How Stock Takes purchase orders differ from Shopify's

Shopify's native purchase orders let you create an order, specify quantities, and receive stock against it. Shopify itself has been steering merchants toward transfer orders instead, since purchase orders provide an older, less feature-rich experience, and the purchasing experience on Shopify POS is simple by comparison.

Our purchase orders integrate deeply with Shopify, so you can still use any other Shopify integrations or Shopify Flow alongside them. The differences come in several ways:

How it helps

• Work from the shop floor, start to finish — run the whole purchase order process from Shopify POS, from creation and adding items through to receiving, giving you the flexibility to work where you need to
• Control exactly how your team receives stock — decide whether items need to be scanned individually to ensure accuracy, or received all in one go, and prevent over-receiving, managed from the Settings page or on each individual purchase order
• Order in the right quantities every time — configure pack sizes, vendor prices separate from Shopify's unit cost, and back-order warnings, so you reorder in the correct pack quantities your supplier provides and never over-order stock that's already on back order elsewhere
• Never guess what to reorder — generate purchase order line items automatically based on your replenishment limits and current incoming or available stock levels, so your stores stay correctly stocked. You can try this under Add Items > Generate Items, where filters let you apply it to specific product ranges
• Save time on recurring orders — use our Shopify Flow actions to automatically create and generate purchase orders periodically, without anyone needing to remember to do it
• Capture what actually happens during receiving — a step-by-step workflow on Shopify POS for processing purchase orders, with the ability to record missing items, over-receiving, or anything unexpected, so your team stays accountable to the process

Worth knowing

• Stock Takes by Pimsical isn't free, though a 30-day free trial gives you full access to every feature
• The step-by-step process can feel slower than manually processing everything in one go — a small trade-off for the added accuracy and control