Can AI Help With Your Shopify Inventory? A Friendly Guide

By Vladislav Gerasimchuk, founder of Extensions Market, which builds EZstock

AI chat tools can write a supplier email in seconds and explain a sales report in plain words. They can't see your shelves, though, and they sometimes get numbers wrong. Below is where AI helps with stock in a small shop, where it doesn't, and how to keep your reorder numbers right, with a small tea shop as the example.

What can AI do for your stock?

AI is good at the writing and reading that comes with running stock.

• Write supplier emails. Ask for "a friendly email to my tea supplier asking for 120 tins of Earl Grey by December 1" and you have a draft to edit in seconds.
• Explain a sales export. Paste a sales report from Shopify, without customer names or emails, and ask which products sold fastest last month.
• Draft notes for customers, like a back-in-stock email or a note about December delivery times.
• Answer questions inside Shopify. Sidekick, the assistant in your Shopify admin, "works with your store's data and presents changes for your review before applying them," as Shopify's help center puts it.

What AI can't do

An AI only knows what it's given. It can't see your shelves, so if Shopify says 10 tins and the shelf holds 6, it goes with 10. It won't know your supplier is running late unless you tell it. It can also get numbers wrong, and Shopify's own help pages warn about this: "AI outputs can contain errors, so review anything a tool creates or changes."

If you ask a chat tool how much to order for December, it can only work from the numbers you paste in. Check its math before you spend the money.

An example: the tea shop's best seller

Say you run a small tea shop. Earl Grey is your best seller, at about 30 tins a week. Each tin costs you $8 from your supplier, you sell it for $18, and you keep about $7 after shipping and fees. Your supplier takes 2 weeks to deliver.

The first row needs only two numbers from your own shop: how many you sell a week and how long your supplier takes. Reorder when the stock you have left covers the delivery time plus a week to spare. An AI can do that sum if you give it the right numbers, and an inventory app can do it every day without being asked.

Five tips for using AI with your stock

1. Give it real numbers. Export your sales or stock from Shopify, take out customer names and emails, and paste only the columns you need.
2. Ask small, clear questions. "Which 5 teas sold the most in October?" gets a better answer than "What should I order?"
3. Check the answer against Shopify before you act on it.
4. Let AI write while you decide. Use it to draft the supplier email, then put in the quantities you checked.
5. Keep your reorder numbers somewhere that sees every sale, like Shopify or an inventory app, so they're still right tomorrow.

Where to find AI tools worth trying

Start with what's already in Shopify. Sidekick is in your admin, and Shopify says many of the other AI features in the admin come at no additional cost, though availability varies by plan, device and language.

For a general chat assistant to write emails and read your exports, look through the assistants and chatbots on AI Platforms List, ChatGPT among them. Every tool's link on that list is opened and checked before it goes on, and we run it too.

How EZstock helps

EZstock is a Shopify inventory app that keeps your reorder numbers for you. It works out what's running low from your own sales and stock, suggests how many to reorder, and turns that into a purchase order for your supplier.

It also answers in Sidekick. With EZstock installed, you can ask "What's running low?" or "What should I reorder?" in your Shopify admin, and EZstock answers from your store's real numbers, on every plan, Free included.

The Free plan has the low-stock dashboard with reorder alerts and up to 5 purchase orders a month. Starter ($19 a month) adds unlimited purchase orders, stocktakes and emailing up to 10 purchase orders a month to suppliers, and Growth ($49 a month) adds demand forecasting with days of stock left. Every new store gets all features free for 14 days.