How purchase orders update Shopify inventory
Available on: Pro Plus.
Purchase orders can update your Shopify stock at two moments: when you mark an order as Ordered, and when you receive it. Whether they do depends on a choice made when you first set purchase orders up.
What changes, and when
Two quantities move: incoming and available.
Available stock only changes when you receive. Nothing else in a purchase order's life adds to or removes from the stock you can sell.
Incoming changes at almost every step, because it represents what is still outstanding on the order:
| What you do | What it writes |
|---|---|
| Mark as Ordered | Adds the outstanding quantities to incoming |
| Receive | Moves accepted units out of incoming and into available |
| Edit an ordered PO | Adjusts incoming to match the new quantities |
| Close a PO | Clears any incoming still outstanding on it |
| Reopen a closed PO | Puts that incoming back |
| Unreceive | Reverses a receive - available down, incoming back up |
| Unreject | Returns rejected units to incoming as outstanding again |
All of it lands at the order's receive location.
Rejected units never become available stock. They do come off incoming, because you are no longer expecting them - which is why unrejecting puts them back.
Track orders only, or update Shopify
When you set up purchase orders, you chose one of two modes:
- Track orders only - Stockie records your orders and receipts, and never changes your Shopify stock
- Update Shopify inventory - the two moments above write through
This choice is made once during setup and cannot be changed from Settings afterwards. If you are on the wrong one, contact support and we will switch it for you.
Switching does not backfill. Orders you already received while on track-only will not push their stock through retrospectively.
Checking which mode you are on
The receive screen tells you when a store is on track-only, so if you are receiving and your Shopify stock is not moving, that is the first thing to look at.
Where the stock lands
Inventory is written at the order's receive location, which is not always where the supplier ships to. If you set a custom shipping address, you also pick a Receive inventory at location, and that is the one that gets the stock.
Turning it off for a single order
Some stores can decide per order rather than for everything. Where that is set up, a purchase order carries a Sync inventory to Shopify checkbox.
Untick it and that order stops writing to Shopify entirely - ordering, receiving, editing and closing all leave your Shopify stock alone. The order still tracks quantities inside Stockie.
The checkbox tells you which way it is set. Ticked, it names the location the order will write to. Unticked, it says inventory writes are off for that order.
If you do not see the checkbox, your store is either on track-only or set to always write. Contact us if you want per-order control switched on.
When stock did not change
Work through these in order:
- Is the order's Sync inventory to Shopify checkbox unticked? If your store has per-order control, this is the most likely answer and the easiest to miss
- Are you on track orders only? The receive screen will say so
- Were the units entered under Reject rather than Accept?
- Is the order still a Draft? Nothing is written until it is marked Ordered
- Is a receive location set? An order set to sync but with no receive location writes nothing
- Check the product's inventory history in Shopify to see what actually wrote to it