Big Cartel Review 2024: Pricing, Pros & Cons

Big Cartel is a value-priced e-commerce platform developed to help artists and artisans build simple yet effective online stores. Forbes recently included Big Cartel on its list of best e-commerce platforms; Big Cartel was named the best e-commerce platform for creatives.

The Big Cartel platform doesn’t have all the advanced bells and whistles that other top e-commerce providers offer. Still, Big Cartel delivers all the fundamentals you need to build a functional and attractive online presence for your creative business. Even better, Big Cartel makes it easy to get your site up and running quickly.

Pros

• User-friendly: Big Cartel’s intuitive dashboard and simple setup make it extremely easy to build an online store.
• Great value: Even the top-tier Big Cartel plan is more affordable than entry-level plans from other top e-commerce competitors, including Shopify and BigCommerce.
• Free templates: All Big Cartel design templates are free.
• Sales flexibility: You can sell online or in-person with Big Cartel, and you can sell physical or digital products.
• Custom domain: Paid plans can use a custom domain.
• Mobile apps: Big Cartel offers iOS and Android mobile apps that allow you to manage and monitor sales for your online store on the go.

Cons

• Low product caps: While many e-commerce providers such as Shopify allow unlimited products, Big Cartel caps out at 500 on its top-tier plan, and the free plan only lets you promote five products.
• Missing advanced features: Big Cartel doesn’t have advanced built-in features such as shipping calculation by product weight, abandoned cart recovery, the ability to sell services and memberships, and blogging capabilities.
• Minimal SEO tools: Big Cartel is only so-so on SEO.
• Limited customizability: Currently, Big Cartel has less than 20 design templates, and site customization is relatively limited.

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Big Cartel is a simple e-commerce platform with an intuitive editor that lets you build a website quickly. Choose from three plans, which vary in price based on the number of products you want to sell.

When you register for an account, Big Cartel gives you a Getting Started Checklist that walks you step-by-step through store setup. Once you’ve verified your location and currency, connected to a payment processor, set up shipping, chosen a design template and added products, you’re ready to launch your online store. You can track your orders in real time and view site performance via your personal Big Cartel dashboard.

When purchasing an e-commerce website builder, it’s important to confirm that your chosen solution delivers the specific features you require for your business. Big Cartel offers essential features, including payment processing, discount codes, basic shipping and site performance analysis tools.

You won’t need technical or coding experience to build a website with Big Cartel. Easy-to-implement design templates and a simple editor make Big Cartel one of the least complicated e-commerce website builders available today.

Intuitive User Dashboards

Even true beginners with minimal technical skills will find the Big Cartel dashboard easy to use. You can manage your entire website by navigating the five icons at the top of your personal Big Cartel dashboard.

Payment Processing

Big Cartel does not come with a built-in payment processor. You’ll be prompted to select a payment processor when setting up your Big Cartel store. You have two options for accepting payments: Stripe or PayPal. If you want to sell subscriptions—which is currently in beta—you must connect to Stripe.

Big Cartel does not charge a transaction fee for payment processing. The fees you pay for payment processing will depend on the provider you choose.

With Stripe, you’ll pay 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction for online sales and 2.7% plus 5 cents per transaction for in-person credit card processing. PayPal charges 2.59% plus 49 cents per transaction for online credit and debit card payments and 2.7% per transaction for in-person credit card payments.

Integrations

Big Cartel is rather limited in terms of the number of direct integrations it offers. The platform lists under 30 direct app connections

• Marketing and promotion: App integrations include Mailchimp for email marketing, LiveChat, Instagram and Poptin, which lets you add custom pop-ups and forms on your website.
• Shipping: Extend your shipping capabilities by connecting to popular shipping apps such as ShipStation, ShipRush, ShippyPro, ShipRobot and Pirate Ship.
• Manufacturing and fulfillment: Connect directly to print-on-demand fulfillment apps such as Printful and Art of Where; sell digital products by connecting to Pulley.

Additionally, Big Cartel integrates with Zapier, which in turn lets you connect with thousands of popular third-party apps.

