Reorda / Blog / Automatic purchase orders in Shopify: reorder points explained · Updated 2026-09-30 · By Reorda

Written August 3, 2026 · 4 min read

Automatic purchase orders in Shopify: reorder points explained

A reorder point turns restocking from a daily guessing game into a threshold: when stock on a product drops to a number, it's time to order more. Automating it means an app watches that number for every product and raises the purchase order for you, you approve and send, instead of remembering to check.

What "automatic" means here

No app should place an order with your supplier without you seeing it first, that's how you end up with stock you didn't mean to buy. What automatic PO generation does is remove the manual math and the manual draft:

• It tracks sales velocity per product, not a single store-wide number.
• It combines that with each product's supplier lead time to compute a reorder point (see the full formula in how to calculate a reorder point).
• In Reorda’s low-stock view, generate draft purchase orders from the suggestions, grouped by supplier. Drafts are created when you request them, not sent silently in the background.
• You review the draft and send it, one click instead of a spreadsheet lookup.

Where lead time comes from, and how it self-corrects

Lead time is the weak link in most reorder-point setups, because merchants set it once and forget it. Supplier lead times drift, shipping gets slower, a new supplier has different terms, and a stale number quietly produces bad reorder points either way: too early wastes cash on excess stock, too late causes a stockout.

Reorda records the date a PO is marked as ordered and the date it's received. After a handful of orders with a given supplier, it compares the real average against the lead time on file and surfaces a one-line suggestion, "~12 days, update?", rather than silently drifting out of sync.

Setting it up

1. Attach a supplier and lead time to your products (bulk-assignable if you're moving fast, see assigning suppliers to hundreds of products at once).
2. Set the store-wide safety-stock buffer; use a manual product threshold when an individual variant needs a different reorder point.
3. Let a few weeks of sales accumulate so the velocity number is meaningful.
4. Check the low-stock view, products approaching their reorder point show up there before they run out, with a suggested order quantity attached.

Who this is overkill for

If you carry a handful of SKUs and reorder once a season, the spreadsheet is fine, automating a decision you make four times a year isn't worth the setup. This earns its keep once you're checking stock levels weekly or more, across enough products that eyeballing them stops being reliable.