What Shopify Retailers Need To Know About Inventory — Jordan Finners | Why Inventory Impacts Real Costs, How Poor Accuracy Loses Sales, What Complicates Retail Inventory Management, Why Barcode Scanning Reduces Errors, How Faster Stock Takes Work (#471)

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Claus Lauter (03:46.072)
Hello welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast. Most Shopify retailers treat inventory like it's basically under control. Sales are coming in, orders are flowing, everything looks fine. But behind the scenes the numbers don't match across systems. Stock levels are off, best sellers run out without warning, and your team starts guessing. That's when it gets messy and expensive. So what's really happening there, and how do you fix it before it starts hurting your growth?

To break it all down, I'm joined by Jordan Finners. He is the winner of the 2025 Shopify Build Community Award and he has run over 5,000 stock takes for stores ranging from single location brands to major European retailers. Jordan, great to have you on the show.

Jordan (04:23.733)
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about stuff.

Claus Lauter (04:26.914)
Let's dive into it. So why do so many stores still struggle to keep their inventory numbers accurate? Should that be easier nowadays?

Jordan (04:34.826)
Yeah, so I think it's really complicated. It's also really boring. It doesn't get all the glamorous attention that conversion rates and, you know, optimizations of your website and things can get, but it's actually critical to your business. But it's also really hard because, you know, we've all been in physical retail stores, there's customers, there's kids, there's staff members, all trying to manage the stock. There's different size retail locations, you know, you could have a tiny stock room in the back. So you haven't got

the ability to hold much stock, you could have a huge stock room. It could be split across multiple locations. There's one retailer I got in London whose stock room is actually 15 minute walk away from the real store. So it's actually quite complicated to manage that logistically. So I think it's quite a complex problem, but it's one that every business should be focused on because it's absolute cost in your business. Inventory is always thought of as just like, I got 10 units of this t-shirt, but it's actual physical cost that your business is holding. And so making sure it's accurate.

and correct and you know what's going on is absolutely critical to your business and your bottom line.

Claus Lauter (05:39.31)
Let's dive a little bit deeper into this to make our listeners understand why bad inventory tracking hurts your sales and most and foremost your customer trust.

Jordan (05:51.327)
Yeah, so I think everyone's had this experience, right? You've gone into a retail store, you've found something that you like, but it's not in your size, or they don't have enough of it if you're buying a few items. I've got a younger brother, so I want to buy a couple of items. And if you haven't got a retail store, you've got a disappointed customer, and they're going to leave disappointed. That's especially important when they've come to your retail store in person, because that's the chance to really bond that experience. We all know that.

physical retail and shopping and selling in person is a much deeper connection and experience than online. And so making sure that the customer is leaving satisfied is really important. But it also means that there's costs hanging up in your business. You if you go into a retail store and it's piled high with boxes, that isn't a great customer experience. They kind of wonder what's going on. It's also terrible for your staff because they've got to try and find whatever items they're looking for across all those, across that entire store.

So ensuring that it's accurate and you know exactly where things are and what you need to replenish and that kind of stuff is absolutely critical to making sure that your customers and staff have a great experience and your business is running smoothly.

Claus Lauter (06:56.878)
Now from the practical side, what's an easy way to reduce human error, which mostly happens during stock takes?

Jordan (07:05.141)
Yeah, so everyone has a different way to approach stock takes. But we would recommend always barcode scanning where you can. Doing that, our barcode scanner works to show a point of sale. So again, you don't have to learn any new tools. But being able to do that and scan each individual item, make sure that you're accounting for exactly what's in your store and in front of you. It can be time consuming, but our app aims to make it as quickly as possible. We've had merchants report that they've saved.

hours of time, both using the scanners and the reporting tools that we've got available. So it doesn't have to be something that's going to weigh you down for a very long time. You don't have to close the store. You can do a stock take while the store is open or do a partial stock take to account sections at a time. There's lots of different approaches here for making sure that it's both quick and efficient, but also accurate and making sure that it's not one of those things that you put off and just do once a year because you know you have to for accounting purposes.

Claus Lauter (08:01.602)
Yeah, very true. You should do that very often. in the past, there was Shopify stocky and this has been taken away. A lot of merchants did rely on that. Just walk me through what it was and why it was so important.

