Most advice about Shopify purchase order apps rests on one assumption: that Shopify has no purchase orders of its own. That assumption expired on June 22, 2026, and any article written before then carries it.

On that date Shopify connected purchase orders to inventory transfers. A purchase order records what you agreed to buy and what it cost; a linked transfer records the goods actually arriving. The two now reference each other, the way an order references its fulfillments. Combined with Stocky's shutdown on August 31, 2026, this quietly moved a large chunk of the PO app category from "essential" to "optional."

Optional is not the same as unnecessary. Here is where the line actually falls.

The short version

• Native purchase orders are real and reasonably complete. Suppliers with contact details, payment terms, supplier currency, supplier SKUs, cost autofill from your previous orders with that supplier, CSV line-item import, barcode-scanner entry, PDF export, and a linked transfer that handles multi-shipment receiving with per-line Accept, Reject, and Cancel actions.
• There is no documented way to email a purchase order to a supplier. The Shopify Help Center describes exactly one route: More actions → Export PDF, then you send it yourself. Three of the six apps below advertise emailing POs to suppliers, and a fourth sends them as PDF/CSV.
• Payment terms don't stick to a supplier. Shopify states it plainly: payment terms and supplier currencies "are specific to individual purchase orders, and aren't saved as default values to any specific supplier." Net 30 gets re-entered every time.
• There is no approval step. Purchase orders have two statuses, Draft and Ordered. No pending-approval state, no spend threshold, no second signature. And "marking a purchase order as ordered can't be reversed."
• You can't order a product that doesn't exist yet. "You can only add products that already exist in your Shopify store." For a brand placing a first PO on a new season's SKUs, that's a real sequencing problem.
• PO apps meter differently, and two of them meter by POs per month. Ultimate Purchase Orders sells 50, 100, 250, and 500 POs/month. Auto Purchase Orders sells 100 and 250 POs/month. Split one supplier order across three POs and you've spent three units of your allowance. Native POs aren't metered at all.
• The two Built for Shopify options bury POs several tiers up. EasyScan Inventory & Barcode gates Purchase Orders & Transfer Orders to Advanced, $79.99/month, its third of four tiers. Stockie Inventory Management gates them to Pro Plus, $59.99/month, its fourth of four. You are buying forecasting and scanning; the PO module rides along.

All pricing, ratings, and review counts were verified on the Shopify App Store in the en-US locale on September 10, 2026.

What native purchase orders actually do now

Start here, because the answer for a lot of stores is "nothing, keep your money."

Purchase orders live at Products → Purchase orders. A PO carries a supplier, a destination location, line items, payment terms, a supplier currency, and a cost summary. Suppliers are records with contact information and addresses, and a supplier's page shows recent purchase order line items you've ordered from them before.

Line entry has three modes: manual search, CSV import against SKU or barcode, and barcode-scanner entry (including your phone camera on mobile). When you add a product you've bought from that supplier before, Shopify auto-fills the Supplier SKU, Cost, and Tax from the previous PO — and if you've paid multiple prices historically, it offers them in a dropdown. Absent any history, cost falls back to the variant's cost per item.

Receiving happens on the linked transfer, not the PO. Each line gets Accept, Reject, or Cancel, in whatever quantity split you need, with an optional note explaining why. Rejected units are recorded but never enter available inventory. Because the origin is a supplier rather than a location, cancelled units are removed rather than returned. A single transfer can hold multiple shipments, so a supplier who ships in three batches is tracked as three batches.

Costs that weren't knowable at order time — freight, customs duties — attach to individual shipments as adjustments, and the transfer's Cost summary aggregates them so you can compare the agreed cost against what the goods actually cost to land. Transfers also accept metafields as of June 30, 2026, which is how you'd carry lot numbers, freight references, or ERP keys.

Receiving works in the Shopify admin and in Shopify POS, so a shipment that arrives at a retail location can be received at the counter.

That is a genuinely capable system, and it's part of the admin rather than a separate purchase. The Help Center pages for purchase orders and transfers state no Shopify plan requirement — though they don't affirm one way or the other, so confirm against your own plan if it matters.

The five gaps that sell apps

1. Getting the PO to the supplier

The Help Center's route is: save as draft, Export PDF, "submit to your supplier for review and approval." Attach it to an email yourself. There is no send action, no supplier email field that fires anything, no delivery record.

Apps close this in three different ways. Ultimate Purchase Orders sends from your own address, Gmail included. Auto Purchase Orders sends from your custom domain and advertises deliverability as a feature. Full Shelf Purchase Orders emails a link rather than an attachment. Stockie sends POs to suppliers via PDF/CSV.

2. Supplier defaults

Supplier currency does default to the supplier's own currency, so that part is handled. Payment terms are not: Shopify's documentation states that payment terms and supplier currencies "are specific to individual purchase orders, and aren't saved as default values to any specific supplier." If you buy from twelve suppliers on four different terms, those are twelve facts living in your head or your spreadsheet, re-entered every time.

Stockie stores supplier contacts alongside lead times and safety stock settings, which is the same idea extended into forecasting.

