Stock what sells, drop-ship the rest
Most stores are both, and the two halves want different things. Stockroom keeps the lines you stock on real purchase orders and reorder points, and turns a drop-ship order into a supplier PO that fulfills your customer with the supplier's own tracking. Connect the supplier and the whole chain runs without you touching it.
- Order to PO to supplier
- Supplier ships, customer notified
- Manual approval on any step
The whole chain, with nobody in the middle
Every hand-off below can wait for your approval instead. Automate the ones you trust, keep a click on the rest - it is the same chain either way.
- An order comes in. A customer buys something you do not stock. Stockroom resolves the supplier from the same vendor and product-tag rules that already assign your products.
- It becomes a purchase order. A drop-ship PO is raised against that supplier at your cost, carrying the order's own line quantities and your customer's shipping address.
- The supplier gets it. A supplier you have connected on Stockroom Network receives it in their own Stockroom, your lines matched to their catalog by the supplier SKUs you already keep. Anyone else gets the PDF by email, exactly as before.
- Their store creates the order. On their side the PO creates the order in their store - one click, or automatically if they have turned that on. They pick and ship it as their own order, because that is what it is.
- Your customer hears about it. When they fulfill, the tracking flows back onto your PO and fulfills the Shopify order it came from. Your customer gets your store's own shipping email with the supplier's tracking number in it.
- Or a pair of human eyes, anywhere. Each step is a setting, not a rule. Review every drop-ship PO before it leaves, or approve the send and let the rest run. Nothing here is all-or-nothing.
A document your supplier can ship from
The automation rides on top of an ordinary purchase order. That matters the day a supplier is not connected, or an order needs a human.
- Start from the order. Create a purchase order straight from a Shopify order, and choose where it ships: your own location, or the customer's address. That one choice is what makes it a drop-ship PO.
- The customer's address, on the PDF. Their name and address print where your warehouse block would be, so a supplier who has never heard of Stockroom still ships to the right door from the same document.
- Only what is still owed. Quantities map line by line from the order and are capped by what it still has outstanding, so an order you part-fulfilled yourself composes instead of shipping twice.
- Fulfillment is per shipment. Each shipment on the PO fulfills the source order with its own tracking, so a supplier who splits a delivery across two parcels produces two fulfillments, not one wrong one.
- The permission is the opt-in. Automatic fulfillment needs a Shopify permission that is deliberately not in the install set. Stockroom asks for it at mark-as-ordered on a drop-ship PO, and declining still sends the order - the loop just stays manual.
- A restock from an order never fulfills. If you picked your own location, that PO is a restock and Stockroom treats it as one. It never touches the customer's order, because receiving those goods is still your job.
If you drop-ship everything
Plenty of stores never hold a thing. The purchasing side still applies in full - it is the stock side that does not, and Stockroom is built to stay out of your way about it.
- Suppliers, not a list of links. Every Shopify vendor becomes a supplier with contacts, currency, lead time and payment terms, so "who do I chase about this" has one answer instead of an inbox search.
- Keep drop-ship SKUs untracked. This is how most drop-ship variants are already set up, and it is the setup Stockroom is tuned for: variants with Shopify inventory tracking off are filtered out of reorder suggestions and out of the stock warnings on Home. There is no setting to find.
- A real supplier scoreboard. Open POs, units on order, late deliveries and on-time delivery over the last five dated deliveries. None of that cares whether the goods reached you or your customer.
- Spend, not stock. Drop-ship POs are real purchases, so they count in vendor purchase history and in spend per currency. Currencies are reported separately and never summed together.
- Their price list keeps your margin honest. A supplier connected on Stockroom Network can publish what they actually charge you, arriving under an accept policy you choose. Your cost stops being a spreadsheet somebody last touched in March.
- The ordinary paperwork. Your own PO numbering, per-line discounts, per-line tax rates, shipping and adjustment charges, payment terms with an overdue badge. All of it emails, prints and exports.
Stocked lines behave like stocked lines
The reason to run both halves in one app is that the stocked half is where the money leaks.
- Reorder points from your own sales. Up to two years of your sales history and each supplier's observed lead time become a reorder point and an order-by date, per location if you hold stock in more than one.
- Landed cost on what you import. Freight, duty and fees allocate into the unit cost at receiving, so the margin you read on a stocked line is the one you actually made.
- One PO, several destinations. A single supplier order can feed every location you hold stock at, with the destination on the line and the PDF grouped per delivery address.
- A free-text ship-to for the odd one out. Any PO can print a custom address - a trade show, a 3PL, a one-off customer - while stock still flows to the Shopify location you chose.
Common questions
Do I have to hold stock for any of this to work?
No. The order-to-supplier-to-customer chain never assumes a warehouse. What does assume one is the stock side - reorder points, receiving, counts and stock valuation - so a pure drop-shipper simply leaves those parts unused. It is the same free app either way.
Will drop-ship items throw off my inventory numbers?
Keep them untracked in Shopify, which is how most drop-ship variants are already configured. Untracked variants are excluded from reorder suggestions and from the stock warnings on Home. Being straight with you: a drop-ship purchase order does not yet have inventory rules of its own, so a drop-ship SKU that IS inventory-tracked in Shopify is the one case to avoid for now.
Does my customer find out who my supplier is?
Not from Stockroom. Your supplier sees your purchase order with your customer's shipping address on it; your customer gets a shipping notification from your store, carrying the tracking number. What goes inside the parcel is between you and your supplier.
What if my supplier is not on Shopify?
Then they get the purchase order by email as a PDF with your customer's address on it, and you fulfill the order from the shipment when they send you tracking - one button. The automatic half of the chain needs them connected on Stockroom Network. The document half never did.
Is this the same as Shopify Collective?
No, and they answer different halves of the problem. Collective is a marketplace: it finds you suppliers and handles the money between you. Stockroom Network is the document rail between you and a supplier you already buy from, where your purchase order becomes their order. Plenty of stores will use both.
Can I still see the tracking myself?
Yes. Every shipment is recorded on the PO with its tracking number, carrier and date, and the PO shows which of them have fulfilled their order. Stockroom does not look up carrier delivery estimates - the tracking number is a record, and a link for whoever needs it.
Run it on your own catalog
Install Stockroom free from the Shopify App Store. No trials, no credit card.