Looking for an Inventory Planner alternative?
Same search, two different itches. Either the software is wrong for you, or the forecasts were fine and the stock numbers underneath them were not. The fixes have nothing in common.
What Inventory Planner is.
Inventory Planner, from Sage, sells forecasting and replenishment: how much you need and when, based on demand. It grew up in the Shopify world and remains strongest for multichannel DTC brands. A capable product. The interesting question is what it needs from you to stay right.
A forecast is a multiplication of assumptions: velocity, lead time, stock on hand. The model checks none of them against the real world. That is not a flaw, it is a boundary. Somebody works the boundary.
The candidates, briefly.
SoStocked
Amazon-native forecasting and PO workflows, per-SKU pricing, part of Carbon6. The usual move when Amazon is your center of gravity. Our page on it →
An operations system
If what you actually miss is order routing, warehouse moves and one record of where stock sits, that is management software like Cin7, and it is a different shelf entirely. The distinction →
A built workbook
No subscription: your catalog modeled once, in files you can open, fed by exports. This is what the Engine’s build installs, and it is enough for most brands under a few thousand SKUs. What the build covers →
Multichannel drift is an input problem.
Run Shopify and Amazon together and you have at least three stock truths: the platform’s, the 3PL’s, and the one in your planning tool. They disagree a little every week. A forecast built on the wrong one is precise about a fiction.
The documented version: a purchase order, already placed, was caught and stopped at roughly 400 days of coverage. The forecast approved what its inputs justified. A person asked whether the inputs were still true. The documented catch →
The weekly rhythm exists for exactly this: reconcile the counts, re-check the lead times, and only then let the math speak. The plan lands before a 30-minute call, the decisions get made with dates on them, and the drift never gets a full quarter to compound. How the weekly cycle runs →
The three questions this page gets.
Can you work alongside Inventory Planner?
Yes. The weekly cadence has run inside client accounts that plan on Inventory Planner. The Engine reads from your systems, questions the inputs, and owns the order-by dates. Whether the forecast comes from their model or our workbook matters less than whether anyone checked what it was fed.
We sell on Shopify and Amazon both. Which velocity wins?
Neither, they are columns. The build models demand per channel and stock per node, then plans against the total picture: FBA, 3PL, upstream. That multi-node view is the reason the free supply chain map exists, and it is a fair preview of how we think.
We are under 50 SKUs. Should we book anyway?
No, and that is a real answer, not modesty. At that size a decent sheet and your own hands beat a retainer. Use the free map and the health score, and come back when the catalog or the lead times outgrow them.
Inventory Planner is a product of Sage. SoStocked is a product of Carbon6. Cin7 belongs to its owner. Names appear for factual comparison only. No affiliation or endorsement is implied, in either direction.
Talk it through against your catalog.
Bring the restock report and the all-orders export, whichever tool they come out of. Thirty minutes later you know which SKUs are at risk in the next 90 days.