Shopify Collective

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

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.

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!!!

The best application to grow and support small business

Fastest way to add product with no upfront costs!

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.

great

Works great if you partner with the right people

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.

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.