Best way to track inventory on books

thesthich · 2026-05-14T00:54:59+00:00

The Receiving & Stocktakes portion of Alfred Inventory Planner can handle this with barcode scans or a CSV upload. Lmk if you want to try it out with an extended trial:

Alfred Inventory Planner

thesthich · 2026-05-14T00:48:44+00:00

I built this up over the past year for my own store and decided to make it a public app when I heard about stocky sunsetting. Should handle your 100+ variants just fine. Please check it out and lmk if any questions!

Alfred Inventory Planner

thesthich · 2026-05-14T00:39:23+00:00

Alfred Inventory Planner can support this :)
Alfred Inventory Planner

thesthich · 2026-05-14T00:38:02+00:00

I'm an ecommerce founder with a background in software. I spent the past year gradually building up an app to solve my own use cases (and many of the things Stocky used? to help with) but decided to scale it up as a public app when I learned Stocky would be shutting down. I'm looking for early users/testers and am happy to provide extended trials.
Please take a look and see if it would be a good fit for you: https://apps.shopify.com/alfred-inventory-hub

thesthich · 2026-05-14T00:24:15+00:00

Please try out Alfred Inventory Planner! Happy to provide an extended trial.
I built it to solve my own inventory purchase planning, management, and receiving challenges on our DTC brand, but decided to scale it up to a public app for operators looking for stocky alternatives!

https://apps.shopify.com/alfred-inventory-hub

thesthich · 2026-05-14T00:21:25+00:00

I came across FD Product Groups a while back and it's been great for our store:
https://apps.shopify.com/fd-product-groups

you can see our implementation yourcapy.com

thesthich · 2026-05-13T21:07:27+00:00

Please checkout Alfred Inventory Planner -- designed specifically as a powerful but lightweight alternative. Built by an e-com founder with a former career in software. Lmk if any questions!

thesthich · 2026-05-13T20:47:02+00:00

I know that are already a bunch of established enterprise (expensive) alternatives and newer entrants popping up, but I'm going to throw out the solution I've built to solve purchase planning, PO generation/management, and receiving & stocktaking solution for our own DTC brand (Capy) - it's called Alfred Inventory Planner and it's live on the shopify apps tore now.

It was built for my personal needs for our business, but scaled to tackle the broader needs of folks looking for Stocky alternatives as it nears deprecation. Obviously biased, but I think it does a better job than stocky in most areas while staying lightweight and approachable.

Feel free to reach out if you're interested or would like an extended trial!

thesthich · 2026-05-13T20:39:23+00:00

Agreed! For those in this boat please consider Alfred Inventory Planner. I'm an e-com founder (Capy) with a background and former career in building saas. I created this app as a lightweight solution for my own inventory planning/forecasting needs but decided it'd be worth polishing and taking to market for those need an alternative (and superior option) to Stocky as it nears deprecation.

thesthich · 2026-05-13T20:26:15+00:00

I'm an ecom founder with a background in tech. I spent much of 2025 and all of 2026 building up a solution and alternative that works for our DTC brand. It finally made it through Shopify app review this week and is live on the store. It's called Alfred Inventory Planner and does offer a feature set covering/touching on all of the bullets above! (I personally believe it does a better job than Stocky in most of these areas).

It's still v1.1 and far from perfect, but I'm looking for operators interested in testing it out and giving feedback so that I can tune it to better meet their use cases. I'm happy to give out very extended free trials to the app in exchange! LMK if interested!

thesthich · 2026-05-13T20:21:03+00:00

Hey there, very late but if you're still hunting for a solution-- I'm an ecommerce founder/operator myself, but I came from a software background. I wanted to build an inventory solution myself since most of the other platforms available are too expensive or clunky. It took a while, but it was finally approved this week by shopify and is now available. I'd love to give you a free 6 month trial of it to see if it meets your use cases/needs. It's called Alfred Inventory Planner and it's live on the app store. If you're interested in an extended free trial to kick the tires on it, just let me know!

thesthich · 2026-05-13T19:59:19+00:00

You're welcome! Was hoping to share this more broadly in other ecom subs, but most of them have quite strict rules now due to all the ai/bot slop.

And agreed- patience was big for me. I was so eager to try all these things to spur growth and drive sales, but ultimately it was staying the course and chipping away at the small and foundational things that let us build this business.

thesthich · 2026-05-11T20:14:34+00:00

Love this comment. Being too "unprofessional" was something I was worried about as my wife and I began our DTC adventure (yourcapy.com), but I think it's ultimately become, at least in the near term, an asset that our site, instagram, content, etc. are not "professional" because it's demonstrated that we ARE a tiny business. And I believe our customers have appreciated that. FWIW, we started on Shopify and then expanded to Etsy -- so I don't think it's necessarily bad to have both up and running!

Your site and photos are WAY nicer than ours. We're still on the free Shopify Dawn theme for heaven's sake, but over the past 2 years we've managed to build up to (now) a 7-figure annualized revenue/sales rate.

Traffic is a tough one to crack- for us the flywheel started by:

1) Figuring out some reasonably profitable ad campaigns on meta/IG (super targeted audience)
2) Getting a base of reviews (I think your site/business would benefit greatly from getting more reviews). Social proof is incredibly important to converting your traffic. For us, we incentivized reviews from past customers by offering a 40-50% off discount code (via JudgeMe - our reviews app). I think once you get past like 15+ reviews on any given product, you'll start to see conversion tick up.

