By Bogdan Rancea
Whether you’re new to the world of online selling, or you’ve been investing in ecommerce for a while now, you probably know few things have a bigger impact on your success, than your choice of ecommerce platform.
For me, Shopify stands out as one of the best ecommerce platforms around, thanks to its scalability, versatility, and ease of use.
However, Big Cartel is another heavy hitter in the industry with a lot of benefits to offer.
It’s great for “artistic” merchants, photographers, and visual artists. Plus, it’s arguably the more “cost-effective” choice for beginners (with a free plan for smaller merchants).
So, which platform is really best for your business?
I put these two solutions head-to-head to find out.
Shopify vs Big Cartel: My Quick Verdict
Big Cartel might be affordable and user-friendly, but Shopify is still the better option “overall” in my opinion.
Shopify gives you access to more advanced inventory management and sales tools, marketing and SEO features, and business management capabilities.
It’s also a lot more scalable, with omnichannel selling features, and thousands of integrations with popular apps.
Big Cartel, designed with artists and creators in mind, might be a good option for companies selling handmade goods, artwork, and creative services.
However, once you start to scale your business, you might want to consider switching to an alternative platform.
Shopify Pros and Cons
Pros
- Powerful website design tools and themes
- Intuitive AI-powered features for marketing and content creation
- Extensive range of app integrations
- Scalable plans for growing businesses
- Advanced omnichannel selling capabilities
- Stronger inventory management features
Cons
- Higher monthly fees
- Slightly more complex for beginners
- Additional transaction fees for third-party payment gateways.
Big Cartel Pros and Cons
Pros
- Straightforward and affordable tools for beginners.
- Access to a range of free templates for website design
- Excellent customer support
- Valuable self-help resources for artists and creators
- No transaction fees
Cons
- Limited sales tools
- Basic marketing capabilities
- Limitations on how many products you can sell
Shopify vs Big Cartel: Pricing Plans and Fees
Pricing is usually a big factor for ecommerce merchants comparing platforms like Shopify and Big Cartel, so I wanted to start this comparison guide by looking at fees.
First, as mentioned above, Big Cartel is the generally “cheaper” option.
First, there’s a free plan that you can use to sell up to five products.
This plan even comes with import options for products on other channels, sales tax autopilot features, and free SEO-optimized templates.
Paid plans start at $15 per month (for the Platinum plan), with access to more advanced shipment tools, POS integrations, and marketing features.
Alternatively, the $30 per month diamond plan comes with priority support, PPC campaigns, and advanced template customization.
Notably, though, while Big Cartel doesn’t charge transaction fees, it does limit the number of products you can sell on each plan (50 on Platinum, and 500 on Diamond).
Shopify, on the other hand, doesn’t offer a free plan (although you can access a three-day demo of the software).
However, it allows you to sell unlimited products on every plan. You also get more advanced features on most plans, like abandoned cart recovery emails.
Options range from $39 per month for Basic Shopify, to $105 per month for Shopify’s standard plan, and $399 per month for Advanced Shopify.
There’s also an enterprise-tier plan (Starting at $2,300 per month), and a Starter plan ($5 per month) for social media selling.
Shopify does charge transaction fees if you’re using a third-party payment processor, but you can bypass these costs by using Shopify Payments.
Shopify vs Big Cartel: The Core Features
Since they’re both ecommerce platforms, Shopify and Big Cartel do offer a lot of overlapping features for online selling, marketing, and business management.
For the most part though, Shopify’s features are a lot more advanced.
Let’s take a closer look at the key features of both tools.
Website Design and Customization Features
Shopify and Big Cartel both offer access to pre-made themes and templates to help you create an attractive online store.
However, the options on Big Cartel are pretty limited. There are around 17 mobile-optimized templates to choose from – all of which are free to use.
Shopify only offers 13 free theme options, but it also gives you dozens of premium themes you can explore, with unique features, like integrated mega menus and look books.
Additionally, with Shopify, you get more control over “customizing” your store. Big Cartel allows you to make basic changes to colors, images, and fonts, but you can’t really do much to alter the entire “feel” of your store.
Shopify, on the other hand, makes it easy to make granular changes to themes with a drag-and-drop interface.
It also allows users to implement HTML and CSS into store designs. Plus, you can add more product variations and extra features to Shopify, like text fields and drop-down menus.
There are even AI-powered tools like Shopify Sidekick that can help you fine-tune your site’s design.
Plus, Shopify allows companies to create “localized” experiences for international customers with the “Shopify Markets” solution – making it great for global sellers.
Ecommerce and Sales Capabilities
Shopify and Big Cartel both give companies a range of great sales tools.
