspeed, Sep 2026) | Purchase orders "auto-populate with previous purchase prices or the cost per item from the product page" (Shopify, Jun 2026) | No per-supplier product catalog. This is the largest single gap for multi-source retailers. |
| Purchase order statuses Open, Sent, Dispatched, Received; email the PO to the supplier with cc and bcc (Lightspeed, Sep 2026) | Draft and Ordered. "You can delete a purchase order while it's still a draft"; marking ordered "can't be reversed" (Shopify, Sep 2026) | Native is thinner and one-way. Plan approvals outside it. |
| PO line-item CSV import with SKU, quantity, handle, supply price | "Import purchase order line items using a CSV" (Shopify, Jun 2026) | Native covers it |
| "Add products from recommendations," which "automatically suggests products that are at or below their set reorder point" (Lightspeed, Sep 2026) | Sidekick "reordering suggestions based on sales velocity and seasonality" (shopify.com/pos/features, Sep 2026) | A stored reorder point is not the same object as an AI suggestion. See below. |
| Discount, total shipping and total import duty fields on the PO | Transfers carry "their own line for shipping and logistics" (Shopify retail roundup v11.8, 8 June 2026) | Landed cost math still lands on someone's spreadsheet |
| Partial receiving against one PO, with supplier cost editable at receipt | "If your supplier ships items in multiple shipments, then you can receive each shipment individually as it arrives" (Shopify, Sep 2026) | Native covers it |
| Serial numbers captured at receiving | None | App or ERP. See the two follow-ups below. |
| Purchase order history | "Historical purchase orders can't be imported into Shopify" (Shopify, Sep 2026) | Archive, or the ERP |
The reorder point is a real loss, and it is easy to miss
Stocky calculated reorder points "using the lead time and number of sales per day," and let merchants "manually override the automatic reorder points for specific product variants, as well as the lead time per vendor" (per Shopify Help Center, September 2026, on a page that still describes the app it also says is gone).
Lead time per vendor is a stored fact about a supplier relationship. Sales velocity is a calculation. Shopify's replacement names the calculation and not the stored fact. If your buyers have spent years tuning per-vendor lead times in Lightspeed or Stocky, that tuning has nowhere native to live, and it is the input that makes any reorder suggestion worth reading.
The API gap is the one that decides the architecture
Shopify's purchase orders and suppliers exist in the admin and nowhere else. A developer checking the 2026-07 release candidate reported that "Shopify has native Purchase Orders in the admin today, but there's no way to touch them via the API" and that there is "no PurchaseOrder object, query, or mutation anywhere" (per Shopify developer community, 16 June 2026). We confirmed it independently: shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/latest/objects/Supplier returns 404, and the InventoryItem object exposes unitCost, countryCodeOfOrigin and harmonized system codes but no supplier or purchase-order relationship (per shopify.dev, September 2026).
Three consequences follow, and they are the whole architecture decision:
- No integration can read or write your POs. Your accounting system cannot pull a purchase order. Your 3PL cannot post an ASN against one. Your supplier portal cannot acknowledge one.
- No migration script exists or can be written. Suppliers and open POs move by hand or not at all.
- If purchasing has to be integrated, purchasing cannot live in Shopify native. That is not a criticism of the feature. It is a scoping fact that sorts merchants into two groups before anything else is decided.
The four destinations, and how to pick one
- Shopify native. Right when purchasing is a buyer with a spreadsheet and a barcode scanner, suppliers number in the dozens, and nothing downstream needs to read a PO. Cost: zero, plus $89 per location per month for POS Pro if you need to receive stock in the store rather than the admin (per shopify.com/pricing and shopify.com/pos/pricing, September 2026).
- A purchasing app. Right when you need forecasting, per-supplier lead times, landed cost or open-to-buy. Prediko rates 4.9 stars across 248 reviews and prices at $49, $119 and $199 per month by revenue band with a custom enterprise tier, and advertises Stocky migration explicitly (per Shopify App Store, September 2026). Inventory Planner by Sage rates 4.5 across 152 reviews and publishes no price, listing "free to install, additional charges may apply" (per Shopify App Store, September 2026).
- An ERP. Right when purchasing already runs there, or when POs must reconcile to a general ledger without a human retyping them.
- Nothing, deliberately. Right when the old purchase-order module was a filing cabinet nobody opened. Some Lightspeed retailers discover during discovery that they raise four POs a year by email.
When NOT to move purchasing during the migration
- When the ecommerce store is the deadline. Purchasing can stay in Lightspeed through the ecommerce launch if Lightspeed stays the inventory system of record. It cannot stay there after the registers move.
- When the buying team is mid-season. Cutting a buyer over between a pre-order and its receipt loses the link between the two, and Shopify will not import the first half.
- When nobody has counted the suppliers. Forty suppliers is an afternoon of rekeying. Four hundred is a project with an owner.
- When the answer is an ERP. Then the PO question is an ERP implementation question, and sequencing it inside a platform migration is how both slip.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: We scored purchase-orders-and-receiving DEPENDS, and the 2026 evidence sharpens what it depends on. It is not features any more. It is whether anything downstream needs to read a purchase order programmatically. If yes, Shopify native is out on day one regardless of how good the screens are, because there is no API. If no, native is genuinely sufficient for the first time (Deploi verdict, September 2026).
- What we tell clients to do first: Count two numbers before comparing anything. How many suppliers you will rekey, and how many systems currently read a purchase order. The first sets the labour. The second decides the architecture, and it is the one nobody has in week one.
- What this page knows that its Build vs. Buy record doesn't: the record was written before native purchase orders shipped and treats the absence of a Shopify PO as the premise. This page names what actually replaced Stocky, dates it, and relocates the gap from the feature list to the Admin API.
- Where we disagree: The category still answers this question with a list of Stocky replacements, because Stocky's retirement made that list easy to write and easy to monetize. That framing buries the actual 2026 finding, which is that Shopify built the module and left it unaddressable. An app list answers "what can I install." It does not answer "can my ERP see this," which is the question that determines whether you install anything at all.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Follow-up questions
How do vendor/supplier records and purchase-order history migrate as data objects during a platform switch, given Shopify has no native supplier-management model?
Historical purchase orders cannot be imported into Shopify, and Shopify says so plainly (Shopify Help Center, September 2026). Supplier records have no documented CSV import and no Admin API object, so they are rekeyed by hand or held in the app or ERP that will own purchasing. Decide that owner before extraction, not after.
How do serial numbers, lot numbers, or expiration-date tracking (common in specific verticals) migrate to Shopify's inventory model from a platform with native support for them?
Shopify's inventory model tracks a quantity per variant per location and carries no lot number, batch or expiry date. Regulated verticals keep that data in an app or an ERP, which then becomes the system of record for traceability. Freshly Batch Inventory prices at $24 per month for batch tracking with FEFO rotation (Shopify App Store, September 2026).
How do serialized or lot-tracked inventory items (common in Lightspeed retail categories like jewelry or bikes) migrate to Shopify's inventory model?
Lightspeed exports serial numbers and Shopify has no field to receive them. X-Series exports a CSV of serialized products with serial numbers, SKUs, outlets and sale dates (Lightspeed, September 2026). Shopify treats a serial as an attribute of a sold order, not of a unit in stock, which reverses the workflow a jeweler or bike shop runs.