Big Cartel vs Shopify — Which is Better for Your Online Store?

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Big Cartel vs Shopify — which is the better store builder? In this comparison, I’m going to help you answer that question! I’ll take you through the key features, pros and cons and pricing of both these well-known ecommerce platforms — making it easier for you to decide which tool is right for you, your budget, and your business.

At a glance feature breakdown

Let’s start with a key question: what do Big Cartel and Shopify do?

Big Cartel and Shopify: an overview

Big Cartel and Shopify are ‘hosted’ online store building tools. This means that they run ‘in the cloud’ and there’s nothing to install on your computer.

So, as long as you have access to a web browser and the internet, you can build and manage your store from anywhere using either platform.

Both solutions allow you to:

And they both do these core ecommerce jobs very well.

But, as you read on, you’ll see that they don’t quite do these tasks in the same way or to the same extent. This is largely because both products have quite different histories and userbases.

Let’s dig into these.

Big Cartel’s history

Big Cartel has been around since 2005. Since its inception, the platform has hosted well over a hundred thousand online stores — creating over $2.5bn in sales for Big Cartel users.

At time of writing, internet statistics company Builtwith.com estimates that there are over 71,660 websites powered by the platform.

And who are those Big Cartel users and store owners making that revenue?

Well, for the most part, we’re talking about the same business demographic from Big Cartel’s early days: artists, musicians and small businesses. This is where the ‘art’ in Big Cartel comes from!

A considerable proportion of Big Cartel’s user base consists of:

It also includes small businesses focused on selling:

and many other craft-based small businesses with a limited inventory of products on offer.

Shopify’s background

Shopify was founded in 2006 and now has 11,600 staff working on the platform. To date, Shopify has helped its users generate over $755bn in sales, dwarfing the more-than-respectable Big Cartel total.

Millions of merchants now use the platform; according to internet statistics company Builtwith, there are currently around 4.6 million online stores running on Shopify.

Shopify’s users come from a very wide range of industries and sectors — some of the more popular categories of industries its users originate from include:

And, whereas Big Cartel is focussed on individuals and small businesses, Shopify’s platform caters for online businesses of all sizes — from micro-sellers to large, household-name enterprises like Tesla, Heinz, Pepsico, Unliver and Red Bull.

So as you can see from the stats above, Shopify is by far the bigger platform, both in terms of its userbase and the revenue it generates.

Now, before we delve deeper into each platform, a quick note on why size matters here.

In the past, some ecommerce companies have ceased operation suddenly, resulting in a difficult situation for their customers and short-notice migrations of their stores to new platforms.

(A key example of this is Magento Go’s disappearance).

With this in mind, it’s worth pointing out that because Big Cartel has a much smaller market share than Shopify, it is the riskier platform to choose — the likelihood of a company the size of Shopify suddenly going bust is remote.

But that said, Big Cartel is a well-established ecommerce solution that has stood the test of time to date. And, as we’ll see later on in this comparison, there are some upsides to a ‘small is beautiful’ approach to ecommerce.

More on that later, but first let’s look at how the pricing for these two platforms compares.

Big Cartel and Shopify pricing

Big Cartel fees

Big Cartel provides three pricing plans:

All Big Cartel pricing plans come with free themes to design your store with, and all plans allow you to:

It is important to note that Big Cartel’s ‘free’ plan is exactly that! It is not a free trial that expires after a set time period. You can run and make sales on a basic store on this plan indefinitely. Very few of Big Cartel’s competitors facilitate this, with the notable exception of Ecwid. 

As you might expect though, there are limitations to the Big Cartel free plan.

Most significantly, it limits you to selling a total of just five products. It also restricts your ability to edit your site’s code, add Google Analytics and keep tabs on how much inventory you’ve got left.

Despite these restrictions, the ‘free’ plan can be a great way to get started with selling online, testing the market and developing sales and marketing techniques.

In short, the free plan may be basic — but it is the strongest argument in favour of using Big Cartel over Shopify.

Moving on to the paid-for plans, the ‘Platinum’ plan at $9.99 per month allows you to sell a maximum of 50 products in your store. It also gives you access to inventory tracking, increased editing functionality for your store theme, and, importantly, Google Analytics. All these help you make the most of your online presence.

The most expensive ‘Diamond’ plan, which costs $19.99, increases your product inventory limit to 500 products. Otherwise, all of its bundled features are the same as those of the Platinum plan.