Jordan (08:15.457)
Yeah, so Stocky was a free app that Shopify had. It was actually an app in the marketplace a long time ago that Shopify acquired, and the person behind it joined Shopify. And it was critical for merchants doing kind of physical retail. Point of sale has come a long way in the last couple of years, but Stocky was really there to fill a lot of the gaps that existed. It allowed you to stock take, it allowed you to run purchase orders and transfers, and run a lot of the critical kind of inventory processes in store.

Now, admittedly, it only worked via the laptop, not via point of sale and mobile devices, but it was there as a kind of critical piece for a lot of merchants to use and manage their inventory processes that were missing in Shopify's main inventory process that it can do inside of Shopify admin that, again, has come in a long way in the last couple of years. It's actually gone away now, so you can't even install it anymore. If you've got it, it will expire in August. So we're really on the timeline now to start thinking about your processes.

and what options you have because the last thing you want to get is to August when it's going to run out and be panicking and trying to find a new set of processes for your business.

Claus Lauter (09:22.264)
Now you thought about it early enough and you have a new solution which takes basically over. Talk me through it. How does it work? How does it integrate with existing data? How do you get started?

Jordan (09:32.063)
Yeah, so it's actually a we've been around for about 18 months, two years now. And it came about because I used to work at Gymshark. I saw the set up of that retail store. I had a partner who worked in retail and he was telling me about how they were stock taking and doing things in Excel manually, which is really fun and something that I think we could do better than in 2020, 2025, 2026.

And so that's kind of where the initial idea for the app came along. And then with Stocky going away, it's left lots of gaps. So purchase orders in Shopify is an OK experience. But again, it doesn't allow you to receive accurately by scanning items in. Easy replenishment by using replenishment minimaxes, which Stocky did and lots of matches we're using didn't exist in Shopify admin anymore. And efficient stock taking. Shopify have a little option for this now, but it doesn't give you the full auditability and accountability.

and reporting options to give you the visibility of what's going on in your stock, take the differences and the differencing cost. So you can use Shopify's admin tools now to get a little bit of the way there. But really, if you want to ensure your inventory is accurate and step up that game and make sure you're not wasting time or energy doing things repeatedly or letting down your customers because your inventory is not accurate, then our app's here to kind of help them fill those gaps.

Claus Lauter (10:35.351)
Mm-hmm.

Claus Lauter (10:52.782)
A lot of our listeners might hear inventory tools and then think ERP. that feels like for some of them far too big where they are in their business growth right now. Talk to me through the differences between an inventory tool and an ERP system that's just on the corporate level, on a big level.

Jordan (11:13.769)
Yes, you make a really good point. The inventory space is really fascinating because it ranges all the way from, you know, stocky, which was really powerful, but a free app from Shopify, other Shopify apps like myself, all the way through to Inventory Planner, which was acquired by Sage, which is a huge company now, ERP systems like NetSuite and Salesforce. And so the inventory space has a huge breadth across all these different solutions and scales.

Claus Lauter (11:30.573)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (11:40.425)
And this is where I think the thing that differentiates our app is that we build in Shopify native. So you can get a lot further using Shopify native tools and move a lot faster than a lot of other businesses using Shopify native tooling. So we integrate with Shopify point of sale. So your team don't need to learn anything new. They don't have any new apps to learn. They're not swapping devices. We've seen merchants who were previously swapping devices between the front of store, which was running Shopify point of sale and the back of store, which was running like a warehouse system or an ERP, for example.

and having to learn those two different systems and swap between them was a lot of context switching for the staff. And so we believe that leaning into Shopify's tooling and letting you work all inside of Shopify admin, Shopify point of sale and not have to go somewhere else is going to really help accelerate your business and make sure that you're working as efficiently as possible.

Claus Lauter (12:26.254)
Now, I like the idea that everything runs together into Shopify and you have a complete overview there without learning new tools and having to deploy and connect APIs and whatever comes to it. Talk me through how does the day-to-day work look like when you do a completely inventory check? What's the steps? do you version start there?