3. Approval

Draft and Ordered. Nothing between them. No "requires a second approver above $10,000," no routing, no audit of who authorized what. For a two-person store this is fine. For a store where a buyer drafts and an owner approves, it's a policy you enforce socially rather than in software.

Note also that Mark as ordered is irreversible. You can still edit the PO afterward — supplier, products, costs are all editable — but you can't put it back in Draft, and a PO marked Ordered can only be archived, never deleted.

4. A supplier-facing portal

Native suppliers are records you maintain. They have no login and no way to respond inside Shopify.

Purchase Management by Webkul is the one app here built specifically around that: suppliers get their own account, see POs assigned to them, and can accept or reject a request. The listing also states you can set the minimum and maximum quantity that can be requested from a supplier on a purchase order. It's $25/month (or $275/year) with a 7-day trial — and it has no reviews at all, which is a meaningful risk signal for something sitting between you and your suppliers.

5. Ordering products that don't exist yet

"You can only add products that already exist in your Shopify store." This one catches people out. If you're placing an opening order on next season's line, you have to create every variant in Shopify first — with SKUs, with variants, unpublished — before you can put them on a PO. Apps that create their own product records aren't bound by this; native is.

What the apps cost, and what they meter

This is where the category gets confusing, because the apps barely agree on what they're charging for.

App	Starting price	Metering unit	POs available from	Built for Shopify	Rating (reviews)
Full Shelf Purchase Orders	$9.99/month	None stated	$9.99	No	5.0 (5)
Ultimate Purchase Orders	$9.99/month	POs per month	$9.99 (50 POs)	No	3.5 (11)
Purchase Management	$25/month	None stated	$25	No	0.0 (0)
Auto Purchase Orders	$39.99/month	POs per month	$39.99 (100 POs)	No	4.9 (45)
Stockie Inventory Management	$4.99/month	Variants (Basic only)	$59.99 (Pro Plus)	Yes	4.8 (147)
EasyScan Inventory & Barcode	$9.99/month	User seats	$79.99 (Advanced)	Yes	5.0 (357)

The "starting price" column is the number the App Store shows you and the number most listicles copy. For Stockie and EasyScan it is nearly meaningless if you came for purchase orders: POs sit three tiers above Stockie's entry price and two above EasyScan's.

Ultimate Purchase Orders

Source: Shopify App Store (Ultimate Purchase Orders), retrieved September 10, 2026

Four tiers, all metered by POs per month: Small Business $9.99 (50 POs), Medium Business $14.99 (100), Large Business $24.99 (250), Enterprise $34.99 (500). Each has a 7-day trial. Developer is Droid Infinity; launched May 18, 2023.

The tier boundaries hide things you might assume are baseline. Customizable PO and email templates and packing slips start at $14.99. Moving average costs, live-rate multi-currency, and document attachments start at $24.99. Remittance advice starts at $34.99.

Rating is 3.5 across 11 reviews — the only app on this page rated below 4. A June 6, 2026 review from a UK store using it four months describes unpredictable line-item sorting and unanswered clarification requests. A February 2025 review from a US store using it about a year praises the one-click order-to-PO "Recreate" function and sub-day support response. Eleven reviews is not enough to call either experience typical.

Auto Purchase Orders

Source: Shopify App Store (Auto Purchase Orders), retrieved September 10, 2026

The most expensive entry point and the longest automation feature list. Advanced $39.99 (100 POs/month), Professional $59.99 (250 POs/month, plus combining Shopify orders into one PO and a webhooks API), Enterprise plan $74.99, whose PO allowance the listing doesn't state — it says to install the app to see Enterprise plans. 14-day trial. Developer is Magic Bits; launched March 22, 2021.

Its distinguishing capabilities are dropship-shaped: auto-generate POs from Shopify orders, split one customer order across multiple suppliers, merge multiple customer orders into a single supplier PO, and sync POs to Xero and QuickBooks as bills. It lists Shopify POS and Shopify Flow under Works with. Rating is 4.9 across 45 reviews, with no reviews below 4 stars.

Worth reading its data-access disclosure before installing: it requests customer data including name, email, phone, and physical address, plus geolocation and IP — reasonable for a dropship app addressing packages to your buyers, but more than a pure replenishment tool needs.

Full Shelf Purchase Orders

Source: Shopify App Store (Full Shelf Purchase Orders), retrieved September 10, 2026

One plan, $9.99/month, 5-day trial, no stated PO cap. Developer is Cashew Tree Software Inc. in Vancouver; launched February 15, 2018, which makes it the second-oldest app here.

It does a small number of things: supplier SKU field, PDF or emailed link, per-supplier logo/notes/shipping/tax on the PO, partial or full receiving that writes back to Shopify inventory, and creating a PO from a Shopify order with the customer as ship-to. 5.0 across 5 reviews — a perfect average on a sample far too small to mean much.

Purchase Management

Source: Shopify App Store (Purchase Management), retrieved September 10, 2026

$25/month, or $275/year, 7-day trial. Developer is Webkul Software Pvt Ltd; launched December 14, 2015. The supplier portal is the entire reason to look at it, and the zero reviews are the entire reason to be careful. There is a demo store link on the listing; use it before you commit.