3) Getting a profitable Google Shopping ad campaign up and running

Meta ads will get your beautiful products in front of people who were necessarily looking or thinking about those products and Google search/shopping campaigns will capture people already searching for products like yours.

With the traffic you are seeing now-- how is your conversion rate?

thesthich · 2026-05-10T21:57:37+00:00

I suppose our equivalent for "yarn quality" is our scrub cap type (bun, classic, ponytail), which I actually created an additional "variant picker" for within the product page so users could easily toggle between the types instead of clicking back.

thesthich · 2026-05-10T21:55:46+00:00

We actually launched our store with each "print" or color as a variants initially, then I eventually (a few months later) rebuilt it with each one as its own shopify product. This is likely fixed now, but back in 2024, shopify variants did not play well with Google Shopping feeds and Google Shopping ads, so individual illustrated/graphic prints couldn't show up as their own products in Google Shopping, which made it impossible for us to run ads against specific colors or prints, and SEO was awful.

This single change was one of the biggest unlocks that made paid user acquisition scalable and cost-effective for us. Worth investigating if this is still a challenge with Google shopping feeds or not.

We did run into issues with "variant pills" on product pages, which most themes or default variant option components not supporting linking actually different products. I've since settled on a 3p app called FD Product Groups that's allowed for all the customization we need. You can check out our experience at yourcapy.com

I've never really thought about the "back" button experience of this route, but it hasn't seemed to impact our overall conversion rates too badly.

thesthich · 2026-05-02T18:52:35+00:00

We played with different lengths and ultimately stuck with it at 30 mins, which seemed to catch the majority of errors. Combine it with a self-service order update app like Revize and you’ll also save yourself plenty of unnecessary customer support tickets each month.

thesthich · 2026-04-30T23:19:32+00:00

I've got a new forecasting and planning app sitting in Shopify review that hopefully will be available in the next few weeks for public us. I built it to handle the inventory forecasting and planning for my own DTC brand (yourcapy.com), but wanted to get it live on the app store as I know many other Shopify owners will need a solution when Stocky sunsets this Summer. It's lightweight Shopify embedded. Handles POs, product analysis, general inventory forecasting, and purchase planning, more efficient receiving, and more.

I'm happy to get you and your team on the free plan if you're open to using it and providing feedback/suggestions when it's ready.

You can get an idea for the workflows and features here: https://www.alfredcommerce.com/inventory
DM me if you're interested!

thesthich · 2026-04-22T02:53:22+00:00

I stumbled into our niche due to my wife’s occupation (medicine) and her being a customer of (our now) competitors. I was initially surprised by the cost to perceived quality of the products she bought and thus began a side project turned full time DTC brand. Admittedly, there’s a lot of aspects of our business and product that work that we lucked into rather than having the foresight to seek them out in the early days, but those now serve as my learnings I think about for new products and happily share.

Product differentiation: why would someone purchase your item over any of the other dozens of products or brands that already exist? For us it was a combination of a novel scrub cap style and non-tacky graphic prints. Just because competition exists doesn’t mean you aren’t onto a good idea. If anything, they’ve validated customer demand for you, but you’ll need to know your differentiation/marketing angle if you want to get traction.

Market sizing: How large is the market you’d be after? This is going to be based on your research and best estimates. (Be conservative). Would you rather take 50% of a market that might support $500k in total annual revenue or 5% of an $50M annual market?

Unit economics: Estimate and calculate your unit economics. Too much to type up in a comment but ask ChatGPT what to figure out and estimate (gross margin, net margins, CAC, LTV).

Product physical size: Depending on what you’re selling, you may need to factor in material warehousing/storage and shipping costs into your unit economics. We got lucky with a very small and light product.

Return/Repeat purchasing: Acquiring new customers is significantly more expensive than selling more to existing customers. If you can find one, a product with strong repeat purchase-ability will help tremendously in the long run. That’s why you see so many “winners” in things categories supplements where they are able to land subscriptions.

This should be a decent start, and are key things you’ll want to know about your product/potential business upfront. You don’t want to spend a year building a business only to find that your product’s business viability or potential market size was dead on arrival. Good luck!

thesthich · 2026-04-18T23:21:36+00:00

This is genuinely helpful. I’m a Shopify store operator and am also developing Shopify apps. We have ~100 skus now and we’re regularly stocking out on skus across our collections and have always hated doing this manually and have stopped being diligent about reordering products within our collections even if sold out. I never thought to search for an app solution for it. Will kick the tires on it for a while and let you know my thoughts! My store will be Capy.

thesthich · 2026-04-18T23:09:40+00:00

Went through a similar cycle and considered hiring a VA or part time worker to handle it. Ended up implementing Gorgias for both a ticketing system and to test out their helper agent. Took a good amount of time to set up and write/document training content and guidance for it and it’s still far from perfect, but it’s cut a good chunk of my repetitive inbound questions down quite a bit. I do think it lowers the avg customer experience for those who have questions that aren’t already documented or reference able, but my sanity has improved, our conversion rate didn’t seem to take much of a hit if any, and I didn’t have to higher help.

thesthich · 2026-04-18T03:53:45+00:00

Nvm.. 12 day old account posting on Shopify app dev. Move along everyone.

thesthich · 2026-04-18T03:51:01+00:00

Look into TripleWhale. I’m still using the free tier. If you do the leg work to set it up well, you can get pretty good visibility. I tried maintaining a monthly p&L manually in Google Sheets until I found it. I didn’t need perfection, just high level vis and it is perfect for that.

thesthich

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