I built a simple Shopify app for sellers who still check stock and draft supplier orders by hand
If you sell physical products on Shopify, how do you notice that something needs reordering?
I built RestockPilot for the small stores that don’t need a full inventory suite. You set a reorder point for your products. The app checks inventory daily, and when stock falls below that point, it emails you a draft purchase order. You review it and decide whether to send it to your supplier.
It doesn’t forecast demand or place orders automatically. The goal is to make the step between “stock is running low” and “I have an order ready to review” less manual.
It was just approved on the Shopify App Store, and I'm looking for my first merchants to try it:
https://apps.shopify.com/restockpilot-1
If you run a Shopify store, would this fit how you reorder today? If not, what's the missing step?
keeping it at "draft, you review" is the right call for small stores, most owners don't trust anything that orders stock for them yet.
the missing step i'd guess at is supplier lead time. a fixed reorder point works for the thing that arrives in 3 days and quietly fails for the one that takes 5 weeks from china, and the owner only finds out when it's already out of stock. even just a lead time field per supplier and "at your current pace this runs out in 12 days" in the email would make the draft feel way smarter without adding any forecasting
That's a great point. A fixed reorder point can warn you too late when a supplier takes weeks to deliver.
I'm looking into using actual sales history alongside supplier lead time, so the email could say something like "At your recent sales pace, you have roughly 12 days of stock left, but replenishment takes 5 weeks." It would still be an estimate, and the seller would still review the draft before ordering.
Thanks — this is a useful way to make the alert more actionable without turning it into automatic ordering.
Really solid approach — curious how you're thinking about this, what's been the hardest part to figure out so far?
For the first merchants, what behavior would show the draft-order step is enough value on its own—regularly approving orders, replacing a spreadsheet, or something further downstream?
I don't know yet — I haven't had a confirmed merchant using it long enough to tell. The strongest signal would be a seller repeatedly using the emailed draft to place real supplier orders, rather than going back to their spreadsheet. The app doesn't track whether they actually send those orders, so I'd need to learn that directly from early merchants. Until then, it's a hypothesis.
Could be useful to dig into that real-order behavior as you get a few merchants — happy to continue by email sometime if you’re open to it.
Really appreciate you sticking with this thread and offering that — means a lot given I'm still figuring a lot of this out. Out of curiosity, is this something you're working through on your own product too, or just interested in the pattern?
Mostly the pattern — I spend a lot of time looking at where early product evidence stops short of a commercial conclusion. Could be useful to compare notes beyond the thread sometime.
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?
How did you decide this was worth building in the first place?
Daily email with a draft purchase order is the right scope. The temptation with inventory tools is to add forecasting, automated ordering, and multi-warehouse logic before anyone has asked for it. Keeping it at "stock is low, here is a draft, you decide" means the failure mode is a seller reviewing an order they didn't need, not the app placing one they didn't want.
The Shopify App Store approval is the hard part done, but discovery inside it is the next problem. There are hundreds of inventory apps in that category and the star ratings barely differentiate them — most cluster around 4.5 stars regardless of quality.
We hit the same scope decision at UtilitySEO. Free SEO scan, up to 2,000 pages, 100+ ranking factors, about 30 seconds, no signup. We could have added ongoing monitoring and alerts to the free tier but chose not to, because the value of the free scan is in showing results immediately, not in drip-feeding them over time.
One question: does the daily check cadence match how these sellers actually restock, or do some need it triggered by a sale rather than a clock?
Thanks — keeping the seller in control was exactly the goal.
On the daily cadence, the honest answer is that I haven’t validated it with real merchants yet. I chose it as a simple starting point that keeps alerts predictable. For fast-moving products, daily might be too slow. I'll pay close attention to that with the first merchants who try it.
Honest answer is the right answer. The first merchants will tell you quickly — if someone selling candles says daily is fine but someone selling trending phone accessories says they need it after every batch of orders, that is the signal for whether cadence should be configurable or whether you need two modes.
Starting with daily and watching what breaks is better than building event-triggered reordering before you know anyone needs it. The worst version of this is adding complexity to a feature nobody has complained about yet.
Exactly — daily is a starting point, not a conclusion. I'll keep it simple for now and let actual merchant feedback tell me whether faster checks are worth adding.
Really useful data, thanks — the "top 10 = 55% of reviews" stat is a good reason to actually track this instead of assuming. I just switched the listing to fully visible in Shopify's App Store search, but it's brand new with zero reviews, so I genuinely don't know yet whether it's surfacing for relevant searches — I'll be watching for that specifically now that you've framed it this way.
On the supplier question: right now it's single supplier per SKU, no multi-location handling. That's exactly the point where a clean reorder point turns into a messy draft, like you said. I hadn't thought about it as a distinct thing to design around yet, but it's a good flag before I go further with the "no compromises" framing — I'll keep it in mind as a boundary to be upfront about rather than something to paper over.
Zero reviews on a new listing is the universal cold-start. The people most likely to leave a review are the ones who had a problem you fixed quickly — so paradoxically, your first support ticket is the highest-value event for App Store ranking.
Being upfront about single-supplier is the right call. The alternative is someone discovering the limit mid-workflow and leaving a one-star review about missing features, which at zero reviews would be devastating. State the boundary in the listing itself, not just in docs. The merchants who need multi-supplier will self-select out, and the ones who stay will be the right first users to learn from.
Both good points, especially the second one — I hadn't thought about stating the single-supplier limit directly in the listing copy itself, only in how I'd explain it if asked. Docs a merchant has to go find are easy to skip past; the listing is what they actually read before installing. I'll look at adding a line there.
One thing worth knowing before you push hard on distribution: there are already 270 live Shopify apps with "inventory" in the name, and of the 118 we have review counts for, the median is just 6 reviews — so "crowded" doesn't mean "occupied," most of that shelf is barely reviewed. The top 10 apps do hold 55% of all reviews in that set though, so being findable matters more than being unique. Question I'd actually ask: does RestockPilot handle multi-supplier or multi-location stock, or is it one supplier per SKU? That's usually where "stock fell below X" turns into a messy draft PO instead of a clean one. (I work on BestAppify, that's where the numbers come from)