Opsgear2 review for Stocky
April 16, 2018
This is one of the most useful Shopify apps we have encountered, and well worth the price. First, some background: My company is a long-established multi-million dollar company. We ran for about 15 years on our own internally developed code before recently switching to "Shopify Plus" (Shopify's $2000+ per month option). There was a time in the not too far distant past when the only thing my company relied on an ISP for was for the pipe to the internet. We did *everything* ourselves, including maintaining and supporting our own DNS servers, email servers, website, and much more. Besides having developed our own website code that generated over $50M gross revenue during it’s lifetime, we had many internal R&D projects targeted to replace, one-by-one, our internal servers. Some of our website R&D projects included an experimental Magento site, and other sites, each of which were being evaluated as to their feasibility of replacing our internally-developed site. In other words, my company has a considerable amount of internal expertise on websites and website development. Thus, I think we are *very* qualified to provide a useful opinion on Stocky. And as I mentioned above, Stocky is one of the most useful Shopify apps we have encountered, and well worth the price. For any 3rd party Shopify app, you also need to consider the stability of the vendor before coming to rely on the app. The gravity of this consideration will vary in direct proportion to how easy it would be to replace (with something else) the functions provided by the app, weighed against the cost of the app, as well as the perceived stability of the vendor of the app. Without going into a huge amount of detail on how this evaluation was done with the Stocky app, suffice it to say that we have concluded that Stocky was a “must have” app. It passed our tests in this area. I know Stocky has an overwhelming variety of features, but if you install it and then focus on only the three features I describe below, it will be *well* worth the money. Then you can investigate the other features as additional "gravy" as you move forward. These features also pretty much require that you load COGS data into Stocky. For us, this was trivial, as we had the data in our legacy (in-house developed) site, and it was trivial to write a bit of code in our legacy site to write out a CSV file with this data, which was subsequently slurped up into Stocky. There are many other ways to accomplish this as well, depending on your own circumstances, but you really need to record the costs of your products to make proper use of Stocky. Without COGS data, you are flying blind. And Shopify, out of the box, does not store COGS data. You need a 3rd part app for that. The three important features I think you should use first with Stocky are these: 1. Click the "Statistics" tab on the Dashboard. All of the statistics shown are very useful, but for us probably the most useful one is: “Total stock on hand at cost price”. This is a number that needs to be brought over to any accounting system (we use Quickbooks). I know of Shopify store owners that just SWAG (“Scientific” Wild-Arse Guess) this number, but I don’t think the IRS is going to accept SWAG'd numbers for any but the smallest of stores. 2. Click “Sale Items” on the Dashboard. This report is the equivalent of our old “Dead Stock” report in our old legacy website. This report shows days of stock on hand for all of your products, and you can filter those products in a very wide variety of ways. By looking at the top of the report, and can know what you are overstocked on (thus identifying products to put on sale), and you can look at the end of the report to know what needs to be restocked. 3. Stocky has a number of “Profit” reports that are extremely useful. As I write this, though, the profit reporting is beta, and not available on any normal Stocky menu. You must request the URL for it. But do so. It is worth it— even if Beta. But also be aware that this part of Stocky *is* beta! If you just use the above 3 functions, you will be richly rewarded for the price you pay for Stocky, in all but the smallest of Shopify stores. Yes, very small stores probably do not need Stocky— and I am not exactly sure where to draw the line. Basically, though, when a store expands to more than a couple of dozen products, you probably need Stocky. And if you have hundreds of products, you *definitely* need Stocky. Nevin Pratt, CEO Bountiful Baby http://www.bountifulbaby.com P.S. The above was posted from the context of our "Bountiful Baby" shop (www.bountifulbaby.com), but I guess I posted it from my OPSGEAR account (www.opsgear.com). Both of those are our stores, and both stores are using Stocky.
