Shopify Collective

Why is the burden of onboarding and convincing other merchants to use Collective falling entirely on us? Shopify should be actively promoting this feature and driving merchant adoption. When I reach out to potential partners, I'm frequently met with skepticism. One merchant explicitly asked how they could verify I was a real business and not a scammer. Others have told me they immediately delete Collective invitations from unfamiliar stores out of distrust.

Shopify, you’ve built a tool with massive potential to benefit your merchants, but the lack of platform-level backing and verification makes it incredibly hard to use. You need to step up the education, marketing, and security trust-marks so we don't have to do all the heavy lifting.

Tatjana L
4:54 pm
Hi Ahmet,

I wanted to reach out to you directly to let you know where we're at with your Collective shipping issue.

I'm still actively working on this. I've escalated your case to our Collective team and I'm waiting for their response to confirm exactly what happened with your shipping configuration and why Crystal Quest's shipping rates weren't displaying to your customers.

I know you're waiting — and I know this is costing you real money. The $274 loss you've already absorbed in shipping costs, plus the investment you made in Shop campaigns to drive those sales in the first place, is a significant hit to your business. You trusted Shopify Collective to work as advertised, and instead you've been losing money on every order. I completely understand why you used the word "scam" — when you're told you'll have a 20% margin and you end up losing $40 instead of making $70, that feels like a betrayal of trust.

You were right to be furious. This shouldn't have happened. You set up Collective in good faith, ran campaigns to drive sales for your supplier's products, and the platform failed to pass shipping costs through to your customers. That's on us to investigate and explain.

Here's what I'm pushing the Collective team to confirm:
Why the supplier's "calculated at checkout" shipping rates didn't display to your customers, causing them to check out at $0 shipping
Whether this is a known configuration issue with Collective shipping profiles or a bug in how supplier rates flow through
What the proper configuration should be so this stops happening immediately on future orders
Whether there's any path to recovering the $274 you've already lost — I told you in chat that Shopify can't reverse payments already transferred to Crystal Quest, but I want the Collective team to review whether there are any exceptions or supplier dispute mechanisms available in cases like this where the platform didn't work as expected

I don't have answers yet, but I'm not letting this fall through the cracks. The moment I receive a response from the Collective team, I will update you — you won't have to chase me. I will come to you.

In the meantime, please don't uninstall the Collective app yet. I know you're frustrated and ready to walk away, but if you remove the app before we finish investigating, it may make it harder for our team to review your shipping configuration and order history. I need you to trust me for just a little longer so we can get this fully documented and understood.

I know "I'm still checking" isn't the update you wanted, but I wanted to make sure you knew this case is still active, still a priority, and I'm personally staying on top of it until we have real answers for you.

Thank you for your patience, Ahmet. I'll be back in touch as soon as I have findings from the Collective team.


Best regards,

Tatjana
Money Support Specialist
Shopify
Tatjana L
1:21 pm
Hi Ahmet,

I have answers for you.

I've received confirmation from our Collective team about exactly what went wrong with your shipping configuration, and I want to walk you through it clearly so you understand what happened, why it happened, and how to fix it going forward.

Your store has a flat shipping rate configured in your shipping settings (Settings > Shipping > Delivery profile). This flat rate setting is overriding Crystal Quest's calculated shipping rates at checkout.

Here's what that means in practice:
Your customers are seeing free shipping (or a very low flat rate) at checkout
Crystal Quest is still shipping directly to your customers and charging you their actual shipping costs ($7.95–$122.50 per order)
You're paying the full supplier shipping cost while collecting $0 from customers
Result: You're absorbing 100% of the shipping cost on every Collective order

This is why you lost $274 across those five orders. Your customers paid nothing for shipping, but you still owed Crystal Quest the full amount they paid to ship those orders.

I'm genuinely sorry this happened to you, Ahmet. You were right to call this out.

To ensure your customers are charged Crystal Quest's actual shipping rates at checkout (so you stop absorbing these costs), you need to change your shipping configuration from "Flat rate" to "App calculated shipping."

Here's how:
Go to Settings > Shipping > Delivery profiles
Find the delivery profile that includes your Collective products (likely your default profile)
Click into that profile
Under shipping rates, remove the flat rate you currently have configured
Enable "App calculated shipping" or ensure "Display all available supplier rates" is turned on in your Collective Retailer app settings

Once you do this, Crystal Quest's calculated shipping rates will automatically display to your customers at checkout, and they'll pay the actual shipping cost instead of $0. You'll stop losing money on every order.

