Big Cartel Review
If you’re looking for a comprehensive hosted shopping cart service for your ecommerce site but you aren’t planning on running a huge operation, you may want to consider Big Cartel, a service that is tailored specifically to small online stores.
The Basics
Big Cartel, from Indie Labs, has become one of the better-known web-based ecommerce shopping cart services thanks in large part to its accessibility and affordability. In terms of service options, they offer two paid plans: Platinum, at $9.99 US per month, which allows for 25 products, and Diamond, at $19.99 per month, which accommodates up to 100 items and features additional image slots per product, more custom pages and Big Cartel’s complete. One of the most amazing things about Big Cartel is that they also offer a free plan for vendors who intend to sell five products or fewer. All of Big Cartel’s plans are free of transaction fees.
It’s clear that Big Cartel is intended as a simplified option for smaller ecommerce businesses, as they don’t offer the same exhaustive feature list as some of their competitors. So, does Big Cartel truly perform better for small businesses than the competition?
Features
Big Cartel has all of the basic features that users would expect from a shopping cart service. You can use PayPal to receive credit card payments, and most of the world’s key currencies are accepted. Each product can be assigned multiple images, and Big Cartel’s design templates are attractive and should certainly be adequate for the types of businesses they accommodate. Of course, compared to services like BigCommerce and Volusion, Big Cartel’s feature list is pretty limited. There are no additional payment gateway options at this time, nor is there support for sales of digital products (though that’s on the way, according to Indie Labs). Also, Big Cartel doesn’t allow for the sort of customization that you can get with Shopify or FoxyCart.
Ease of Use
Big Cartel’s best feature is probably how simple it makes it for users who want to get a professional, functional, great-looking store up and running quickly and painlessly. The Big Cartel interface’s central control panel, which will be where you do most of the necessary work, is very well-designed and easy to use. Although Big Cartel’s customization options are pretty limited, they are at least very simple to perform thanks to a templating language that works like a simplified version of HTML.
Conclusion
Although it doesn’t have some of the high-powered features you can get elsewhere, Big Cartel’s combination of affordability and ease of use makes it a great choice for ecommerce site operators who intend to sell 100 products or less.
