Thu 11 September 2025

BigCartel is an eCommerce platform, much like Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Magneto, and more. Unlike those platforms, however, it is much less known, lacking even a Wikipedia article for the company or platform.

For some background, my partner runs a small business for which I primarily handle the website design and technical aspects. We've moved from Etsy (forceably) to BigCartel, and now that we've decided to move on from BigCartel and spread our wings, I felt like it was time to give BigCartel a review.

• The Rating
• The Good
• The Mid and The Bad
• Takeaways

The Rating

Ease of Use: 8 / 10
Value: 4 / 10
Customizability: 7 / 10
Overall: 6.5 / 10 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐½

The Good

Getting started with BigCartel was a relatively smooth experience with their provided product import tool which is always a good start. Designing the shop was also pretty smooth as BigCartel gives you several pre-built themes to start from which you can choose to modify and customize. You can also create additional pages, and leverage advanced templating with what appears to be Jinja templating (but oddly is not very well documented).

The options to create discounts are relatively easy to use and got better over time. You can accept payments through Stripe, CashApp, PayPal & Venmo, giving you lots of methods to offer customers.

Overall, the platform is relatively easy to get started with and use. You could even use their "In-Person Checkout" app, which functions similar to Square POS and offers more competitive fees via the Stripe payment processor (though we didn't feel compelled to switch from Square.)

The Mid and The Bad

It takes using a platform for awhile to see where it falls short, as you yearn for improvements in certain places, whether it's missing features, certain platform behaviors, etc. Here's a list in no particular order:

• Simple comes at a cost, and for BigCartel, it's both a boon and a curse. It meant less quality of life features, a greater need to basic accomplish tasks through third-party integrations, and eventually a subscription price to value ratio that became just not worth it (see below).
• The subscription tiers included three tiers: Free, "Platinum" and "Diamond" which started at relatively fair pricing ($9.99 and $19.99 respectively) and was later increased to $15 and $30. For us, who moved from Etsy which provided a much cheaper store with more features and more boosting, $19.99 felt fair for the service provided despite no boosting. When the price rose to $30 with only few feature improvements, it was a clear sign that it was a time to look for a new platform.
• A big pro of Etsy was the way it drove traffic to your site and the cost of that service being included in the fees taken from sales, and eCommerce platforms don't provide any of that. You have to do some (a lot) extra legwork to get your name out there, whether that's in the form of running Ads, connecting to social media as a business, using Google's Merchant Center to list your items on Google Shopping, etc. Even with all of that set up for our BigCartel shop, our shop rarely broke even for the month but more frequently we were in the red.
• Being one of the underdog eCommerce platforms means integrations are few and far between. Most integrations we used did work decently, but the number of options is limited. For reference, Shopify has "over 8000" apps in their app store, WooCommerce has 1176 at the time of writing plus "8,000+" apps integrations offered by Zapier, while BigCartel has just 24, most of which are listed twice to pad the page length.
• No support for bulk modifying or exporting of items (aside from an obscure feature that makes all of the items in your shop accessible via an XML file). They did eventually add a "Table View" to view your products and make edits to some fields more easily, but depending on what changes you're making, a complete wipe of the store and reupload of a CSV would probably be easier.

One other personal grievance I had was the way BigCartel adds new features to only specific themes. We used the Netizen theme which was the only theme to not receive this "Shareble Shopping Carts for Your Shop" and still to this day they have not added it. There were multiples times since 2021 that it felt our particular theme was deprioritized.

Takeaways

All in all, despite my grievances with the service, it was a very stable, solid platform to use and, aside from the my issues regarding the value of the subscription after the price was raised, is a decent starting place for an online shop.

Comparing it to Etsy, it is quite a big leap to make. You miss on out the benefits Etsy offers for advertising and promotion, but similarly you are escaping a platform that is steeped in controversy.

Category: ratings Tagged: small-business big-cartel