Discount Codes

You can offer a variety of discounts on your Big Cartel shop. Create site-wide discounts by percentage off the total purchase or by a fixed dollar amount. Or, you can apply discounts to only specific items you choose. You can also offer free shipping discounts. You can only use one discount per transaction, and naturally, your discount cannot exceed the total purchase price.

Shipping

Big Cartel lets you create zone-based shipping rates that you can apply at a product or product variant level. Default shipping rates are used to calculate costs at checkout and are automatically applied to all products in your shop unless you specify otherwise. Product shipping profiles can be used to assign special shipping rates to specific products you identify; shipping profiles override your default shipping rates.

If your shipping needs require more versatility than what Big Cartel’s built-in shipping tools deliver, you can integrate your site with a third-party app such as ShipStation, ShipRush or ShippyPro.

Big Cartel lets you send shipment notifications to your buyers when you mark an order as shipped. You can even send shipment notifications in bulk if you plan on shipping several orders all at once.

Inventory Tracking

Inventory tracking is only available on a Big Cartel paid plan. When using inventory tracking, your site automatically displays when an item has sold out once inventory is fully depleted. When restocking items, you’ll need to manually add the new product count to the inventory listed on your Big Cartel site.

Performance Analysis Tools

Big Cartel makes it easy to view product sales and site visitor trends. On your home dashboard, you can view charts and performance stats by year, month, 30 days, seven days and complete stats across all time. You can also view individual product and category stats.

With a Big Cartel paid plan, you can also connect your Big Cartel site to Google Analytics. This will give you even greater visibility into your website traffic and performance trends.

Preferences

Big Cartel Preferences let you customize contact preferences for you and your customers. For instance, it’s your choice whether to require a customer phone number at checkout. You can also set Preferences so that you are emailed every time you receive a new order and request that your customers receive an email confirming each new order.

Mobile Apps

You can manage your Big Cartel store on the go via the mobile app, which is available for Android and iOS. With the mobile app, you can track product sales, change account settings, add product photos, create or edit discount codes, print packing slips, get notified about new orders and track which orders you’ve shipped.

Big Cartel was developed for artists, hobbyists and makers—it’s an e-commerce builder exclusively for creatives. Some other top e-commerce platforms offer design templates for the creative community, but none of those solutions are explicitly developed for these users.

While many creatives use Etsy to sell goods and artwork, Big Cartel lets you have a branded site of your own where you can showcase your offerings any way you’d like without paying product listing fees.

Big Cartel offers three plans: Gold, Platinum and Diamond. All plans come with free customizable themes, access to sales performance stats and product option groups that help you keep your site well-organized and easy for visitors to navigate. Every plan also lets you sell online and in person.

With the free plan, you can get started with Big Cartel without spending any money, but you will face a cap of five products in your online shop. The higher-tier plans allow you to promote more products—50 to 500. At $9.99 and $19.99 per month, respectively, Big Cartel’s Platinum and Diamond plans are a good value compared with other e-commerce platforms.

The chart below illustrates the core differences among the three plans, with price and the maximum number of products allowed per plan varying considerably.

	Gold	Platinum	Diamond
Price per Month	$0	$10	$20
Max Number of Products	Five	$50	$500
Image Allowance per Product	One	Five	Five
Sales Tax Autopilot	✔	✔	✔
Bulk Editing	‘-	✔	✔
Inventory Tracking	‘-	✔	✔
Theme Code Editing	‘-	✔	✔
Google Analytics	‘-	✔	✔
Shipment Tracking	‘-	✔	✔

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Signing up for a free account with Big Cartel is the first step to creating your online shop. You can upgrade to a paid plan once you’ve opened a free account.

To open your account, first provide your email address, password and desired shop name. Big Cartel will let you know if your desired shopname/bigcartel.com domain is available. If it’s not, Big Cartel will ask you to create a different name for your shop; if the name is available, Big Cartel will send a confirmation email to your inbox. Follow the confirmation email’s directions to activate your account.