I've included a direct link to your shipping profile settings here for convenience:
Your Shipping Profile

I need to be honest with you about this part. The shipping amounts that were debited from your account ($7.95, $14.95, $29.95, $122.50, and ~$99) were already transferred to Crystal Quest to reimburse them for the shipping costs they paid when they fulfilled and shipped those orders to your customers.

Shopify cannot reverse or refund those payments because they've already been paid out to your supplier. Any reimbursement or compensation for those past losses would need to be negotiated directly with Crystal Quest. I know that's not the answer you wanted, and I wish I could tell you something different.

What I can tell you is this: you have every right to contact Crystal Quest and explain what happened. You were operating under the assumption that your customers were being charged for shipping, you were not aware of the configuration issue, and you absorbed $274 in costs that should have been passed through to buyers. Whether they're willing to reimburse you or issue a credit is up to them, but you absolutely have grounds to ask.

What happens now:
Immediate action: Update your shipping configuration using the steps above to stop this from happening on future orders
Verify the fix: Place a test Collective order or ask a friend to check out—you should see Crystal Quest's calculated shipping rates displaying at checkout now
Contact Crystal Quest: Reach out to them directly about the $274 loss and request reimbursement or credit

I know you said you were ready to delete the Collective app, and I completely understand why. If you decide Collective isn't worth the risk after this experience, that's a valid business decision and I respect it. But if you're willing to give it one more shot with the correct shipping configuration in place, you should finally see the 20% margins you were promised.

I'm truly sorry this happened, Ahmet. Thank you for your patience while we investigated this, and thank you for being honest about how angry you were—that feedback matters, and I've made sure it's been heard by our Collective team.


Best regards,

Tatjana
Money Support Specialist
Shopify

Ahmet Kara
2:28 pm
some how you are making shopify collective app mistake mine thats not acceptable by any means. Shopify collective suppose to have their rates overriding my current setup which they failed to do so. how is this my problem why am i forking the $274 loss whis is not small amout. Im deleting collective to never to be used ever again

It's great, but it needs some work on product categories and on making communication links between the collective and the collective supplier easier.

This app is great overall and has helped us increase sales with new products that we otherwise would never have been able to sell.

But there is a massive bug in this app that FORCES products to enable "sell when out of stock". Even though suppliers are sending 0 in stock for items, this app allows customers to still purchase!! It's incredibly frustrating to not give us the option to turn this off for Collective products!

It needs an easier way to see what is out of stock before importing and notifications of price changes when sync is off.

I like my products to be in whole numbers which requires sync to be off, but when major price changes happen, I don't see that.

We love using Shopify Collective to source new products for Casual Chic Shop! Payment and inventory management is handled seamlessly on the backend making it super easy compared to other dropshipping platforms.

I love the opportunity to add more product options for my customers. It really fills the gaps of products that I am not able to carry myself especially high value and consumable products. I am on both sides of collective as a vendor and user. However collective needs to hold the suppliers responsible more. I have run into this issue a few times now and just had a big one with one of the suppliers who had thousands of products listed that I added to my store. These were all products that my customers were very interested in and I spent over a week adding all the products, featuring them on my website and creating collections for them. I started selling them and the vendor filled the first order and then rapidly refused to fulfill several orders in a row. I messaged them and they basically said they didn't want to be on collective any more (the brand was still available but did eventually get removed). I then had to message multiple customers the reason why their orders were cancelled and I had to pay the credit card processing fees.
I strongly feel that if a brand chooses to be a part of collective they should be required to fulfill all orders (unless they run out of product) and should be required to pay any and all fees when they cancel an order on their end. I would also love to see a little accountability where they sign on to be a part of collective for a set amount of time. I spent so much time integrating things on my site and it was beyond frustrating that a week after I added them I had to delete everything.
I also had a customer try to do a return and collective gave me two different instructions as to how the return was handled and I ended up having to google search it because the instructions were not correct and I gave the customer a refund (because collective said it was approved and that was the next step) not realizing it was my responsibility to contact the vendor to request a refund and then I was responsible for forwarding a shipping label email to the customer.
As a vendor on collective I have had a few sales, but nothing too exciting. A lot of random fake stores add your products and then are closed shortly after.

They don't allow us to write proper reviews on Suppliers. Majority of the suppliers don't respond to your emails especially when they are supposed to fulfill return labels. Suppliers can also cancel your customers orders without giving any context. I strongly advise not to use collective

Collective is a gamechanger for our small business. Having access to so many great products without having to stock them in house, really helps us financially. The process is quick and easy. The margins are great as well. Definitely recommend giving it a try if you are a small business working on a tight budget.

Great way to get more exposure for your products as a supplier and also a great way to expand your offerings without having to store inventory as a seller.