Shopify Collective

Shopify Collective is a great tool overall and makes it easier to connect with suppliers. However, there are some limitations that make it a bit frustrating. For cross-border stores, automatic payments aren’t supported, which really limits the ability to sell in the U.S. Some suppliers either don’t accept alternative payment methods or don’t understand how to work around this issue, which slows things down.

Also, when searching for suppliers, the platform mostly shows local options. It would be much more useful if there was a simple way to filter or select suppliers by country or region, especially when you’re looking to expand internationally.

Overall it's been great but some of my requests to vendors have gone unanswered for months making me wonder if Shopify is doing enough to actually get vendors to accept new storefronts. Nothing I can do on my end either short of reaching out to the vendor directly which negates a lot of the convenience of the platform.

Shopify Collective is a good app if you want to complement your store with products from other stores, as it simplifies cross-store integration. However, the risk for retailers is often much higher than the actual benefits.
Retailers can face chargebacks for mistakes made by suppliers, which feels unfair since these issues are outside of their control.

Additionally, some suppliers offer very low margins—sometimes even less than what they’d pay out for referrals—making it difficult to justify the effort.
Retailers also end up handling a large volume of customer inquiries and negative reviews caused by factors such as slow fulfillment and delayed dispatch, even though these problems originate directly from the suppliers.

Overall, while the app has potential, the imbalance of responsibility between retailers and suppliers makes it a challenging tool to use profitably.

It's unfortunate that suppliers don't take in account that retailers have to take responsibility for payment processing fee's on the total order, when determining the commission fee for selling their products. Because the commission fee is only given on the item total, not the total order. In most cases retailers are losing money when a product is sold, especially when shipping cost is added! We have had to delete many suppliers for this reason alone. Payment processing fee should be added automatically to the commission. This is suppose to be a win/win for both parties and it's not. RETAILERS BEWARE OF THIS!

We need the ability to modify retails (like with Synclogic). Collective has room for improvement - need to be able to better sort items to import especially from larger catalogs. It would also be great if the Shopify tags would import over, too.

We are loving Collective at The Mayfair Hall.
Suggestions:
-Be able to sort products that are available to import from current vendors (new to old for example).

Love it overall. But more functions are needed. It would be nice if there was a feature to filter out listings that have no inventory.

Good. Would love the ability to sort imported products i.e. newest to oldest or low to high

It's great. Wish there were a way to nudge vendors who have not responded to requests.