Getting Started Checklist

Once your account is active, you can access your personal dashboard. Big Cartel offers a Getting Started Checklist on your home dashboard that guides you through every step of shop setup, including:

• Verifying your location and currency
• Adding products
• Setting up shipping
• Connecting to a payment processor
• Selecting a theme and designing your shop
• Launching your shop

Themes

Big Cartel offers 16 customizable design themes. Unlike other website builders, which typically have both free and paid design templates, all Big Cartel themes are free.

With Big Cartel, you won’t find the visually stunning themes you’ll get with Squarespace or the variety of themes you’ll find with Shopify or BigCommerce. You will, however, be able to choose from a collection of mobile-responsive themes that offer a variety of creative aesthetics, from minimalistic to retro to rugged.

Each Big Cartel theme has a detailed list of features embedded into the design. Users also receive tips for optimal image sizes and how to use the theme best to tell the brand story and advertise promotions.

Custom Pages

Use Big Cartel’s custom pages to create all types of informational pages. Use custom pages to communicate refund policies, privacy policies, instructions for product care, return and exchanges policies and to explain shipping and delivery options.

Perhaps Big Cartel’s best feature is that it’s just so easy to use. The user dashboard is intuitive, and the setup process is straightforward. No coding or website experience is required to get started; even those with limited technical skills report it’s easy to create an online store with Big Cartel.

You could build and open your online shop in mere minutes, though it’ll take longer if you want to add design polish and additional functionality to your site via third-party integrations.

Big Cartel-branded domains and custom domains used through the platform are secured by secure sockets layer (SSL) security encryption. If you don’t see an SSL padlock logo on your Big Cartel site, you may have added code or images via an unsecured http://; you can contact the support team for help with any concerns about SSL encryption.

Payment card industry (PCI) compliance is required by law for sites that accept online payments. PCI compliance requires specific standards for taking, processing, storing and transmitting payment information online.

Technically, Big Cartel is not PCI compliant, but it doesn’t have to be because the e-commerce website builder does not come with a built-in payment processor. However, both Stripe and PayPal are PCI compliant, and you must select one of these payment processors to use Big Cartel, which protects your customers’ personal data and credit card information.

Big Cartel is a relatively small company with a relatively small support team. The company’s
12-member support staff is available Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, via a non-live online chat feature powered by Intercom. Response times vary, though the company does a reasonably good job of getting back to you within a few hours.

Telephone and live chat support are not offered. Big Cartel provides several support documents in its online Help Center.

Automatic Sales Tax Collection

When selling products online, you must collect and pay appropriate sales taxes. Big Cartel is integrated with TaxJar, which automatically calculates and remits sales tax for U.S. and Puerto Rico purchases, provided you sell in U.S. dollars. You also have the option to set up manual tax rates for orders outside Big Cartel’s taxation jurisdictions.

Product Categories

Creating categories to organize your products helps you manage your site more easily, and creates a better experience for your website visitor. With Big Cartel, you can create multiple categories and then assign products to them at any time.

Product Variants

Some products come in different sizes, price ranges, colors or have other variable product attributes. Big Cartel’s product variant feature lets you add multiple options to your products. The Variant Groups feature makes it easy to cluster like-variants within product groups.

Custom Domains

All new shops start out with a Big Cartel-branded domain. If you upgrade to a paid plan, you can ditch the branded domain in favor of a custom domain, though you’ll pay an annual domain registration fee of $8 to $25 depending on the domain registrar you use.

Dropshipping

Big Cartel integrates with two dropshipping stores that are popular with creatives: Art of Where and Printful. Both of these sites allow you to create and sell custom print-on-demand products such as wall art, clothing, headwear, fabrics, totes, home goods and stationery.

Subscriptions and Donations

Big Cartel’s Subscriptions feature is still in beta mode, so it’s not thoroughly tested yet. A paid plan is required to enable Subscriptions, and you must use Stripe as your payment processor to sell subscriptions.

With Subscriptions, you can allow customers to sign up to buy products on a monthly basis. You can also use this tool to set up a donation option on your website to collect monthly recurring donation payments from site visitors.

Digital Products

Big Cartel does not have a built-in mechanism for selling digital products, but it integrates with the Pulley app, which enables digital product sales. With Pulley, you can sell music, digital artwork, printables and other digital products via your online shop. Pulley’s plans range from $6 to $49 per month, so adding this feature will drive up total website costs.

