Shopify Collective Supplier Feedback and Suggested Improvements

Shopify Apps
1

After using Shopify Collective as a supplier for approximately three months, I would like to share some feedback and suggestions that I believe could significantly improve the experience for both suppliers and retailers.

1. RETURN POLICY

I believe suppliers should have the ability to establish and clearly display their own return policies within Collective. A supplier’s return policy should not be dictated by the retailer. Instead, retailers should be able to review a supplier’s return policy before choosing to work with that supplier and decide whether those terms are acceptable to them.

Currently, retailers are able to set certain return parameters within Collective, which can create confusion. Retailers may assume that the return settings they select automatically govern their relationship with the supplier, even when the supplier has separately communicated a different return policy by email or through other means.

Allowing suppliers to clearly establish their return policy within Collective would eliminate this ambiguity and help ensure that both parties understand and agree to the terms before conducting business.

2. RETAILER COMMUNICATION & EXPORT

There is currently no convenient way for suppliers to communicate with all of their connected retailers at once. If I need to send an important announcement, policy update, product update, or other information, I have to manually copy and paste each retailer’s email address individually. This becomes extremely time-consuming as the retailer network grows.

I would suggest adding two features:

  • The ability for suppliers to send an email or announcement to all retailers or selected retailers directly through Collective.
  • The ability to export retailer information into a CSV or Excel file, including information such as retailer name, store name, email address, telephone number, website, and other relevant contact information.

These features would make retailer relationship management significantly more efficient for suppliers.

3. PRICE LIST ACCESS & PERMISSIONS

It would be helpful to provide suppliers with more control over how retailers access individual price lists and products.

For example, suppliers should be able to create different levels of access, such as:

  • Public price lists
  • Invitation-only price lists
  • Price lists that require supplier approval before access is granted
  • Price lists available only to selected retailers

This would allow suppliers to better manage which retailers have access to specific brands, products, pricing structures, or collections.

4. EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS / UNSUBSCRIBE OPTIONS

Because some of my price lists are public, I receive an email notification every time a new retailer connects or signs up. As the number of retailers increases, these notifications can quickly overwhelm a supplier’s inbox.

I would appreciate the ability to customize or disable these notifications. Ideally, suppliers should be able to choose which Collective notifications they would like to receive by email.

For example, notification preferences could include:

  • New retailer connections
  • New orders
  • Return requests
  • Retailer messages
  • Product or price-list activity

Providing suppliers with more control over notifications would make it much easier to focus on the communications that actually require attention.

5. “CONTINUE SELLING WHEN OUT OF STOCK” / PRE-ORDER PRODUCTS

Another issue involves products that are set to “Continue selling when out of stock.” This setting can create significant confusion for retailers and their customers, particularly when the retailer’s Shopify theme does not identify the product as a pre-order.

Some of our products are intentionally offered for pre-order before inventory becomes available. In these situations, the product inventory may be set to zero while the “Continue selling when out of stock” option remains enabled so customers are still able to purchase the item.

On our own website, the Shopify theme we use recognizes this setting and changes the “Add to Cart” button to “Pre-Order.” This makes it clear to our customers that the product is not currently in stock and that they are placing a pre-order.

However, this behavior does not necessarily carry over to a retailer’s store through Shopify Collective. Depending on the retailer’s theme, the product may simply display a normal “Add to Cart” button even though the supplier’s inventory is zero and the item is actually being offered as a pre-order.

As a result, the retailer’s customer may reasonably believe that the item is currently in stock and ready to ship when, in reality, it is a pre-order item. The retailer then has to find another way to communicate the product’s actual availability, and they may not even realize that additional communication is necessary.

This can lead to:

  • Customer confusion regarding product availability
  • Incorrect expectations regarding shipping and delivery times
  • Increased customer service inquiries
  • Potential cancellations or disputes
  • Retailers unknowingly representing a pre-order item as being in stock
  • Confusion between the supplier and retailer regarding actual inventory status

I believe Shopify Collective should provide a more standardized way to communicate the supplier’s product availability status to the retailer.

For example, Collective could include a specific “Pre-Order” product status or setting that is transmitted to the retailer along with the product information. Retailers could then clearly see that the item is a pre-order and either automatically display that status on their storefront or receive a warning that their theme may not display the pre-order status correctly.

At minimum, retailers should be clearly notified when:

Supplier inventory = 0
Continue selling when out of stock = Enabled

This would help retailers understand that the product may not actually be available for immediate fulfillment and that additional information may need to be displayed to their customers.

Ideally, Shopify Collective would support a dedicated pre-order field that could communicate information such as:

  • Pre-Order
  • Expected Availability Date
  • Estimated Ship Date
  • Backordered
  • Made to Order
  • Currently In Stock

This would provide much greater transparency between suppliers, retailers, and ultimately the end customer.