Jordan (12:51.647)
Yeah, so you can start by creating a start take in our app, an inventory count if you're in North America. There's a lot of terminology differences between the UK where I'm based and North America in terms of this, but we're all talking about the same thing at the end of the day of making sure that our image is accurate. You can create that in our app. You can configure how that works. So again, like I mentioned, everyone has different preferences on how they want to run things and we let you have the flexibility to do so. So you can scan each individual item, you can allow your team to input quantities.

You can scan without confirming each individual item as well to speed up the stock text. So you can run it how you want to. And we've got settings to allow you to configure that. Once you've configured it, your team can hop onto Shopify point of sale, which is a tool I'll already use, open up our stock text tile and start scanning. And it's really as simple as that. You can use as many devices as you want to to increase the speed of the scans. You know, we have teams downloading on their mobile phones, just increase the number of scanners available. We actually had someone do an entire warehouse.

So we're designed for physical retail stores, but this team wanted to roll out to their physical warehouse as well. So someone actually counted an entire warehouse, which was over 55,000 units to be counted. And so we can scale from any kind of size of stock tech that you want to do. Yeah, and then once you've done that, you run our reports. So we have some reports to help you assess where you are, to very quickly compare.

what you've scanned into what's in Shopify showing you the difference in quantity but also in cost because depending on what you're selling you might care more about the cost rather than the quantity. For example, we've got jewelers who care that there's one or two pieces of a high value missing as opposed to more apparel retailers who probably care more about the quantities of items, there's 10 t-shirts missing here and so on. And so those reports we've had merchants say that that saved them hours and hours of time having to compare.

what was scanned in and what was in Shopify, doing different comparisons between different systems, exporting CSVs and doing all that manual lookup. yeah, merchants have reported they've saved hours of time doing that. And once they've done that, we'll go and adjust the inventory in Shopify automatically in the background so they don't have to worry about anything.

Claus Lauter (15:01.71)
You already gave a couple of examples and I never thought about the jewelry who was losing one precious jewelry item. I mean, that makes a huge difference if you don't know where that is. think that panic starts settling in very quickly there. Do you have any other customer stories or case studies that you can share with our listeners? What kind of difference brands saw when it came to implementing your solution?

Jordan (15:09.557)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (15:24.809)
Yeah, so we've held brands of all different sizes. We have a lot of single store merchants on there because I believe like the local high street is really important. And I think it's a really important thing for our communities and our businesses. Setting up a digital business is hard enough, never mind a physical one with a retail store and staff and inventory costs. So we try to price flexibly to support everyone at different sizes. But that scales all the way up to we have Body Shop in Europe, running stock takes across their locations.

33 different locations across their retail stores. So we're really here to support you as a business and help you stock take any scale and really make those processes as efficient as possible for you.

Claus Lauter (16:05.87)
Walk me through the typical onboarding process of a new customer. What steps are involved? How long does it take to get up?

Jordan (16:13.269)
Yeah, so I've actually had this question quite a few times because people often think it's got complicated setup, given that it's on multiple screens. So you've got the admin side of it and you've got the mobile side of it as well. But actually it's really straightforward. So our onboarding is five steps in Shopify admin once you install the app. It will take you through adding the necessary things to Shopify point of sale that you need to, take you through how to get started with a stock take or inventory transfers or purchase orders, because we now support those as well.

So depending what you're looking for, we'll take you through the right steps to get started. And then you can create a stock take or transfer or purchase order and get started straight away. Again, because it's tools that your team are familiar with in Shopify point of sale in terms of receiving and processing those. They don't need to learn anything new. They can simply use the tools and experience that they're used to on Shopify point of sale. So they don't have to get used to anything new, no separate logins, no extra setup. So it's really quite straightforward to get started.

Claus Lauter (17:09.038)
Okay, one question is somebody has not done this with any kind of scanner whatsoever. What kind of hardware do they need to buy?

