Supplier SKUs on Shopify purchase orders: the hidden field

Start with the thing most articles on this get wrong: the field exists. A Shopify purchase order line carries a Supplier SKU, and Shopify's documentation states that if you have ordered that product from that supplier before, "the Supplier SKU, Cost, and Tax values are auto-filled from your previous purchase orders with that supplier."

So the problem is not a missing field. The problem is that the data behind it is write-only. There is no product field, no list, no export, no bulk edit, and no API. You can put a code in, and after that it is effectively out of your hands.

• Populating it: type it on a purchase order once and it auto-fills next time for that supplier. That works.
• Correcting a mistake: there is no supported way. Merchants raise fake purchase orders to get at it.
• Loading a thousand of them: there is no supported way either, and the bulk-editing tools cannot reach purchase orders at all.

If you are moving off Stocky, read the last section first — its shutdown date is close and the official replacement does not carry this data.

The fictional purchase order

This is the part worth reading even if you never use Shopify's purchase orders, because of what it says about the shape of the gap.

Want to know the horrendous workaround to edit an existing Supplier SKU? We create a fictional Purchase Order, add the product(s) we need to edit, change the Supplier SKU, go through all steps of the Purchase Order, and then archive the fictional Purchase Order!!!

— orkman, 1 December 2025

He runs "thousands and thousands of products" and moved from Advanced to Plus partly hoping the higher tier would help. It did not.

A second merchant, seven months later and in a different thread, described the same trick used for the opposite purpose — not correcting one code but loading the whole catalogue:

Or you can make one big fake order, include your entire library, but you will have to do that for each of you vendors. Its not great, considering we have 200+ vendors we deal with, but it beats going by the 10516 varients we have indivudially.

— NeilSlinde, 8 July 2026

Two merchants, independently, using invented purchase orders as a data-entry tool. That is not eccentricity. The purchase order form is the only way to write this data, so anyone who needs to write it without actually buying something has to fabricate an order.

⚠️ Do not treat this as a working solution. The day after posting it, the same merchant reported that a correction made on one purchase order "does not persist to the next Purchase Order" — so it is not clear the ritual reliably does what people believe it does. Try it on one product before you try it on a thousand.

Shopify's own support could not explain it

The clearest measure of how undocumented this is came from Shopify staff in April 2024:

It is not currently possible to add a second SKU number to products, be it the supplier's or otherwise, but I appreciate why this would be beneficial.

— Victor, Shopify staff, 1 April 2024

Later the same day, asked where the supplier SKU is actually kept:

I've taken a look via our Help Center documentation and internal resources we have here at Shopify and I've been unable to find specific information about suppliers SKUs and how to save or add them.

— Victor, Shopify staff, 1 April 2024

A merchant went to support directly at the end of 2025 and came back with more:

Shopify Support confirmed there is currently NO WAY for us to bulk edit or bulk delete Supplier SKU values across a store (which I knew already). Shopify Support also confirmed their own technical team apparently can't do this either […] I even asked them to simply delete all Supplier SKUs associated with our store, as I'd rather they were deleted—and we stop using them—than continue to use them with known errors, but I was told this couldn't be done!

— orkman, 2 December 2025

The mechanism was not documented by Shopify at all. It was reverse-engineered by a merchant in 2024:

I found that if I edited a prior PO to add the Supplier SKU […] then the next time I created a PO for the supplier and added this product, the Supplier SKU field is pre-populated. So, it appears to be saving the Supplier SKU for a product and associating it with a particular supplier. What I can't find is a way to see a list of all SKUs for a particular supplier and the associated Supplier SKU.

— Mike1933, 3 April 2024

Another merchant's name for it has stuck: the "secret hidden sub menu of supplier skus."

What this actually costs

Wrong goods arrive. The most direct consequence, from a merchant in 2024: "the description of the product I use may not match the description the manufacturer or intermediary supplier use and this could lead to the wrong product being supplied."

Typos become permanent. Because every purchase order is retyped by hand, mistakes creep in — and once stored, there is no supported way to fix them. One merchant on Plus described exactly that trap: errors "have inevitably crept into our Supplier SKU field over time and there is currently no way for us to access, edit or manage it in bulk."

Everything gets entered twice. A merchant using a separate purchasing tool: "I have to build the orders twice, once in shopify, once in IP and that leaves gaps for human error." And prices too — updating cost in the bulk editor does not update the copy stored against the supplier, so "I have to remember to go into the supplier and change it manually and individually at that level."

