Big Cartel is an ecommerce platform that focuses on servicing artistic and creative sellers. Powering more than 190,000 online stores, Big Cartel is an affordable choice for many, especially for its ease of navigation and customizable capabilities. With its starter template, growing library of themes on paid plans, and live classes to help you get set up, you can build an online store in less than 45 minutes. By looking at the good and the bad, let’s find out if Big Cartel is the right platform for you.
Comparing Big Cartel to The Best Ecommerce Platforms
Unfortunately, Big Cartel didn’t make it onto our top list—but that doesn’t make it a bad ecommerce platform. In fact, thousands of users love Big Cartel because of its affordable way to transform your online store with little to no effort from you.
We reviewed dozens of ecommerce platforms on the market and narrowed them down to the top 12. We looked at each option to see who it’s best for, what features to consider, and how to find the best option for your needs. Want to scope out all of your options? See all of our top picks here.
Big Cartel: The Good and The Bad
Just like for all ecommerce platforms, there will be good and bad features to consider. After extensive research, we found that Big Cartel offers excellent features that most users are happy to continue using, with only a few drawbacks. Let’s take a deep dive into both sides of the spectrum before you decide.
The Good
Extremely Easy to Navigate: The best part about utilizing Big Cartel to build your online store is how easy it is to navigate the backend and set it up from scratch. You don’t need previous building experience to use Big Cartel because it gives you all the tools you need to succeed. To first sign up, you need an email address, password, shop name, and shop URL.
After signing up, Big Cartel allows you to add your first product, pick a theme, set up your checkout, add a profile image, and create any discount codes. If you choose a premium plan to sign up with, you can also choose to enable inventory tracking and use a custom domain instead. Navigating the backend during this process is seamless due to its large font text and organized pathways.
Decent Variety of Templates: A template is the foundation of your online store, which you can customize and make your own. Big Cartel’s free Gold plan now includes one customizable template to get started, while the paid Platinum and Diamond plans unlock the full template library with more modern, mobile-ready designs. All Big Cartel’s themes are simple and suit the needs of many business niches, such as artists, photographers, and even bloggers.
Big Cartel has optimized each template for any mobile or desktop device, and they are completely customizable for personalization. You can set the number of featured products on the home page, share buttons for social media, display your store’s logo in the header, showcase a search bar, and show or hide sold-out products. Every template offers a different unique feature, such as slide-down shopping carts or drop-down menus, so you can choose how you want your customers to interact with your store.
Customizable: Big Cartel also has a decent range of customization capabilities that will help you improve the functionality of your store. Apart from utilizing Big Cartel’s templates, you can benefit from adding custom pages, images, links, redirects, and favicons to your online store to personalize things a little further. On paid plans, Big Cartel additionally lets you optimize your site for search engines, edit your theme code, link social media profiles, embed an Instagram profile, back up your theme, and embed a video.
The customization aspect of Big Cartel is easy to navigate and isn’t overly complicated, even if you are dealing with code. But if you need help during any customization process, Big Cartel has in-depth tech documentation to assist you appropriately.
Dashboard and Metrics: Running and managing an online store is more than just uploading and selling products. If you want to know how many products you sell, how much revenue you are making, and what products are most popular, you will need a metrics system in place. Big Cartel offers a simple yet comprehensive dashboard filled with key metrics and statistics to help you keep your finger on the pulse of your business.
Big Cartel’s dashboard includes order and visitor stats, conversion rates and trends, product and category stats, and advanced analytics with the Google Analytics integration. Each key statistic comes in the form of a simple graph or chart, with colors that are easy on the eyes and carefully labeled subsections.
Live Classes for Setup: When looking at the more helpful side of things, Big Cartel offers live and recorded classes on YouTube that aim to help you set up the basics of your online store. A Big Cartel customer support representative directs each class, taking you through every step while showing you exactly what to do by recording their screen. The classes cover adding products, creating discounts, shipment settings, account settings, packaging your products, and newer features like tap-to-pay and shipping labels.
The live classes are an excellent asset to Big Cartel because many people are visual learners and having the option to follow along with a video is much easier than reading a long-form document.
Apps and Integrations: Big Cartel now has a fuller app and integration catalog than it used to. Instead of just a handful of options, you can plug into shipping tools like ShipStation, Pirate Ship, and ShippyPro, print-on-demand services like Printful, Art of Where, and theprintspace, marketing tools like POWR and Poptin, blogging with DropInBlog, and even product review apps. This lets you keep your setup lean while still adding the extras you actually need.
You still aren’t drowning in thousands of add-ons, but there’s now more than enough to cover fulfillment, marketing, analytics, and customer experience—especially for creator-style stores.
Controlled Security: An online store needs security, and while Big Cartel’s version isn’t the most advanced, it’s still valuable for the price point. Every Big Cartel store has SSL security for an encrypted layer, and you can review active devices and connected apps, add a backup phone number, and change your password. Big Cartel still relies on PCI-compliant payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal for card processing, so you don’t have to store that sensitive data yourself.
The Bad
Limited Support Variety: When it comes to supporting users, it’s helpful for companies to offer a variety of ways to contact them. Big Cartel support is now available 24/7 through in-app messaging and email, which is an improvement over weekday-only support. However, it still doesn’t offer phone support or true live chat, so getting a real-time answer for an urgent issue can be a hassle.
It’s not all bad though, as most users find Big Cartel’s customer support team to be friendly and responsive, which is a plus, but it would be ideal for many users if there were quicker contact options.