With both platforms, you can track inventory in real-time, automatically calculate sales tax, create shipping rules, run promotions, and offer discounts.
You can also sell online and in-person on both platforms, although Big Cartel relies on third-party POS integrations, while Shopify has its own POS software.
Both platforms also integrate with a major payment processing solutions, but Shopify gives you more variety.
Aside from allowing you to avoid transaction fees with Shopify Payments, Shopify also supports integrations with more than 100 external gateways.
Probably the biggest difference between Shopify and Big Cartel from an ecommerce perspective, however, is that Big Cartel focuses on smaller companies.
Even on the most expensive plan, you can only sell up to 500 products – Shopify allows merchants to sell unlimited products on any plan.
Shopify also gives you more product management and shipping tools.
Although you can track inventory and set up rules for flat-rate and free shipping with Big Cartel, Shopify offers access to extra features like real-time shipping rate calculations.
It also gives users discounts on partnerships with various worldwide logistics solutions, through Shopify shipping.
Beyond that, Shopify streamlines inventory management with bulk editing capabilities, multi-location shop management, and streamlined import/export capabilities.
Simply put, Big Cartel might be fine for beginners with fewer products to sell, but Shopify is far more powerful for bigger brands.
Marketing and SEO Features
Once again, Shopify and Big Cartel share a few overlapping features from a marketing perspective.
Both allow you to run custom promotions, send abandoned cart recovery emails (although this is only available on Big Cartel paid plans), and run personalized PPC campaigns.
However, Big Cartel lacks built-in blogging capabilities – so it’s not ideal if you want to boost your visibility with content marketing.
Shopify gives you a fully featured blog, as well as access to pre-built tools for email marketing, chat-based marketing (Shopify Inbox) and more.
Shopify’s SEO capabilities are stronger too.
Although Big Cartel allows users to customize meta descriptions, titles and URLs, you’ll miss out on advanced solutions for boosting your search engine rankings.
Plus, you’ll have to use third-party tools with Big Cartel if you want to share reviews and testimonials on product pages, or launch social media strategies.
Even the visual assets you can use to promote your products are pretty limited on Big Cartel. For instance, you can only upload up to 25 images for each product.
From an analytics perspective, Big Cartel gives you access to advanced Google analytics reporting, and a real-time sales dashboard.
However, Shopify gives you more options to create custom reports, and collect insights from multiple marketing channels at once.
Integrations and Scalability
Big Cartel and Shopify are both pretty flexible tools for ecommerce leaders.
With Big Cartel, you can access various easy-to-use apps for print-on-demand selling, PPC advertising, and social media marketing.
You can also import products directly from Etsy, Squarespace, and Shopify.
However, if you want to access more advanced integrations, you’ll have to rely heavily on “connectors” offered through channels like Zapier.
Shopify has a much larger app marketplace, with more than 8000 integrations addressing every business need.
You can find tools for SEO enhancements, marketing, inventory management, product sourcing, fulfillment, and more.
Shopify also offers a lot of great integrations for dropshipping and print on demand platforms – and it allows companies to create and launch custom apps.
Shopify vs Big Cartel: Ease of Use and Customer Support
Personally, I think Shopify is a very user-friendly platform – but Big Cartel is probably better suited to beginners.
Since it doesn’t have as many advanced features as Shopify, Big Cartel benefits from a smaller learning curve, and a faster setup experience.
Still, it’s worth noting that Shopify does offer access to numerous tools that improve the user experience. There are AI tools like Shopify Sidekick and Shopify Magic to help with store configuration and content creation.
Plus, the intuitive interface comes packed with tooltips to help beginners learn how to use various features.
Speaking of resources for new merchants, both Big Cartel and Shopify have some great blogs, guides, and FAQs to explore.
However, Shopify does offer some extra solutions, like Shopify Academy courses, and set-up videos.
Shopify also offers 24/7 customer support via email and live chat, whereas Big Cartel limits its support options to the hours of 8am to 6pm ET on weekends.
You do get “prioritized” support on more expensive Big Cartel plans, however, so it might be worth upgrading if you’re looking for more end-to-end assistance.
Shopify vs Big Cartel: The Verdict
So, which is the better ecommerce platform overall?
If you’re looking for the most feature-rich, scalable solution for your business, I’d recommend choosing Shopify. It’s definitely the more powerful option, with more capabilities focused on driving business growth.
However, if you’re a creator with a limited number of products to sell (and a smaller budget), Big Cartel might still be a good option.
Just be prepared to upgrade to a more advanced ecommerce solution as your company starts to grow.