And it blocks migrations. Several merchants have stayed on their old system specifically because of this. One in 2020: "One of the biggest reasons why I haven't switched over is my reliance on supplier codes for much of my inventory." Another with over 10,000 products said the same in 2022. A merchant moving from a different platform put it plainly: "In Sitoo I could have both SKU's but now I have to have a separate excel sheet with one of them."

The bill for solving it elsewhere is large. A small business explained why they were being pushed into a full inventory system:

This is one of the reasons we're being forced to implement a third party solution such as Cin7, Fishbowl or SKUSavvy. […] we're a SMB and we're finding it impossible to implement without spending over $1k/month on apps and third party solutions, on top of what we already pay for Shopify itself. We decided to migrate to Shopify because it was touted as a 'unified' system.

— BGH, 19 February 2026

Being quoted four figures a month for a text field? See what building just that costs →

The Stocky shutdown makes this urgent

Shopify's own free inventory tool, Stocky, has real supplier records — multiple suppliers per product, supplier codes, pack sizes. For years it was the answer staff gave when merchants asked for this. In 2023 a Shopify staff member on the German forum confirmed there was no automatic way to do this natively and pointed at Stocky.

Stocky is being shut down on 31 August 2026, and the designated replacement is the admin purchase order — which has no place to store a supplier code in advance.

If you are on Stocky, that is the situation to plan around: you are moving from a tool that holds this data to one that does not, and the migration content available is mostly written by companies selling the alternative.

Moving off Stocky and losing your supplier codes? See what keeping them looks like →

Where else the code could live, and what each place costs

There are only four places to put a supplier's code, and every article picks one without telling you what it gives up.

Two things worth knowing before you pick.

The metafield route is the best of the four for lookup, and the part everyone omits is that you must tick "use as filter in admin" when you create the definition — without it, staff cannot search by the code. With it, they can. It still will not appear when you raise a purchase order.

The bulk-editing tools cannot help. A merchant checked: the popular bulk-edit tool "does not support Purchase Orders as an importable/exportable entity." And the field is not exposed in Shopify's API either, which is why "just script it" is not an answer — there is nothing to script against.

Thousands of codes and no way to load them? See where they can live instead →

Which route is yours

The last three rows are where merchants have been stuck for six and a half years — the ask has run continuously from January 2020 to July 2026, across nine threads and in two languages, with staff confirming the gap three times and no fix announced.

What they ask for is modest, and consistent. "A second SKU field." "A single spare text field on each product." "A separate SKU and separate price for each Supplier." "A way to see a list of all SKUs for a particular supplier."

A fourth option: keep the codes somewhere you can see

Everything above is a choice between storing the code where you cannot manage it, or storing it where purchasing cannot see it. That is the whole problem in one sentence, and it is not a problem an off-the-shelf app fixes cheaply — the merchants who solved it did so by adding a full inventory system and a bill to match.

The alternative is a small app of your own that does exactly this and nothing else: supplier codes on products and variants, several suppliers per product with their own code and cost, staff search by the supplier's code, bulk import from a spreadsheet, and a purchase order that prints your supplier's numbers rather than yours.

That is ordinary work — product data, a lookup, an export. It is unglamorous, and it is precisely the kind of thing that never becomes a mass-market app because every business's supplier arrangements differ slightly.

Tell Shopivibe what you want your store to do — "keep each supplier’s own code against every product, let staff search by it, and print it on the purchase order" — and it works out how, builds it, and checks it against your own store's data before anything goes live. You see in your Shopify admin, in plain language, what is switched on and what it has done. It stays looked after; there is nothing for you to run.

Early access is open now, and the $49 plan is free for the whole of it.

One limit, stated plainly. No app can write into Shopify's hidden purchase-order store — it is not exposed to anyone, including Shopify's own support team. What a custom app can do is hold the codes properly, make them searchable, and produce the purchase order you actually send to your supplier. If your requirement is specifically "make Shopify's own PO screen auto-fill correctly", nothing available today does that reliably, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Where this is worth it: you have hundreds or thousands of products, more than a handful of suppliers, or the same product sourced from several places. Where it is not: a short catalogue and two suppliers — type it into a purchase order once and let the auto-fill do its job.