Overall, I have found Shopify Collective to be a valuable platform, but I believe these improvements would make it substantially easier for suppliers to manage retailer relationships, establish clear policies, communicate efficiently, control access to their products, and accurately communicate inventory and pre-order availability.

These changes would not only improve the supplier experience but would also help retailers provide more accurate information to their customers and reduce unnecessary confusion, cancellations, and customer service issues.

2

Your pre-order issue is confirmed by Shopify’s current Collective documentation: inventory keeps syncing, but when supplier inventory is 0 and “Continue selling when out of stock” is enabled, the retailer can still sell the item. Shopify’s present guidance is for the supplier to notify the retailer manually and share an expected shipping date, so the missing pre-order meaning you describe is a real workflow gap.

Until there is a native field, the smallest control I can see is an exception list with SKU/variant, connected retailer, inventory = 0, continue-selling = true, expected ship date, and a storefront label check. That would at least identify products that appear available when the supplier means pre-order.

Which is costing you more today: manually communicating with retailers, or cancellations/support caused by the pre-order mismatch?

3

Manually communicating with retailers is costing me valuable time more so than cancellations caused by pre-order mismatch. To remedy the pre-order situation, I had to change all those products that were pre-order to not continue to sell when out of stock. Not ideal, but it was the easiest and quickest solution.

4

That is a useful prioritization. Since you have already disabled continued selling for the pre-order items, the active cost is now maintaining the same operational message across a growing retailer list.

Shopify’s current supplier documentation describes viewing retailer connections and communicating directly with retailers, but I could not find a documented supplier-wide announcement or bulk retailer-export function. I would not assume that a tool can safely automate that inside Collective.

The smallest workable control outside Collective would be:

  • one retailer register: store, contact, assigned price list/brand, and last-verified date
  • one announcement sheet: subject, affected products or policy, and effective date
  • recipient validation plus exclusions
  • a send log and a short non-delivery exception list

The first practical question is whether you already keep the connected retailer emails anywhere outside Collective. If not, the bottleneck is creating a clean initial register, not composing the announcements.

If you want, I can map and test that workflow on a small batch of 10 retailers as a fixed-scope paid setup, using only business contact information you are already permitted to use. It would not require a custom app or retailer-store access.

6

The preorder point looks like the clearest operational gap in this list. Shopify’s current Collective documentation says inventory is always synced, but custom metafields are not imported into the retailer’s store. So a supplier can have a preorder/ETA field that never reaches the retailer, while the inventory state still does. That is exactly how a technically correct sync can create the wrong customer expectation.

Two parts of your list are partly available now, though not in the supplier-controlled form you want:

  • A supplier can create public or private price lists, and a private list can be assigned to selected connected retailers.
  • The retailer’s return-policy rules are visible to the supplier on the connection details page, but the retailer controls those rules; Shopify’s own guidance says differences may need to be negotiated outside Collective.

Until Shopify adds a real preorder status, one bounded workaround is to keep preorder products in a dedicated private price list and put Pre-order — expected [date] at the start of a synced title or description, then have each retailer confirm the storefront label, estimated ship date and cancellation wording before enabling those products. It is manual, but it prevents zero inventory plus continue selling from silently looking like in-stock inventory.

For the communication/export issue, Shopify documents individual retailer points of contact, but I could not find a supplier-side bulk export. Roughly how many connected retailers and preorder SKUs are you managing now? That would show whether the immediate need is mainly a retailer registry/announcement workflow or a product-level preorder exception sheet.

Shopify references:

7

I have submitted these suggestions to a Shopify agent who told me, “I’ll get all five points logged and passed along to the Collective product team. I can’t promise a specific timeline or direct response, but detailed feedback like yours really does make a difference in how the product evolves.”

8

“Roughly how many connected retailers and preorder SKUs are you managing now?”

On average I receive about 10 to 20 requests a day from retailers who sign up. I currently have over 800 retailers that I am connected to, but only about 2% that actually seem to be active and live. But of the 2%, less than 10% have actually sold anything.

9

Those numbers make the bottleneck much clearer. With about 800 connected retailers, roughly 16 active and only a handful with any sales, the immediate problem is not getting more connections; it is seeing where each retailer stalls between connected → products imported → storefront live → first sale.

I would track five non-sensitive fields per retailer: connection date, products imported, storefront live, first order, and current blocker/next action. That separates low-intent connections from retailers worth supporting.

This has crossed into implementation rather than more general advice. I can turn up to 50 retailer records into a one-page activation exception sheet plus a reusable tracker—no Shopify admin access required. Fixed scope: USD 79, delivered within 48 hours after receiving the fields. It cannot guarantee retailer sales, but it will show which connections are inactive, blocked, or ready for follow-up.

If that would help, reply here and I’ll send the exact input columns and payment request.