There are a handful of downsides to going with Big Cartel. The platform does not come with built-in blogging capabilities, and since blogs are a popular way to drive organic site traffic, this is a disadvantage. In general, Big Cartel doesn’t deliver well when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Big Cartel doesn’t let you host product videos directly on your website, but you can embed a video hosted by a service such as YouTube or Vimeo. If having a product image zoom feature is vital for your site, double-check that your theme supports image zoom, as not all do. Also, though Big Cartel accepts 25 currencies, it will only display your chosen default currency.

While many top e-commerce platforms come with abandoned cart recovery (ACV), Big Cartel does not. If you want this critical feature, you’ll need to integrate with a marketing solution that provides ACV.

Finally, the free Big Cartel plan only allows you one image per product, which makes it hard to sell products if you are competing with e-commerce sites that let you host multiple images for each product.

	Big Cartel	Shopify	BigCommerce	Ecwid
Forbes Advisor Rating
Pricing	$0 to $19.99 per month	$39 to $399 per month	$29 to $299 per month	$0 to $99 per month
Free Trial	Free plan	Trial is free for three days then next three months for $1 per month	15 days	Free plan
Themes	19	90-plus	170-plus	100-plus
Integrations	4,000-plus (through Zapier)	6,000-plus	1,000-plus	1,000-plus
Multichannel Selling	✔	✔	✔	On paid plans only
Drag-and-Drop Interface	✔	✔	✔	✔
Subscriptions	On paid plans	✔	✔	✔
Discount Codes	✔	✔	✔	✔
Sell Services and Memberships	‘-	✔	✔	✔
Customer Service	Small support staff available for email support Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET. Limited online support documentation center available.	Email, live chat and phone support available. Dedicated account representative available on select plans.	Phone, email, live chat and online Help Center.	Support modes vary by plan. Phone, email, live chat, phone and online Help Center available.
Learn More	—	On Shopify’s Website	On BigCommerce’s Website	—
Read More	—	Read Shopify Review	Read BigCommerce Review	Read Ecwid Review

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Big Cartel vs. Shopify

With plans ranging from $39 to $399 per month, Shopify is considerably more expensive than Big Cartel, where even the top plan only costs $19.99 monthly. But the contest between Big Cartel vs. Shopify isn’t just about price. Shopify allows unlimited products, while Big Cartel’s top plan only allows 500. Shopify offers 17 free themes plus 79 paid themes—compared to Big Cartel’s 16 free themes.

Shopify has a built-in payment processor, while Big Cartel does not. Shopify lets you sell memberships and services, offers excellent SEO tools, and extensive email, phone and live chat support. Big Cartel falls short on all of these features.

Big Cartel vs. BigCommerce

BigCommerce plans are considerably more expensive than Big Cartel’s plans—$29 to $299 per month vs. $0 to $19.99 per month, respectively. Both solutions are stand-alone e-commerce platforms that come with hosting. BigCommerce offers several advanced features that Big Cartel doesn’t, including abandoned cart saver, Google Customer Reviews, an unlimited number of products and services, and excellent blogging and SEO tools.

Big Cartel vs. Ecwid

Along with Big Cartel, Ecwid hosts a free plan. The top-tier Ecwid plan is $99 per month; Big Cartel’s most expensive plan is only $19.99 per month. While Big Cartel is an all-in-one solution, Ecwid integrates with existing sites including WordPress, Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. In general, Big Cartel is more user-friendly than Ecwid, but Ecwid allows for more website customization.

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Big Cartel is designed for creative professionals who want to create an online store to sell their artistic goods. The platform is best for individuals with minimal technical skills who need a way to get an online shop up and running quickly.

Value-priced plans, intuitive dashboards and themes designed explicitly for artists and makers set Big Cartel apart from other e-commerce platforms on the market. While Big Cartel delivers all the essentials required to build a basic website, it lacks advanced features that other top e-commerce website builders offer. Still, if you’re on a tight budget and just need a basic tool, Big Cartel may be the right solution for you.