So all in all, the Big Cartel pricing plans offer access to an ecommerce platform at very competitive prices. If you are offering a limited range of products, and you have a small budget to play with, Big Cartel is certainly worth some serious consideration.

However, many users will be disappointed with the product limits that the plans are structured around. If you have more than 500 products in your inventory (or if you plan on having an inventory larger than 500 products), you will need to look elsewhere for an online store builder.

Shopify imposes no limits on the number of products you can sell — no matter which Shopify plan you choose.

Let’s take a look at Shopify plans now.

Shopify fees

Shopify has five different pricing plans:

You can reduce your Shopify plan’s cost by purchasing an annual plan. By doing this you will receive a 25% discount on your plan fees.

You can also avail of a free Shopify trial lasting for 3 days. This is available from the Shopify website and includes free use of Shopify Payments for your first $1,500 in sales. If you choose to purchase a Shopify subscription at then end of the free trial, you will be charged $1 per month for the first 3 months.

Now, in terms of the differences between each Shopify plan, the $5 per month ‘Starter ‘plan is something of the odd man out here.

It allows you to start selling your goods online — but it doesn’t provide you with a fully-functional, standalone online store.

Instead, it allows you to:

The main differences between the other plans are:

Every Shopify plan includes fairly comprehensive point-of-sale functionality that lets you sell goods in physical locations (retail outlets, market stalls etc.). This can be further enhanced via a premium ‘POS Pro’ add-on (more on which later).

Finally, the Shopify ‘Plus’ plan is an enterprise-grade solution for large businesses. It offers advanced features involving security, APIs, fulfillment and automation of marketing tasks. Fees for this are negotiable.

(If you’d like a more detailed breakdown on the differences between Shopify plans, please check out our article on Shopify pricing / fees and our Shopify vs Shopify Plus post).

So, we’ve looked at how much Big Cartel and Shopify plans cost — but how do stores built with these two ecommerce platforms actually look?

Templates and visuals

Quantity

Big Cartel has 16 templates or ‘themes’ to choose from — you pick one of these, and it forms the basis of your store’s design.

This selection is a lot smaller than most other well-established ecommerce platforms. For example, Wix gives you 885+; BigCommerce offers 180+; Squarespace offers around 164.

On the plus side, all of Big Cartel’s templates are entirely free of charge, which isn’t the case with all competing platforms.

In terms of editability, Big Cartel’s themes are customizable — but the options available on this front are fairly limited.

As for Shopify, the platform offers 12 free themes in total.

Shopify also has 151 paid-for premium themes on offer (most of these come in 2 or 3 variants). These range from $150 to $380 in price.

One thing worth noting about the Shopify paid themes is that the customer support for some of them can be limited. You may find that you have to deal directly with third-party theme creators if you encounter problems with your template, which can add a layer of extra hassle.

But overall, when it comes to the choice and variety of themes, Shopify takes the win.

Quality

Big Cartel themes are good overall. They are all fully responsive — meaning they’ll adapt themselves automatically to display nicely on any device (mobile, tablet, desktop etc.) — and there is reasonable variety across the 16 themes provided.

Most of the themes are suitable for visual creatives, photographers, and all types of makers. They are built primarily for selling products — not just showcasing your talent in general.

Big Cartel’s themes have decent aesthetics, although it does feel that some of the differences between them are a bit superficial. 

One thing you should note about Big Cartel’s themes is that although it’s possible to customize certain aspects of a Big Cartel theme, this can require a degree of coding ability.

On to Shopify! 

Shopify’s themes are very attractive and of high quality across the board. Many of them offer you the option to add video backgrounds and parallax scrolling effects to further enhance the visuals.

Like Big Cartel’s, all Shopify themes are fully responsive, and the large range available means that you should be able to find a very professional-looking theme for your niche without difficulty.

Many Shopify themes possess really excellent design elements that you won’t always find in Big Cartel, including:

Ultimately Big Cartel’s templates offering is solid, but Shopify’s offering is more extensive – and has more class.

Now, let’s take a look at how these two platforms compare when it comes to how easy it is to manage your content.

Content management and interface

Ease of use

Big Cartel and Shopify’s interfaces are, for the most part, both easy to use.

In Big Cartel, you have a very ‘uncluttered’ dashboard with an icon-based navigation menu at the top, which you can use to move around the interface easily.

This menu lets you access analytics, add products, view orders, set up discounts and change account settings. 

