You can’t market without inventory control.

Shopify has added purchase-order data to Analytics. Good. Because ecommerce teams shouldn’t just know what customers are buying. They should know what the business needs to buy next.

Ecommerce sits at the front of sales.

We can see what people search for. What they view. What they add to basket. What gets hundreds of visits and no orders. What people email asking for. Which colour keeps getting requested. Which size is missing. Which product gets searched for but doesn’t exist.

That makes ecommerce one of the best places in the business to spot buying mistakes and range opportunities.

High views but no sales?

Maybe the product is wrong. Maybe the price is wrong. Maybe we’re buying it at the wrong cost and trying to force a retail price the market doesn’t want.

If customers repeatedly ask for something you don’t stock, that isn’t just a customer-service question. It’s purchasing data.

Marketing without stock control is guesswork

You cannot market properly without inventory control.

If a product runs out, the ads have to stop. If the stock position changes and the media team doesn’t know, your ROAS becomes very difficult to trust.

There’s another problem: the easiest products to scale are usually already the best sellers.

They convert well, so the platform wants more budget. The dashboard rewards you for spending more. Sales go up and everybody is happy.

But would those products have sold anyway?

If you throw hundreds more into advertising an item that already has strong demand, some of that spend is just buying sales you would have got without it.

Meanwhile, you’re concentrating more demand into the same stock line and ignoring the rest of the catalogue.

I’d rather understand the marginal value of that extra spend and spread risk where there is genuine capacity to grow.

Stock is a timing problem

The ideal stock level sounds simple: have exactly enough to cover the orders until the next delivery arrives.

Good luck doing that perfectly.

If you sell a week’s stock in seven days but the supplier takes fourteen days to replenish it, you have a problem.

If your supplier gives you thirty days to pay and the stock is still sitting there on day thirty-one, you now have cash tied up.

If supply is irregular, you need more buffer. If lead times are reliable, you can run tighter. If demand is volatile, you need to decide how much risk you’re prepared to carry.

Cash sitting in stock isn’t automatically bad. Stock is supposed to turn back into cash.

The problem is when it stops moving.

Shopify should expose all of this

Shopify now has purchase-order reporting inside Analytics: ordered quantities, supplier costs, receiving, transfers, open purchase orders and shipments due soon.

That’s exactly where it should be.

If Shopify holds the operational data, Shopify should make that data available for analysis.

It already exposes inventory metrics such as sell-through, days of inventory remaining and inventory value. Purchase-order reporting joins more of the picture together.

And with Sidekick already able to answer questions about order and fulfilment data, I’d expect this sort of purchasing analysis to become much easier to query conversationally as the data model expands.

That doesn’t make Shopify an ERP overnight.

It just gives ecommerce teams more of the information they should have had in the first place.