Proviand tells Shopify shop owners what to reorder, how much and when. It has been in the Shopify App Store since 13 July. It has zero installs.
I wrote about getting it approved, which took three tries and one fix for a bug that wasn’t the bug. What I never wrote down is what it actually does, why it exists and who it’s for. So this is that post. There is a favour at the end.
What it does
If you run a shop that buys stock from suppliers, there is one question you answer every week. What do I order, how much, and when? Order too little and your best product is sold out for three weeks while the supplier ships. Order too much and your money sits in boxes in the back.
Proviand reads what the shop has already sold and answers that question for every product. The main screen is a list sorted by whatever runs out first, with the weeks of stock left, the date it runs out and how many to order.
Every order quantity has a “Why?” next to it. Click it and you get the arithmetic: what the product sold per week, the seasonality for this time of year, the supplier’s lead time, the safety stock and the order quantity that follows from all of that.
That panel is the part I care about most. A forecast you can’t check is a guess with a nice font. When a number is off, a shop owner can see which part is off. They can disagree with it and be right.
Then it groups what you need into purchase orders per supplier and emails them. When the boxes arrive you tick them off and the stock goes back into Shopify. Partial deliveries too, because suppliers.
Why it exists
Shopify used to have a free app for this, called Stocky. They switched it off on 31 August. What Shopify offers instead has no forecasting, no supplier lead times and no way to bring your old purchase orders along. So every new Shopify store now starts without a free answer to the weekly question, and every store that ran on Stocky had to go somewhere.
Somewhere was expensive. When I went through the App Store at the end of June, the established inventory apps averaged around 193 dollars a month. The affordable market leader already does the same job as Proviand, and the complaint that comes up most in its reviews is that it’s overwhelming.
So Proviand does that job with as little around it as I could get away with. It’s free for 50 SKUs on one location (a SKU is one variant, so a T-shirt in four sizes is four). 29 dollars a month adds purchase orders and alerts, 49 raises the limits to 10,000 SKUs and ten locations, and 99 removes them. No contract and no demo call.
The second idea, built first
At the end of June I went through the Shopify App Store looking for gaps. Proviand was on that list, but it wasn’t first. First was Koppel, which connects a Shopify shop to Bol.
Koppel needed Bol to approve me as an integrator first, and Bol reviews integrators twice a year. Proviand needs nothing except the shop’s own data. No outside marketplace, nobody else’s permission. So while Koppel waited for Bol, I built the second idea on the list. It took a few days and I submitted it on 5 July.
Shopify’s review then took eight days and three submissions, which is its own post. Approved on 13 July.
Koppel got through Bol in the end. Then Shopify stopped accepting apps that connect to outside marketplaces, while Koppel was sitting in their review queue. That one is here. So the idea I built second is the one still standing, and it’s one of the seven that count toward my 12 in 12 so far.
Staying in my lane
Everything I build now is for ecommerce. It took me a while to learn that.
I was a designer for twenty years, and these days I optimise ecommerce stores at BTNG.studio. When the products sit in the same industry as the client work, building an audience doesn’t start from zero every time. A shop owner who finds Proviand meets the person who does checkout research for stores. A BTNG client hears about the apps. I get to know the people, and they get to know me, the Shopify apps, the research and the design work in one go.
Zero
Now the uncomfortable part. Since 13 July, Proviand has had zero installs.
Nobody finds an app in the App Store by accident, so I went looking for shop owners instead. The first cold email campaign sent close to 2,000 emails and got six human replies. All six were a no. One of them, in full: “No!!!”
I know why now. 82% of that list were fashion labels. When a label sells out of a dress, the drop is over and nobody reorders it. And the template’s subject line asked things like “is the Mykonos dress back in stock yet?”, which opens as a customer’s question and turns into a sales pitch by the second line. I’d have replied “No!!!” too.
Another list was sites that rank for “Stocky alternative”, on the theory that whoever writes about the switch knows the shops making it. In this category, almost every one of those sites is a rival inventory app writing its own marketing. Thirteen competitors got a friendly email from me offering to help move their customers to Proviand before I noticed.
Since the end of September an AI writes every email for one specific shop and I approve each one. That setup is here. The install count still says zero.
The favour
If you run a Shopify store yourself, this is for you. If you don’t, you probably know someone who does. Someone who used Stocky until August, keeps their reorders in a spreadsheet, or has a best-seller sold out right now because the supplier takes six weeks.
Send them this post. Proviand is free up to 50 SKUs on one location, and every paid plan starts with a 14-day trial. They can click through the demo without installing anything, or install it from the App Store.
If they try it and think a number is wrong, I’d like to hear that too. Email me at [email protected].
