Shopify Collective: Supplier

This is an incredibly powerful tool that I wish more retailers and suppliers would utilize. Aside from a few manual processes, its primarily plug and play. If Shopify was to focus on one improvement I suggest creating a retailer level output that shows you which items they have published from your price list. This output could be in either csv or Excel formats.

They need to add different fulfillment locations so that you can toggle where it is coming from. This way, the app could be used for consignment at Boutiques or for shared/showroom style pop ups.

Shipping options need to be fixed! The shipping payments CAN NOT be calculated based on what the retailer website charges or does not charge for shipping to an end consumer because those rules are based on end user pricing rules, whereas all things on Collective are based on WHOLESALE rules! Therefore different shipping rules need to be coded within Collective to allow all of us to set such rules otherwise we have to do 'manual', and that defeats the entire purpose of Collective in taking the 'work' out of suppliers and retailers.

Collective is an absolute super duper app. I love how easy it is to set up. I have connected with so many retailers who are now selling my products on their websites. I am connected to some super prominent patriotic stores who use Collective as well through whom I get many orders. It is also so nice to be able to reach out to the retailers and introduce myself. There is no hassle if you have to disconnect your store or there disconnect from you. Thank you for making this app free for suppliers and retailers. It really helps us suppliers who are solo entrepreneurs.

The app is great overall, but there a a few things that could be improved:
1) If you use a third party app to calculate shipping rates, you cannot pass the shipping prices to your retailers' stores.

2) Because our shipping rates are not passed to the retailer's store, we charge that after the order has been sent to us. We aren't able to edit Collective orders so we handle this outside of Shopify.

3) If you have products set to "continue selling when out of stock" like we do, the retailer will also have that enabled and they won't be able to change it. They'll need to find some other way to notify customers about the actual product status. Our products are Made to Order when they are out of stock, so we have them set to "continue selling when out of stock" but this is not ideal for some retailers.

We make sure our retailers are aware of this before we approve them on Collective.

This is mostly great. The problems are as follows:

- Being able to limit ship from locations by retailer (we have a Canadian and USA warehouse and don't want to cross-border ship)
- product offering able to be selected down to the variant level

it would be nice to be able to use shopify catalogs to add products, or a specific collection, or even just a tag. Having to manually add products to this, when we're already tagging them and adding them to catalogs is an extra step.

We also have some "free shipping over $xxx" that doesn't integrate with this.

Other than that, it's pretty seamless and easy to use.

We installed this App several months ago with public price lists so other merchants can list our products.
However no other merchants - apart from 1-2 - have ever applied to list our products, and so what is the point?
This is not the universal marketplace promised by Shopify, and yet it could be a major driver of sales if developed to optimise sales.

This sales channel is terrible, and so is the Collective app. In the app, the tags and metafields on the products that get shared with you, don't come through. So I have to add some kind of categorization MYSELF, on someone else's items, which is ridiculous when there are hundreds or thousands of items shared over. Also, in the Collective sales channel, when selecting products to share, the search can't be done by sku. It also can't be done by whether the item is active or draft and whether it has inventory or is at zero. The other HUGE issue in the Collective app is that if you elect to have items shared with you in Draft status, even if you put them in Active status, every time the other supplier updates their item, it comes back through as Draft. So then you have to figure that out and reactivate them. Which means I'm now babysitting another supplier's whole catalog, on top of my own. And a Shopify Flow doesn't work, because there are some items we don't want automatically turned back to Active. Please Shopify, make this whole concept easier to use!!

I have updated my review, the concept is great and that's why I updated the review. But the work is half done. The shipping has to be figured out. I just got the order and now I am supposed to chase after the other business for shipping cost. Send invoices and such, make sure what setting they have. You can choose "calculated shipping" but it does absolutely nothing!!!! You can send invoices for the shipping cost, but if the other store doesn't reply or doesn't see your invoice, then what? You hold off on shipping and you get ding for late shipping. Also, now you need another app to send invoices or you going to have shipping as orders? That's insane