Managing Shopify Collective orders

After a customer places an order in your store, you and your supplier receive an order in your Shopify stores. Your supplier needs to fulfill the order and you don't need to fulfill the order yourself.

When a supplier fulfills an order, that order is also fulfilled in your store with the order fulfillment details, such as a tracking number. Your customer receives a shipping confirmation email notification from your store instead of supplier's store.

Capturing payments for Shopify Collective orders

Depending on how you capture payments for your Shopify Collective orders, your order fulfillment method for Shopify Collective orders might vary:

• If you capture payments for your orders automatically, then after the order on your store is paid, an automatic fulfilment request is created for your supplier.
• If you capture payments for your orders manually or use a sales channel that doesn't capture payments until an order is fulfilled, then you have to request fulfillment for Shopify Collective products in an order from your supplier. To request order fulfillment, click Request fulfillment > Send fulfillment request in your order.

If you use Shopify Collective automatic payments, then you're charged for Shopify Collective products as soon as you request fulfillment regardless whether your order is marked as paid.

Help prevent fraudulent orders reaching suppliers

Orders are created on supplier stores when they're marked as Paid, a two-minute period has passed and the order isn't on hold. The delay allows your fraud checks and automations time to run in the background. During this window, you can cancel or hold fulfillment for any suspicious orders manually, or using automation tools such as Shopify Flow.

After a hold is created on a fulfillment, if the hold is released, then the order will be created on the supplier store.

If the fulfillment isn't cancelled or put on hold within 2 minutes, then the order will be created on the supplier store.

Managing returns for Shopify Collective orders

To learn about using policies for managing your returns processes, refer to Setting up returns policies in the Shopify Collective app.

Cancel Shopify Collective orders

You can request to cancel a Shopify Collective order when the order's status is Fulfillment in progress. You can't request to cancel already fulfilled orders. After you request to cancel an order, an email is sent to the supplier to cancel the order. A supplier might not proceed with an order cancellation if they already processed the order.

If a supplier cancels a Shopify Collective order, then your order status changes to Request declined and a reason of cancellation is displayed.

When using automatic payments, Shopify Collective automatically cancels the order:

• Immediately if payment has not yet been taken when you request cancelation
• After 14 days if payment was taken when you requested cancelation, but the supplier did not ship the order

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Orders.

2. Click the order that you want to request to cancel.

3. In the Fulfilled section next to the item that you want to request to cancel, click ..., and then click Request cancellation.

4. Optional: Enter a note for the supplier, such as why you're requesting to cancel this order.

5. Click Request cancellation.

Refunding Shopify Collective orders

To issue a refund to your customer, you need to cancel the order in your own Shopify admin. You can cancel Shopify Collective orders the same way as you cancel your other orders in your Shopify admin. For more information, refer to Canceling, archiving and deleting orders.

To request a refund from your supplier:

• If both you and your supplier have activated automatic payments on Collective, then the funds are transferred to you automatically after the supplier initiates the refund process.
• If the automatic payments feature isn't activated between you and your supplier, then the supplier needs to manually send the funds to you, and inform you about the refund transfer process.

Running flash sales through Shopify Collective

Shopify Collective can power flash sales, protecting against inventory overselling or underselling during the given high traffic period. Retailers can sell imported products from suppliers with confidence at a rate of up to 6,100 checkouts per minute.

At checkout, Collective performs several checks against the latest stock information, to support high volume sales.