What is Shopify Collective?
Shopify Collective is a Shopify-native feature that lets one store sell another store's inventory. There are two roles:
Supplier store — owns the inventory (your artist or label store).
Retailer store — makes the sale to the customer (a partner storefront, like a media brand or retailer running a music drop).
When a fan buys through Collective, the order is placed on the retailer's store. The supplier fulfills it, but the full customer record stays with the retailer.
How Collective affects reporting
Single needs complete customer data at the point of purchase to determine chart eligibility. Collective passes some data back to the supplier, but not all of the fields Single requires to verify a sale and report it to chart partners like Luminate. So if Single is only installed on the supplier side, most of those sales fall short of eligibility and can't be reported.
The requirement
For Shopify Collective sales to report, Single must be installed on the retailer's store — the storefront actually making the sale. If you also sell the album direct on your own store, you'll want it set up for reporting there too so those sales report. But the retailer-side install is what unlocks reporting for Collective orders specifically.
How to set this up
Active Collective partnership? Ask your retailer to install the Single app on their Shopify store and set the album up for reporting there.
Planning a new Collective partnership? Make the Single install part of the partner conversation up front.
Also selling via your own store? Set the album up for reporting there too. If you only sell it through Collective, set it up in the retailer's account only.
Common questions
What if I'm also selling the album on my own store?
If the album is set up for reporting on both stores, we report sales from both. Direct sales report from your store, and Collective sales report from the retailer's.
Your store also gets its own copy of every Collective order, and those copies can report too. Each one carries the retailer's billing address, so together they count as a single buyer and are capped at 4 units per reporting week. This means a small number of Collective sales can be counted twice.
If you only sell the album through Collective, set it up for reporting in the retailer's account only. That way each sale reports once.
Which price is reported for Collective orders?
Sales that report from the retailer's store use the price the fan paid. Any Collective orders that report from your store use the wholesale price on your order, since Shopify doesn't share the retail price with the supplier. A wholesale price below the chart price minimum won't report.
What happens to past Collective sales that weren't reported?
Past sales captured on the retailer's store before Single was installed generally can't be reconciled retroactively. Make sure the retailer's setup is in place before release week.
Why doesn't Shopify pass the customer data back to the supplier?
That's how Collective is built — the retailer owns the customer relationship for orders made on their store, so the supplier only gets a partial record. It's not something we can work around from the supplier side.