Finding the Big Cartel template editor is rather difficult however! Unlike the platform’s other core functionality, the template editor is not accessible from the main navigation bar at the top of the screen — you have to go to the ‘account’ section of your Big Cartel store and find a not-very obvious ‘design’ button to open it.

Once you’ve done so, you’ll find that the interface for the Big Commerce’s template editor is pretty simple to use, with settings in a menu on the left hand side of the screen. Changes made using these are visible on the right hand side.

There is some basic drag-and-drop functionality available — but only for changing the order of products in a list or grid.

Overall, getting to grips with the Big Cartel interface doesn’t involve a steep learning curve at all. However, the functionality it offers is fairly basic by comparison to many competing products.

When it comes to Shopify’s interface, it provides a better experience in almost every way.

On the left hand side of the Shopify interface, you’ll find a menu that gives you access to all the platform’s key features. This allows you to get to more places with fewer clicks than Big Cartel.

When you access a feature using Shopify’s left-hand menu, the relevant controls or information are displayed on the right hand side of the screen. Here you can edit content, view data and add products easily.

In terms of editing content, with the release of its new ‘Online Store 2.0’ content management system, Shopify now provides a drag-and-drop editor for laying out your text, images and products.

This new theme editor gives you a lot of flexibility about how you lay out your pages, and goes far beyond what’s on offer from Big Cartel’s more traditional ‘What You See is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) editor.

Shopify’s new drag and drop editor can be used with all 163 themes in the Shopify theme store.

(This wasn’t the case until recently —so a thumbs up for Shopify here).

Overall, you could argue that because of Big Cartel’s smaller range of features, it’s a bit easier to use than Shopify. However, you won’t face a particularly large learning curve with Shopify either — and its new drag-and-drop editor makes laying out pages easier than in Big Cartel.

Importing and exporting content and products

Uploading products to Big Cartel is very straightforward. You can upload products one at a time, or use the ‘product imports’ feature, which allows you to use a CSV file for bulk uploading.

Exporting order information from Big Cartel is possible too — but strangely, there’s no obvious way to export product data. This may prove frustrating for merchants with larger product catalogues who decide to move to another platform down the line.

Shopify also lets you bulk import and export products information via CSV, as well as bulk update your products (again, using a CSV file).

As for importing and exporting ‘static’ content (i.e., pages and blog posts) the options are less extensive on this front with either Big Cartel or Shopify — there are no built-in tools to help you with this, and many merchants migrating to or from either platform may end up having to do a bit of copying and pasting.

That said, there are some paid-for apps available in the Shopify app store which can speed up the process (for example ExIm).

Product images and galleries

The basic image features of Big Cartel are adequate for simple presentation of your products. However, not all Big Cartel themes include an interactive product image zoom feature (and on the themes that do, it’s not fantastic).

(That said, a bit of coding and the use of jQuery plugins can serve as a workaround for adding better product zoom features to a Big Cartel store. This is definitely an endeavour for merchants who are more technically minded, however).

The Big Cartel templates are a also bit fiddly when it comes to things like adding galleries to pages, and a decent level of comfort with CSS is often required to customize pages and themes.

On the Shopify side of things, a large number of its themes come with good product image zoom functionality built in, and there are a host of apps available that give your customer more ways to get up close to your products.

It is also less challenging to add a gallery to a Shopify store than a Big Cartel one, thanks to a wide range of gallery apps that are available from Shopify’s app store.

(More on the app store later.)

Blogging features

When you’re running an ecommerce business, it’s important to be aware of the benefits of blogging. It is essential for inbound marketing, because high-quality content can attract visitors to your store — and more traffic means more sales opportunities!

Unfortunately, Big Cartel doesn’t offer built-in blogging functionality. This is a shame, because the target audiences of Big Cartel stores (i.e., those with an interest in all things artistic and creative) might benefit greatly from merchants sharing unique perspectives on their fields of interest.

So, if you want to blog using Big Cartel, you’ll need to use a third-party app to do so — a good option for this is the DropInBlog tool. However this requires a setup which, if you are a HTML beginner, you may find a little intimidating.

Shopify, by contrast, does provide built-in blogging tools. And for most merchants’ purposes, these tools will cover the main bases.

Shopify’s blogging features are fairly basic compared to, say, Squarespace or Wordpress, however. You can apply tags to Shopify blog posts, but not categories. And there is no content versioning or Yoast-style SEO plug-ins available.