Diamond Features Are Still Capped: While it is more affordable than most ecommerce platforms, the Diamond tier hasn’t removed the 500-product limit. Big Cartel did strengthen this plan by raising image limits to 25 per product and adding things like abandoned cart recovery, advanced analytics, and prioritized support—but stores with very large catalogs will still outgrow it. Paying more doesn’t unlock unlimited products.
Not PCI Compliant: PCI compliance refers to the set of security standards for companies to accept, process, store, and transmit credit card information in a secure environment. Big Cartel still isn’t a PCI-certified platform on its own, which means the responsibility for payment security sits with the third-party gateways you connect—Stripe, PayPal, and similar providers. Using those processors is enough for most small shops, but it’s still something to keep in mind when you compare Big Cartel to fully PCI-compliant platforms.
Big Cartel Pricing and Options
Big Cartel is an ecommerce platform that many users love for its affordability, and that’s because it offers a completely free version with quite generous features. The free Gold version lets you upload five products with one image per product, use one customizable template, accept cards and PayPal, sell online and in person through the mobile app, and see real-time stats and automatic sales tax. Here are some more nifty features that come with the free version:
- Sell online and in-person
- Accept cards, PayPal, and mobile wallets via Stripe
- Sales tax autopilot
- Real-time stats
- One customizable store template
- Multiple size and color variants per product
On the other hand, Big Cartel offers two additional tiers that scale to the size of your ecommerce business. Here’s a quick overview of each one:
Platinum
- $15 per month. Includes 50 products, up to five images per product, access to the full template library, inventory and shipment tracking, bulk editing, discounts and promos, label printing, Google Analytics, and the ability to use a custom domain.
Diamond
- $30 per month. Includes 500 products, up to 25 images per product, all Platinum features, advanced template customization and analytics, abandoned cart emails, and prioritized support.
Both options are still affordable, but the Diamond tier is better for stores that need more images per product, built-in abandoned cart recovery, and higher-touch support—not just more products.
Big Cartel offers an excellent range of features for both paid tiers, including theme code editing, Google Analytics, inventory tracking, shipment tracking, in-person selling, and bulk editing. The main differences now are the higher image allowance, abandoned cart recovery, and prioritized support for Diamond users.
Big Cartel for iOS and Android
Big Cartel has created mobile applications for iOS and Android users to help them take their shop anywhere. Both apps are free and offer unique features to improve your overall ecommerce experience, making it more flexible.
Both the iOS and the Android version of this application offer a bunch of features, including:
- Create, edit, and rearrange products
- View sales statistics
- Add product images directly from your photo library
- Accept in-person cash payments and tap-to-pay card transactions via Stripe
- Search and view orders, add notes, and print packing slips
- Get push notifications
- Track and update order status
- Add, edit, or remove discounts
- Adjust account settings
- Send receipts instantly
The current App Store version requires iOS 15.0 or later on iPhone and iPad, while Android requirements still vary by device.
Big Cartel Pulley
Big Cartel’s Pulley product is the easiest way for artists to sell digital products online, allowing you to sell your products anywhere you like and not necessarily from your Big Cartel ecommerce store.
Whether you’re selling music, ebooks, video, or software, Pulley can help you sell your products at lightning speed by allowing you to upload and sell products in just a few clicks. Each customer you sell to gets a unique link that lets them download the file via email, and with no extra effort from you when Pulley keeps track of your sales.
Utilizing Pulley lets you sell from any different platform, such as your website, blog, social media profile, or email by using Pulley’s Buy Now links. You can also integrate Pulley into your Big Cartel store for maximum performance.
You have to sign up for a Pulley account to use the solution. However, this only takes a few steps, and you can then link your unique Pulley URL to your Big Cartel account.
The best part is that Pulley isn’t limited to selling through Big Cartel. If you want to sell through PayPal, you can! All you have to do is add your PayPal email address and a Success and Cancel URL.
Once your account is set up, Pulley gives you access to its dashboard, which lets you view your latest orders, most popular products, and a sales graph that you can sort by day, week, or month.
You also get functionalities like order emails, variables, and syntax for more freedom and customization.
Pulley is currently $6 per month, and Big Cartel offers a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
How Big Cartel Ranks
While Big Cartel doesn’t rank on our top list, it’s still a pretty great ecommerce platform to choose from for its affordability and ease of use. With excellent customization, you can completely transform your online store for as little as $15 per month or even for free if you have to.
Here is a short overview of the top ecommerce platforms:
- Bluehost – Best for automatic WooCommerce store setup
- Shopify – Best all-in-one ecommerce platform
- Wix – Best ecommerce platform for beginners
- Squarespace – Best portfolio-based ecommerce builder
- BigCommerce – Best for multichannel sales
- Ecwid – Best free shopping cart extension
- WooCommerce – Best ecommerce plugin for WordPress
- Shift4Shop – Best ecommerce platform for developers
- Easy Digital Downloads – Best WordPress plugin for digital products
- Volusion – Best ecommerce platform for large stores
- Magento – Best enterprise ecommerce platform
Summary
Overall, Big Cartel is an affordable way to create an online store that is personal to you. With controlled security, live setup classes, expanded integrations, and comprehensive metrics—what’s not to love about Big Cartel?
Especially with flexible mobile applications and reliable solutions to help you sell digital products, Big Cartel is a solid alternative to help you sell products and grow your business online.
