Big Cartel vs Shopify — Which is the Better Online Store Builder?
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In this Big Cartel vs Shopify comparison, I’m going to pit a cheap and cheerful ecommerce platform, Big Cartel, against an industry giant, Shopify — and see if David can beat Goliath. I’m going to highlight the key areas you need to focus on when choosing between these two platforms, and discuss which solution comes out on top in each one.
Let's dive in!
1. Pricing
Big Cartel is one of the most competitively-priced ecommerce platforms available. Its most expensive plan costs just $24.99 per month — but still gives you a lot of ecommerce bang for your buck.
And significantly, Big Cartel actually offers an entirely free plan. While this is limited in its functionality, it nonetheless lets you sell up to five products and gives you an easy, cost-free way to get going with ecommerce. By contrast, all the Shopify plans involve a monthly fee, and depending on the plan involved, this can be quite substantial.
As we’ll see shortly though, you get a lot more ecommerce features included with a Shopify subscription.
2. Ease of use
Big Cartel is a no-frills ecommerce solution. While this may limit your horizons a bit, it also gives you a really gentle learning curve. You won’t have much difficulty getting a store up and running with Big Cartel.
Although the learning curve with Shopify is not terribly steep either, the fact that it is a more fully-featured ecommerce platform means that it can take a bit more time to get used to.
So if ease-of-use is important to you, and you can live without more advanced ecommerce functionality, Big Cartel takes the win.
3. Templates
Both Big Cartel and Shopify offer a similar number of free themes. These are all attractive, responsive templates that look good on any device. However, what you need to remember about Big Cartel’s offering is that its templates are geared towards creative merchants - artists, musicians, photographers and so on.
(The platform was originally created to serve more artistic sellers — that’s where the ‘Art’ in Big Cartel comes from.)
So, although you can use Big Cartel templates for more general ecommerce purposes, you’ll usually find that Shopify’s templates are suitable for a wider range of business applications.
And, thanks to its large range of premium themes, there are many more templates on offer from Shopify than from Big Cartel.
You can browse all the Shopify themes here.
4. Product management
When it comes to inventory size, Shopify lets you sell an unlimited number of products. However, the most you can sell with Big Cartel is 500.
As for the types of products you can sell, both platforms let you sell physical products out of the box. However, to sell digital products with Big Cartel, you need to pay for a third-party app, Pulley. And, depending on your requirements, the costs for this can be quite high
5. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a way to sell products online without buying or delivering any stock. All you do is take an order through your online store, and send it to a supplier for fulfillment.
While Big Cartel does let you dropship print-on-demand products through services like Printful and The Art of Where, it simply can’t compete with the huge number of dropshipping services that work with Shopify.
With Shopify, you can dropship anything under the sun, making it a much better choice in this area than Big Cartel.?
And it’s worth mentioning that Shopify provides a really useful free dropshipping starter kit to new merchants. This bundles an extendable trial of the platform with a host of useful dropshipping resources – you can access this here.
6. Point of sale
Point-of-sale technology lets merchants make sales in person at events, festivals, markets and brick-and-mortar retail outlets. Both Big Cartel and Shopify facilitate this.
Big Cartel’s offering on this front isn’t great however: you’re basically restricted to selling using a Stripe card reader.
By contrast, Shopify gives you access to an extensive range of POS hardware and advanced features that let you sell in multiple locations and using multiple team members.
You can learn more about Shopify POS here.
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7. Apps and integrations
Shopify is a hands down winner when it comes to apps and integrations. Its app store contains around 13,000 apps and integrations that let you extend Shopify’s functionality considerably, or hook it up to lots of other online services.
Big Cartel does provide some integrations too, but the range is very limited.
8. Email marketing
With Shopify, you get access to a powerful email marketing app, Shopify Email, that works seamlessly with the ecommerce features of the platform. And you can use it to send up to 10,000 emails per month for free, too.
(If you exceed this limit you're charged $1 per additional 1,000 emails sent.)
But with Big Cartel, you have to make use of third-party email marketing tools to send newsletters. You can’t integrate them as tightly into the selling process, and using them means additional costs too.?
9. Abandoned cart saving
An abandoned cart saver tool identifies site visitors who go part of the way through a purchase but don’t complete the transaction. It then automatically sends those store visitors a message reminding them to complete the purchase. This usually contains a discount code or other incentive to encourage them to do so.
While Shopify has a built-in abandoned cart saver feature on all its plans, you won’t find one in Big Cartel.
10. Tax calculation
Both Big Cartel and Shopify provide tools for calculating tax automatically and adding the correct amount of tax to product prices at checkout.
However, while Shopify’s automatic tax calculation tool works in a wide range of countries and with a wide range of tax systems, Big Cartel’s is quite basic and only works in the US.
11. Multi-currency and multilingual selling
You tend to get more sales if you sell in your store visitors’ local currency. While Shopify gives you a sophisticated international selling tool to do this ('Shopify Markets'), Big Cartel only lets you sell in one currency at a time.
Shopify lets you translate your store more easily too, thanks to built-in multilingual features that let you translate your store into up to 20 languages. But translating a Big Cartel store involves using the third-party app Weglot, which can be very expensive to use if you have a large amount of text on your website.
12. Big Cartel vs Shopify SEO
When it comes to SEO, Shopify is a hands-down winner in a Big Cartel vs Shopify shootout. Big Cartel is very restrictive when it comes to letting you tweak even basic SEO settings like page URLs, meta descriptions and redirects, while Shopify gives you complete control over all SEO elements (the one exception being hosting —?you have to use Shopify's shared hosting service rather than your own optimized server. This is also the case with Big Cartel, however).
13. Payment processing
Shopify works with over 100 payment gateways, which means that you can choose the payment solution that works best for you, and accept a huge range of payment methods.
By contrast, Big Cartel only works with PayPal and Stripe.
Big Cartel vs Shopify: the verdict
So which one of these platforms is the better choice for your business? Well, if you are on a really low budget or have very simple selling needs, there is a case to be made for Big Cartel. Its free plan is actually pretty usable, its premium plans are very competitively priced, and the platform itself is very easy to use.
But, in terms of features, there’s no contest. Shopify is by far the better-specced platform, giving you a wide range of tools that you simply won’t find in Big Cartel - important features like multicurrency selling, abandoned cart saving, professional dropshipping tools and much, much more.
So if you have grand designs about ecommerce and want to build a truly professional store, then the goliath that is Shopify is definitely the winner. As always though, we suggest trying before you buy — you’ll find links to both platforms below:
If you're interested in learning more about both platforms and how they stack up against each other, do check out our deep dive comparison of them both too. You may also be interested in reading our Shopify pros and cons guide.
Alternatives to Big Cartel and Shopify
There are lots of alternatives to Big Cartel and Shopify available. Key ones include Wix, Squarespace and WordPress —?you can follow the links below to access useful resources about these platforms:
This article was written by Chris Singleton. Additional research by Matt Walsh.