Shopify Collabs

Easy to use and just what I needed!!

this is a great program to drive sales!

Shopify doesn't do enough promotion/recruiting to attract high level creators to the Collabs app. Having influencers with larger audiences would make it more of a go-to for brands and creators alike. And solve the "which affiliate platform should we use" dilemma that small brands and creators go through. As a small brand, Collabs is the most affordable, user-friendly way to share profits. Making Collabs the obvious choice should be a priority for Shopify.

Today I realized a fake affiliate with fake reviews on their website was referring traffic. I don't even know how that's possible. It's not ok for Shopify to promote an app that promotes fraudulent content.

Biggest waste of money and resources. Will never use again.

I’ve been using Shopify Collabs with the expectation of partnering with genuine creators to help promote my store and drive sales. Unfortunately, my experience has been far from ideal.

First, I received no email updates or notifications regarding commissions paid or orders generated through referrals. This lack of communication meant that I was completely unaware of how and where these commissions were coming from. By the time I realized what was happening, I had already paid out $648.25 in commissions for orders I never approved and from "creators" that were coupon farming code websites.

It wasn’t immediately clear that these so-called "Creators" were actually discount-farming websites, not influencers promoting my products in good faith. This wasn’t something I could notice easily—I had to spend considerable time investigating the issue deeply on my own to uncover the fact that coupon code sites were essentially hijacking the affiliate program and benefiting from commissions.

This experience has been extremely frustrating, as the Shopify Collabs program was intended to connect merchants with legitimate influencers. Instead, it’s being taken advantage of by bad actors looking to exploit the system. While I appreciate Shopify’s willingness to provide preventive measures for the future, this doesn’t address the financial losses already incurred due to this oversight.

If Shopify had better systems in place to vet creators or provide clear notifications about referral activities, I could have avoided this situation entirely.

Shopify is taking no responsibility for protecting merchants from these issues and is unwilling to refund any of the fraudulent commissions that were paid.

It is a simplified app, easy to use.

Beware!!!! Echoing countless other shop owners, this program allows scammers to promote your products using pre-existing discount codes and then pays them commissions automatically without disclosing it to you. By the time we realized this was happening, we had already paid out hundreds of dollars to "creators" who had never applied to work with our brand and were never approved to earn commissions. The majority of the payments went to a scam website that hosted FAKE reviews of our product. When I brought this to Shopify's attention, they told me that we were at fault for not "catching" the affiliate payments earlier and that there was no recourse to recoup the funds. Furthermore, I am still being charged for additional "affiliate commissions" after completely removing Shopify Collabs from our account and reporting all of this to Shopify Support. Stay away from this app.

Collabs is a great way to launch and manage an affiliate program. It is so complicated to do this without a built in ecosystem, and Shopify provides both the technology platform and community of influencers to activate and scale this capability quickly.

9/3/2024 Update - I had a very nice video call with a Shopify rep. They are genuinely trying to improve this app, which is giving us hope. We're updating our review to 5 stars in hope of a brighter future here!

I don't like writing 1-star reviews, but this app is useless. We spent serious time looking up applicable creators and offered them free $250 products, but had no responses.

Now we're just getting spammed by "beauty" influencers who have zero applicability to us.

It seems like Shopify didn't actually verify any of the creators. They either didn't sign up or are fake accounts looking for free things.