Shopify Collective

I’ve experienced several issues with different distributors that have resulted in being charged taxes twice. Because of this, I made no profit on some sales, and on one order I actually lost money.

When I import products, Collective shows that I will make a certain profit. However, after the order is placed, I’m automatically charged taxes twice, along with additional shipping costs that were not disclosed beforehand. As a result, the final costs are higher than the expected profit shown during the import process.

Collective should address this issue by providing accurate cost estimates upfront and ensuring that all taxes and additional charges are clearly displayed before products are imported or sold. Otherwise, sellers can end up losing money on orders they believed would be profitable.

We think Shopify Collective is a fantastic initiative and we're really looking forward to using it more across our store. The ability to connect directly with suppliers and streamline inventory, ordering and fulfilment within Shopify has a lot of potential and could save retailers a significant amount of time.

One feature we would really love to see added is the ability to link or map a supplier's Collective product and variants to an existing product/PDP already established on the retailer's store, rather than having to import it as an entirely new product.

For established retailers, this is incredibly important. We may already have a product page that has been live for a long time with its own URL, SEO history, Google indexing, customer reviews, analytics, custom content, imagery, bundles, upsells and conversion optimisation.

It can also have a major impact on currently running paid advertising.

For example, we may have established Meta/Facebook and Instagram campaigns sending traffic directly to an existing product URL, with substantial historical performance data behind those campaigns. Having to replace that product with a newly imported Collective listing and potentially a new URL can disrupt those campaigns and creates unnecessary risk for retailers transitioning an existing successful product into Collective.

The same applies to Google Shopping feeds, email campaigns, backlinks and other channels that may already reference the existing product.

Ideally, retailers could select an existing Shopify product and simply map the supplier's Collective product variants/SKUs to their corresponding existing variants. Collective could then manage inventory syncing, supplier ordering and fulfilment in the background while allowing the retailer to keep their existing customer-facing PDP, URL and marketing infrastructure intact.

This would be particularly valuable for businesses like ours that already have established supplier relationships and existing products, and simply want to transition the operational side of those relationships into Shopify Collective.

Overall, we think Collective is a great initiative and we're excited to use it. Adding the ability to connect Collective supplier products to existing retailer products would remove a significant barrier to adoption and make an already promising platform considerably more useful for established Shopify merchants.

Everything is great except the shipping costs need to be passed on to the brands and need to be able to partner with interantionally brands that are on shopify