Stockie Inventory Management

Source: Shopify App Store (Stockie Inventory Management), retrieved September 10, 2026

Built for Shopify, 4.8 across 147 reviews, developer Plutonian, launched July 19, 2021. Four tiers: Basic $4.99 (5 alerts, up to 8,000 variants, 3 recipients, unlimited locations), Advanced $9.99 (custom thresholds, Slack, unlimited alerts/variants/recipients), Pro $29.99 (forecasting dashboard, lead time and safety stock configuration, predicted reorder dates), Pro Plus $59.99 (create and manage POs, generate POs from forecasts, track shipments, receive inventory, sync adjustments to Shopify, send POs via PDF/CSV). 14-day trial; no annual pricing shown.

The honest framing is that Stockie is a low-stock-alerting and forecasting product that grew a PO module. If what you want is POs alone, you're paying $59.99 for a stack whose first three tiers you may not use. If what you want is "tell me what to reorder and then draft it," that's exactly what the ladder is built for.

A July 28, 2026 one-star review from a Canadian store — five minutes of use — argues the PO, stocktake, and transfer features are "just a reskin of shopify's native system." The developer replied the same day disputing it. Whatever you make of the review, it's a fair question to ask of every app on this page now that native transfers exist, and it's the reason this article leads with what native does.

EasyScan Inventory & Barcode

Source: Shopify App Store (EasyScan Inventory & Barcode), retrieved September 10, 2026

Built for Shopify, 5.0 across 357 reviews — by a wide margin the most reviewed app here — developer 506, launched January 24, 2020. Four tiers with a 17% annual discount: Basic $9.99 (barcode and SKU generation, label printing), Standard $39.99 (pick/pack/fulfill, stock transfer, bin locations, low stock alerts), Advanced $79.99 (Purchase Orders & Transfer Orders, demand forecasting, AI insights, 6 user accounts), Pro $129.99 (unlimited seats and location roles, barcode aliases). The only quantitative caps stated anywhere in its pricing are user seats — no PO cap, no order cap, no SKU cap.

Its listing never uses the words "supplier" or "vendor," and doesn't mention emailing POs. If your PO problem is a supplier-communication problem, that silence matters. If your PO problem is a warehouse-floor problem — scanning, put-away, counting — this is the app in this set built for that, and its 357 reviews are the strongest evidence base on the page.

How to decide

Stay native if you place a manageable number of POs, your suppliers accept a PDF by email, your payment terms are few enough to remember, and nobody needs to approve anything. That describes a lot of small and mid-size US stores. You already have suppliers, supplier currency, supplier SKUs, cost history, CSV import, multi-shipment receiving, and POS receiving, for free.

Buy a PO-first app — Full Shelf at the simple end, Ultimate Purchase Orders if you want templating and tiering, Auto Purchase Orders if you're dropshipping or splitting customer orders across suppliers — when sending is the bottleneck, or when POs need to originate from customer orders rather than from replenishment.

Buy an inventory platform — Stockie for forecasting-led reordering, EasyScan for scan-led warehouse operations — when the PO is the last step of a workflow you're buying, not the thing itself. Neither is a cheap way to get purchase orders; both are reasonable ways to get purchase orders plus something you actually needed.

Buy Purchase Management only if a supplier portal is a hard requirement, and test the demo store first.

Before installing anything, spend twenty minutes in Products → Purchase orders with a real order. Draft it, export the PDF, create the transfer, receive a partial shipment, add a freight adjustment. Whatever annoys you in that twenty minutes is your actual requirement — and it may be shorter than you expected.

Two things nobody documents

Two caveats worth carrying into your own testing.

The Help Center describes cost adjustments as living on the shipment and being aggregated in the transfer's Cost summary so you can compare agreed cost against actual cost. It does not describe those freight and duty amounts being allocated back to each variant's unit cost. If landed cost per unit drives your margin reporting, verify that behavior in your own admin rather than assuming it.

Second, each purchase order supports one linked inventory transfer at a time. You can unlink and relink, and an unlinked transfer keeps its receiving and cost history. But only one of them can be linked at a time. A single PO that arrives as three genuinely separate transfers is modeled either as three shipments within one transfer, or as standalone supplier transfers that the PO never points at.

Sources

• Purchase orders — Shopify Help Center
• Creating and managing purchase orders — Shopify Help Center
• Creating and managing suppliers for purchase orders — Shopify Help Center
• Creating an inventory transfer for your purchase order — Shopify Help Center
• Viewing and filtering purchase orders — Shopify Help Center
• Inventory transfers and shipments — Shopify Help Center
• Purchase orders now create transfers to move inventory — Shopify Changelog, June 22, 2026
• Define and manage metafields on inventory transfers — Shopify Changelog, June 30, 2026
• Shopify App Store listings for Ultimate Purchase Orders, Auto Purchase Orders, Full Shelf Purchase Orders, Purchase Management, Stockie Inventory Management, and EasyScan Inventory & Barcode, en-US locale, retrieved September 10, 2026