Shopify 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.

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.

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.

We rely heavily on Collective to curate the right pieces for our Shopify store. We appreciate the Discovery options that allow us to collaborate with and support other small business owners while maintaining our brand aesthetic. It is a pleasure to network with other creatives and expand brand awareness for both our store and our suppliers.

One area for improvement involves the customer experience during fulfillment. It would be very helpful if, when a customer purchases an imported product from our store, the supplier could include a thank you card or other recognition from our brand. This would help prevent customer confusion regarding the shipment's origin and encourage repeat business for our store. Also to note, when products are imported to our store and the supplier is "not eligible" to use Collective, it creates a sudden need to draft or refund orders for products that customers have placed. This does not give our customers confidence to return as repeat customers.

Overall, we truly enjoy and appreciate the option to participate in Collective and plan to expand our brand in the Collective community.

Absolute Garbage payout nightmare!!!!! If your a small business and do not hold enough capital in bank account then FORGET THIS APP! Shopify pulls out the total sale capital first , then puts it back into your account. So if you sell a item worth $2k you better have $2k in your bank account before hand. They should be handing the sale money over to supplier first, then providing you with your commission from the sale directly bank account. Otherwise your left with them continuingly pulling account weather money is there not causing several NSF fees to your business. ABSOLUTE RUBBISH!!!

process is fairly simple. Biggest problem is it takes many suppliers way too long to ship. We are up against super fast shipping from many sites.

So far we like the smooth experience. However, the main fears that give us jitters are:
- There is no way to contact Collective directly.
- Some suppliers do not respond to emails on time when a product query comes. This results in loss of sales.
- Returns are handled by Collective, but when we want to stop returns and give the customer a convincing response to avoid the return, it is impossible as neither the suppliers respond nor Collective.

Love it! However, beware that if you add several brands you will quickly run out of media file storage and images will stop showing up. We've also been using an image compression app which helped a little but now we've hit their limit. It doesn't quite make sense that as a Shopify app, only connecting Shopify stores where the brands' images are hosted on their own site that it would affect our media limits. It seems like a huge area for improvement on Shopify to correct this. Otherwise, it's an amazing app and possibly the new wholesale procurement route - seamless and beneficial to all.

As a long time user, Many features are clearly experimental with varying degrees of performance or function.

AWFUL. Absolutely zero understanding from Shopify on how UK VAT and Tax works. Listing collective suppliers that offer 10% margin on goods, yet really there charging you 10% to sell there product! So yeah amazing business model, losing money for selling suppliers products because at the last minute they add 20% vat onto the charge to the retailer. What on earth is going on. Its disgusting that they have no solution in place for this. Sam Hampton of shopify support suggested we paid for a bulk editor like "Matrixify" or "Bulk Price Editor" that might be able to solve the issue. So shopifys are basically telling you collective in the UK is a broken model. I cannot believe they have not fixed this issue and automatically added 20% on the price to any store that is collecting tax.

In response to Shopify response -
I can confirm this issue is not resolved, you built this with USA in mind and not the UK. Its a mess. Fix it.