Purchasing
Purchase orders that already know what should be on them
A purchase order is the last five minutes of a decision that took the previous week. Shopify's admin can record what you ordered. It cannot tell you what to order, because it stores no supplier lead times and does no forecasting.
Replinish holds the supplier record, so every reorder decision knows how long that supplier takes, what their minimum order is, and how they case things up. One click turns your reorder list into draft purchase orders grouped by supplier, with quantities already rounded to what they will actually ship. Email it, export a PDF, and track it until it lands.
What Shopify gives you, and what it doesn't
Shopify's own inventory features cover the operational side properly: tracking stock, moving it between locations, adjusting it, and recording purchase orders. If you already know exactly what you want to buy, that is enough.
The gap is upstream of the order. Shopify does not store how long each supplier takes, does not know a product's sales rate, and therefore has no way to work out that a candle at 45 units is urgent while a mug at 45 units is fine. Every merchant fills that gap somewhere, and for most stores that somewhere is a spreadsheet rebuilt by hand each week.
The supplier record is the missing half
Three fields do almost all of the work, and none of them exist in Shopify.
- Lead time. How many days from sending the order to stock being on your shelf. Not the supplier's stated production time, the real door-to-door number including shipping and customs.
- Minimum order quantity. The smallest order they will accept, per line or per order. Ignore it and you will draft orders that get bounced back.
- Case size or order multiple. If they ship in cases of 12, asking for 189 is asking for an argument.
Replinish seeds suppliers from the vendor field on your Shopify products, so the list is mostly built before you start. You confirm the lead times, which is the one thing nobody can read for you, and add contacts. Coming from Stocky, the CSV import brings costs and purchase order history with it.
From reorder list to purchase order
The reorder list is ranked by urgency, meaning how close each product is to its reorder point relative to its lead time, not by how low the stock number looks. Selecting the products you want to buy drafts one purchase order per supplier, because that is how you actually place orders.
Overstocked products never get quietly added to fill a minimum. If reaching a supplier's minimum means buying something you do not need, that is a decision for you to make on purpose, not something a tool should do on your behalf while you are not looking.
Minimums, case sizes, and open orders
The arithmetic that turns a forecast into a real quantity has three adjustments after the shortfall is calculated.
- Subtract what is already coming. Units on an open purchase order come off first. This is the single most common source of accidental double-ordering in a spreadsheet.
- Round up to the case size. A shortfall of 189 with a case of 12 becomes 192.
- Lift to the minimum order quantity. If the supplier will not ship under 240 units, the order is 240 and you can see why it moved.
There is also a sanity check for the genuinely odd order. If a suggested quantity is far outside what you normally buy for that product, Replinish asks before you commit: "That's about 5x your usual order for this one, all good?" Often it is. Occasionally it catches a lead time entered in weeks instead of days.
Sending and tracking
A draft purchase order can be emailed straight to the supplier from their address on file, or exported as PDF or CSV if they want it in a particular shape. Once it is out, it carries a status and an expected date.
Orders that pass their expected date without arriving are flagged. An overdue purchase order is the quietest way to run out of stock: the forecast believes the units are coming, so nothing looks wrong until the shelf is empty and the reorder point has been passed for a fortnight.
Receiving, and what it teaches
When stock arrives you receive the purchase order, recording what actually turned up. Partial deliveries are normal and should not be a special case.
Receiving is also where the system learns. The gap between the promised date and the real one is the true lead time, and a supplier who consistently says 30 days and takes 42 is a supplier whose reorder points are all 12 days too tight. Over time the record answers this from your own history rather than from a number someone typed in once.
For the arithmetic that decides the quantities in the first place, see how the forecasting works.
Questions about purchase orders
Does Shopify have purchase orders built in?
Shopify's admin includes basic purchase order functionality for recording what you have ordered and receiving it against stock. What it does not include is any way to work out what should be on the order in the first place, because it holds no supplier lead times and does no forecasting. That gap is what a planning app fills.
How do I set supplier lead times for a Shopify store?
Shopify has no field for supplier lead time, so it has to live in whatever tool you use for planning. In Replinish, each supplier carries a lead time in days, an optional minimum order quantity, and an optional case size or order multiple. Those three values drive both when a product hits its reorder point and how the suggested quantity gets rounded.
Can Replinish send purchase orders to my suppliers?
Yes. A draft purchase order can be emailed straight to the supplier's address on file, or exported as a PDF or CSV if they want it in their own format. The PO stays in Replinish with its status, so you can see what is outstanding and what is overdue.
What happens when stock arrives?
You receive the purchase order in Replinish, marking what actually turned up, which may not be what you ordered. Receiving closes the loop on the forecast: the units stop counting as on order, and the gap between the promised date and the real arrival date updates what Replinish knows about that supplier's real lead time.
Does creating a purchase order change my Shopify inventory?
No. Replinish never writes to Shopify. Purchase orders, suppliers, and receiving all live inside Replinish, and your Shopify stock counts stay under your control in the admin.
Can I order for more than one location?
Yes, on the Swell plan. Each location is forecast separately from its own stock and its own sales, so a location that is selling through gets its own order rather than a share of a single national number.
Stop rebuilding the same spreadsheet every Monday
Suppliers, lead times, costs, minimums, and case sizes in one place, feeding orders that are right before you send them.
Launching on the Shopify App Store shortly. Tell us your store and we'll let you know when you can install it. Plans are billed by Shopify, and you pick one in your Shopify admin after installing.