There are four serious consignment and vendor payout apps on the Shopify App Store, and they differ more in price than in capability: roughly $30 to $600 a month depending on how many vendors you have and whether you need a full marketplace. This compares them on what is verifiable — ratings, review volume, certification and published pricing, checked on 12 September 2026 — and on the questions that actually decide the choice. We publish one of them, which is declared below rather than hidden.
The four, as their listings stand
| App | Rating | Reviews | Built for Shopify | Published pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi Vendor — Puppet Vendors | 4.8 | 125 | Yes | $49 / $119 / $249 / $599 |
| Vendor Payout — Consignment | 4.9 | 45 | No | $30 / $70 / $150 |
| CollabPay: Multi Vendor Payout | 3.5 | 26 | Yes | $40 / $60 / $80 |
| Payvenda (ours) | 4.5 | 3 | No | Free / $40 / $80 |
Read those numbers carefully, because two of them are about us and neither flatters.
Payvenda has three reviews. Puppet Vendors has 125 and Vendor Payout has 45. A 4.5 average across three reviews tells you almost nothing statistically, and a merchant choosing on evidence should weigh 125 reviews far more heavily than three. That is the correct way to read it.
Payvenda is not Built for Shopify certified. Puppet Vendors and CollabPay are. The badge is Shopify's own assessment of performance, design and integration standards, and its absence is a real gap rather than a formality.
What Payvenda has that the others do not is a free tier — five vendors and twenty synced orders a month — which matters for a specific reason covered below.
The question that sorts them: marketplace or payouts?
These apps split into two jobs that get described with the same words.
A payout tool assumes you run the store. You hold the stock or the listings, you fulfil, and the app works out what each vendor is owed and helps you pay it. That is consignment in the traditional sense.
A marketplace platform assumes vendors run their own corner of your store — their own products, sometimes their own fulfilment, their own shipping rates. That is a bigger piece of software and it is priced accordingly.
Puppet Vendors sits at the marketplace end, which its pricing reflects. If you need vendors managing their own listings and shipping, that capability costs what it costs. If you have twelve local makers whose stock sits on your shelves, you are paying for a platform you will not use.
Work out which you are before comparing prices, because the cheapest marketplace platform will still cost more than the right payout tool.
What the price actually buys
Every one of these prices by vendor count, order volume, or both. So the comparison is not "$30 versus $49" — it is what each costs at your vendor count.
Before looking at any pricing page, write down:
- How many vendors you have now, and realistically in a year.
- How many orders a month contain a vendor's product.
- Whether you need a vendor portal, or a monthly statement is enough.
The third is where tiers tend to break. A portal is usually a paid-tier feature across all of these, so a store that only needs statements may be paying for the tier that includes one.
The five questions that decide it
Listings answer none of these directly, and each is worth asking in a trial or a pre-sales email.
1. What happens to commission when an order is refunded? The failure that costs real money. Ask specifically about a refund arriving after a payout has been made, and whether the adjustment carries into the next period as a visible line. Why this matters in detail.
2. Is commission calculated with the rate that applied on the order date? Change a vendor's rate, then open a statement from before the change. If the numbers moved, historical payouts cannot be reconstructed when a vendor queries one.
3. Can one order hold several vendors' products? Normal in consignment, and it forces decisions about allocating order-level discounts and shipping. An app treating an order as one vendor will be wrong the first time a customer buys from two makers.
4. What exactly can a vendor see? Their own sales and payouts, or more? Customer names and addresses should not be visible unless the vendor ships the item themselves.
5. Does it export? Your accountant will ask for gross, your share, vendor share, refunds and tax by vendor. "It is in the dashboard" is not an answer.
Payment rails, and what no app can do
One capability difference is real and worth understanding, because it is easy to read as a gap when it is not.
CollabPay's listing describes payouts via Stripe or PayPal — the app initiates the transfer. Others calculate what is owed and leave you to move the money.
That sounds like a clear win for the first, and sometimes it is. But moving money on a merchant's behalf is regulated, so an integrated payout means routing through a payment provider with its own onboarding, fees and country coverage. Three practical consequences:
- Your vendors have to be payable on that rail. A maker without a Stripe account, or in an unsupported country, still needs a bank transfer.
- There is a fee per payout, on top of the subscription. On small monthly payouts that can be a meaningful share.
- Failures become your problem in a new way. A rejected transfer inside an app is harder to diagnose than one your bank rejected.
For a store paying twenty vendors by bank transfer once a month from a list, calculation is the hard part and payment is ten minutes. For one paying two hundred creators worldwide, integrated rails are the reason to choose an app. Know which you are before treating it as the deciding feature.
How to test properly
Whichever you shortlist, run one full payout period in parallel with your existing spreadsheet and reconcile the two before trusting either.
That parallel run is the whole reason a free tier matters. Five vendors and twenty orders is enough to catch the things nobody anticipates — an unassigned product, an order split across two vendors, a rate changed mid-month — while the volume is small enough to check by hand. On apps whose lowest tier is $30 to $49, the parallel run costs a month's subscription.
That is the honest argument for Payvenda's free plan, and it is narrower than it sounds: it makes evaluation cheap. It does not make the app better than one with 125 reviews.
What we would tell you to do
Given the numbers at the top, the honest guidance:
- Running a real marketplace, vendors managing their own listings and fulfilment? Puppet Vendors is built for that and has the review volume to back it.
- Consignment, and you want the most-reviewed dedicated payout tool? Vendor Payout has 45 reviews at 4.9 and the lowest entry price of the paid options.
- Want to test the workflow against your own data before committing? Start on Payvenda's free tier, run the parallel period, and then choose — including choosing something else.
A comparison written by a vendor that concludes "buy ours" is worth nothing. The parallel-run test costs you a month and settles it on your own numbers rather than on anybody's article.
A note on these figures
Ratings, review counts and pricing were read from each app's live App Store listing on 12 September 2026. All of them change. Before deciding, open the listings — the numbers there are authoritative and this page is not.
We have deliberately not compared feature checklists, because those go stale fastest and because an app's own listing is not a reliable source for what a feature does in practice. The five questions above are the ones to ask directly.
Where to go next
If you have not yet settled how commission should be calculated — what the percentage applies to, and who bears discounts — do that before choosing a tool: tracking vendor commission accurately. The full setup is in the consignment and vendor payouts guide.
