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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Die Idee hinter dieser App bzw. dem gesamten System ist grundsätzlich interessant, in der Praxis sehe ich jedoch einige deutliche Nachteile.

Das größte Problem sind die Versandkosten: Bestellt ein Kunde sowohl eigene Produkte als auch importierte Artikel anderer Lieferanten, fallen oft doppelte Versandkosten an. Das sorgt schnell für Unzufriedenheit beim Kunden. Die einzige Alternative besteht darin, die zusätzlichen Versandkosten in den Verkaufspreis einzurechnen – dadurch werden die Produkte jedoch häufig zu teuer und verlieren ihre Wettbewerbsfähigkeit.

Hinzu kommt, dass die Margen in vielen Fällen ohnehin sehr gering sind. Kunden vergleichen Preise heute sehr genau und merken schnell, wenn ein Produkt deutlich teurer angeboten wird als anderswo. Dadurch wird es schwierig, dauerhaft profitabel zu arbeiten.

Außerdem entsteht der Eindruck, dass viele der angebundenen Lieferanten selbst lediglich Zwischenhändler oder weitere Dropshipper sind. Dadurch wird die Lieferkette unnötig verlängert und die Kalkulation noch schwieriger. Manche Lieferanten mit identischem Angebot wie ich verlangen das 3 bis 4fache meiner Verkaufspreise ohne einen Mehrwert. Wie soll man da kalkulieren?

Meiner Meinung nach wäre das System deutlich attraktiver, wenn verstärkt direkte Hersteller eingebunden würden, anstatt weitere Zwischenhändler.

Viel Arbeit für nichts eigentlich.

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!!!