Receiving stock against a purchase order sounds simple until you’re standing in front of forty boxes trying to figure out which items still need barcode labels printed. Shopify’s native Purchase Orders and Transfers tool covers the ordering and receiving side well, but the label printing step is where most merchants hit friction. This guide walks through how receiving actually works on Shopify and what your options are for getting labels printed without losing an afternoon to it.
How Shopify’s Native PO and Transfers Tool Works
Shopify built purchase orders and inventory transfers as a connected workflow, replacing what used to require a separate app like Stocky for many merchants.
Creating a purchase order
You create a PO from within Shopify’s inventory section, listing the supplier, the products, and the quantities you’re ordering. This becomes your record of what you expect to receive.
Converting a PO into an inventory transfer
Once the PO is sent, Shopify lets you convert it into an inventory transfer, which is the document you’ll actually use to log what arrives. The transfer keeps a running record tied back to the original PO.
Marking items received (full vs. partial)
As stock arrives, you mark quantities as received against the transfer. Shopify supports partial receiving, so a shipment that’s short a few units doesn’t block you from logging what did arrive.
Why Receiving Slows Down in Practice
The workflow above sounds clean, but merchants running high volume or a large SKU count hit real friction once labels enter the picture.
The Stocky retirement gap
Stocky used to offer built-in label printing tied directly to what you received. With Stocky retired, that specific capability didn’t carry over cleanly into the native PO and Transfers tool, and merchants have raised this gap repeatedly in Shopify’s own community forums.
The missing “print labels from this PO” step
As it stands, there’s no native button that takes a received transfer and turns it directly into a batch of barcode labels sized to what actually arrived. That forces a manual workaround for anyone receiving stock regularly.
How Do You Print Labels From a Shopify Purchase Order?
Printing labels tied to a purchase order currently requires either a manual cross-reference process or a dedicated app that reads your received quantities directly.
What’s possible natively today
Natively, you can view and export your received transfer data, but turning that into printed labels means manually retyping quantities into a separate label tool, adjusting for partial receipts, and generating barcodes by hand for anything that doesn’t already have one.
Where a dedicated label app closes the gap
A dedicated receiving and labeling app can read the transfer directly, pre-fill label counts from what was actually received rather than what was originally ordered, and print to standard label formats. If you want to explore this option for your own receiving workflow, it’s worth checking whether an app like AOP’s PO Label Printer fits, and confirming its current feature set before relying on it for a specific workflow, since label app capabilities vary and are worth verifying directly.
Printing Labels Fast at Receiving Time
Once you’ve settled on a labeling approach, a few habits make the actual printing step faster every time.
Auto-filling label counts from received quantities
Pulling label quantities from the received amount, not the originally ordered amount, avoids printing labels for stock that never showed up. This matters most on partial shipments, which are common enough that it’s worth building the habit from day one.
Generating barcodes for items that don’t have one yet
New SKUs or items from a supplier that doesn’t provide barcodes need one generated before they can be labeled and shelved. Doing this at receiving time, rather than discovering the gap later at the register, keeps your inventory data clean.
A Practical Receiving Checklist
Pulling the workflow together, here’s a simple order of operations for a smooth receiving day.
Before the shipment arrives
Confirm the PO matches what you’re expecting, and have your label printer and stock ready so there’s no scramble once boxes start coming in.
At the moment of receiving
Mark quantities received against the transfer as you physically count each item, generate any missing barcodes immediately, and print labels from the actual received counts rather than the original order.
Receiving against a purchase order on Shopify works well right up until labels enter the picture, and that’s usually where merchants lose the most time. Building a receiving process that pulls label counts straight from what arrived, rather than retyping numbers by hand, is the difference between a smooth receiving day and a lost afternoon. For B2B order management topics beyond receiving, our guide to B2B order management challenges on Shopify covers the other common friction points.