Jordan (17:17.599)
Yeah, so they might not necessarily need to buy anything. Shopify point of sale app now works on any Android or iOS device. So they can use it on any mobile phone. If you want to start there, that's a great place to get started at if you need the flexibility of hardware. So we've also seen it where smaller merchants especially, they might only have an iPad as the till, which isn't a great way to stick all your inventory in because you've only got one device. And so you can scale it up by downloading the app because it's a free point of sale app.

on multiple mobile phones and get started scanning around all of the different items in store and increase the number of scanners and that'll increase the speed of the stock take. Not only that, but we also don't require a Shopify POS Pro subscription. That's one of our key differentiators. You don't need that to do transfers and purchase orders and things as well. So again, that opens up the these capabilities to more people to be able to use them.

Claus Lauter (18:11.406)
That's very cool that you can just use your phone. Is there any kind of homework that the merchant needs to do before they can get started?

Jordan (18:18.941)
Not really, we have a lot of tutorials and demos available to kind of take you through it, lots of YouTube videos and those kind of things to take you through how to get going. You can create as many stock takes or reports, image transfers and purchase orders as you like as well, there's no limits on that as part of our subscription. So you can test ones and make sure you're comfortable with the process as well before you actually roll out to your teams because a lot of times you want to make sure you're...

You feel comfortable with it before you start rolling out to your different teams that might be using it in store and things. So you can always create test ones to try out first.

Claus Lauter (18:52.48)
Okay, already you mentioned that your pricing is very flexible depending on the size of the business. Is there some general guideline in regards of your pricing?

Jordan (19:01.345)
Yeah, so at the moment the pricing is for a single location is about $10. Two to three locations is $21 and more than that is $37 a month. So we try and support businesses of all different sizes and scales using that pricing model to keep it available to everyone because like I said, inventory accuracy is important to every business regardless of the size and so everyone should have access to the tools to be able to make sure it's accurate.

and it's not affecting their business and their base costs.

Claus Lauter (19:35.342)
No, absolutely. I think that's an investment that everyone should do. And it's not necessarily an investment. It's so affordable that it's a no-brainer. And as said, one sleepless night because of some items that you're not finding because they're lost in your storage, you want to have a good solution for that. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered?

Jordan (19:58.977)
Yeah, so I think one thing that's important is to make sure that these tasks are happening day to day, right? You're replenishing your retail store from your warehouse or your suppliers on a day to day basis, week by week basis. You're starting to stock take at an annual place. We'd always recommend stock taking more regularly to make sure that inventory is accurate as possible. And also any discrepancies, you understand what's happened to them because investigating something that's happened a week ago is a lot easier than investigating something that happened 11 months ago.

So we'd recommend that as well. And getting those day-to-day processes and making sure that they're really efficient and smooth and that everyone in the team knows what they're doing, I think is gonna make a real impact on your business because it's often overlooked. These things are boring, right? A stock take is not a very exciting process for people to go through, for people to run, but it is absolutely critical. And same with the inventory transfers and purchase orders. They're not always the most glamorous and exciting things in a business, but they are absolutely critical and they run more often than not day-to-day.

So making sure that they're as efficient and flexible to your needs and work how you want to work, I think is really important. I'd also emphasize that Stocky is going to go away. Shopify have announced that. They've set the timeline. So I'd also recommend that merchants start looking for solutions and options as soon as possible because making sure that they're comfortable with those processes, the change in that process and the change they're going to have take their teams through and making sure those processes are still

run efficiently and effectively, think is really critical. So I'd start looking as soon as you can to find a solution that works for you.

Claus Lauter (21:33.154)
No, absolutely. totally agree there. And you're quite right. The boring, repetitive tasks are most likely the most important tasks in your business because that's the stable that you need to do. And that's where you can lose money very, very quickly if you don't do them at all. Where can people go and find out more about you guys?

Jordan (21:51.421)
Yeah, so you can find us at Pimsicle.com or you can search the App Store for PML Stocktake and you can find more information available there. I'm also available on social media at Jordan Finners. If there's any questions that you have, just let me know. Happy to answer them on any platform that you can find me on. And I think we'll have links as well in the notes to the podcast.

Claus Lauter (22:16.086)
Absolutely. Links as always in the show notes. You're just one click away. Jordan, that was a really good overview about why inventory taking is so important for every business out there. I hope a lot of our listeners will reach out to you and implement your solution into their business. Thanks so much for your time today.

Jordan (22:33.515)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.