Reviews

A Quick Look At Big Cartel

Introduction

I’ve recently discovered an interesting website called Big Cartel. They’ve been around since 2005, but I’ve only just found them recently. They provide services that enable people to sell their products online. I’m going to gloss over the individual details and just give a quick take on the site itself. If I end up using it more in the future, I may do some in depth articles on setting up and running a shop.

Features

The first thing that jumps out at me about the site is its simplicity. It looks great, but there is not a lot of extra stuff to get in your way. This is especially true for the admin pages, which present your options in a clear and concise way. Don’t let the simplicity fool you, there is a very powerful engine lying beneath the pretty exterior. Your shop can implement different themes, add custom pages, change a wealth of shop settings, and even utilize several APIs to customize your site to your heart’s content.

Business Time

Big Cartel provides you with a vehicle to sell products. They don’t make products or fulfill orders. That’s your responsibility once orders are placed. Payment is done through PayPal, and you must have a Business or Premier account with them. Signing up is free, but the free shop is severely limited. You can only have 5 products available and many of the cooler features of the site are unavailable. The Platinum plan is a step up and gives you access to more features and 25 products. The Diamond plan is their top plan and you get up to 100 products and access to everything they’ve got. These upgrade plans will cost you 9.99 and 19.99 a month respectively. Since Big Cartel doesn’t charge any other fees than the monthly fee, if you plan on selling at least a few products a month you should more than cover the monthly fee. If anything, you can get your feet wet with the basic shop and upgrade once you’re making enough money to cover the monthly fee.

Review

Big Cartel seems to be providing fantastic services for small shops in need of a web presence. With the amount of customization you can do to your shop it can be hard to tell what the engine is that runs some of the featured shops. The sparseness of the interface really impresses me, especially the admin section which remains powerful while looking clean. I would urge anyone interested to set up a free shop and play around, I know I will!

© 2009 Ryan Salsman