For enhanced capability, third-party blogging tools like the DropInBlog app mentioned above can also be used on Shopify to add additional features (for example, SEO post analysis, categories, and multiple contributors).

Mobile apps

Big Cartel and Shopify both provide mobile apps for their users to manage their stores on the go.

Big Cartel provides one mobile app, available for both iOS and Android. The iOS app is the better of the two, giving you some extra functionality for taking in-person cash payments and issuing receipts (it scores more highly on the iOS app store too, getting 4.8 stars out of 5 to the Android version’s 3.7 out of 5 on the Google Play store).

The Big Cartel app allows you to:

Shopify provides a bigger mobile app offering than Big Cartel.

First, there’s the main ‘Shopify’ app which lets you

The Shopify app scores 4.5 and 4.1 stars out of 5 on the iOS and Google Play stores respectively.

The other main app that many Shopify merchants will need to use regularly is its ‘POS’ (point-of-sale) app. This is geared towards merchants using Shopify to sell in physical locations and lets you:

There are also a few other Shopify apps available, including a customer chat app (‘Shopify Inbox’) and a handy logo-making app (‘Hatchful’).

Of these additional apps, the most useful is probably ‘Shopify Inbox’. This lets you add a live chat service to your store that lets you manage queries and share product information with customers; it also lets you program automatic replies to questions submitted via chat.

(Shopify Inbox can be set up to work with social chat services too, like Facebook Messenger and Instagram).

Analytics and reporting

When you’re running an ecommerce business, the more you know about how your users interact with your store, the more you can adapt your offering and brand strategy to clinch more sales.

So, the type of reporting available in an ecommerce platform is very important.

Big Cartel offers some very basic reporting ‘out of the box,’ providing you with a very simple overview of how your visits and sales are going. However, for detailed analytics, you’ll have to connect your store to Google Analytics — and you can only do this if you are on a paid-for plan.

Shopify’s in-built analytics and reporting features outshine those of Big Cartel, giving you:

There are many types of report available within each of the above categories, which allows you to drill down into various perspectives on each.

However, a major downside to Shopify’s approach to reporting is the fact that you are pushed towards the more expensive plans in order to access the most useful reports — many of the reports that merchants will require are only available from the $105 ‘Shopify’ plan and higher.

Shopify also permits you to create custom reports, but only if you are on the ‘Advanced Shopify’ and ‘Shopify Plus’ plans.

So, Shopify certainly beats Big Cartel in the area of reporting functionality — but at a financial cost to the merchant.

Ecommerce features

So far, we’ve looked at how Big Cartel and Shopify stores look, along with some of the key features of their content management systems.

But of course what matters most is how they let you sell your products.

So, let’s drill down into both platforms’ ecommerce features, starting with their payment gateway options.

Payment gateways

A payment gateway is the software that lets you accept credit card payments from customers on your online store.

Shopify offers a built-in payment gateway — ‘Shopify Payments ‘— but also lets you make use of external payment gateways.

By contrast, Big Cartel only uses integrations with external payment providers.

In terms of the number of payment options you can use with both platforms, Shopify lets you connect with over 105 payment gateways. This dwarfs Big Cartel’s integration with just two official payment methods: Stripe and PayPal.

(You should also note that Shopify Payments is not available in all countries, however.)

Many Shopify merchants simply opt for Shopify Payments. As an ‘out of the box’ payment system it involves less setup than an external gateway, and Shopify won’t take a cut of your sales (i.e., a transaction fee) when you use it.

You will however still have to pay a credit card fee on each of your sales if you use Shopify Payments (these vary by plan and by country).

Big Cartel doesn’t charge any transaction fees whatsoever when you accept a payment through your store. However, you’ll still be charged credit card fees by your chosen payment gateway. Taking Stripe as an example, this typically equates to 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in the US (fees can be lower in other territories).

If you use an external payment gateway with Shopify, you will have to pay transaction fees on top of whatever your payment gateway is charging you (2%, 1% and 0.5% on the Basic, Shopify and Advanced Shopify plans respectively).

In short, Shopify gives you a world of options for taking payments, whereas Big Cartel’s options on this front are very limited.

Just make sure to factor in the associated fees if you plan on using a third-party payment gateway with Shopify.

Now, let’s move on to how much stuff you can sell on each platform.

Product numbers and product options

When it comes to inventory size, the differences between Big Cartel and Shopify are clear cut.

Big Cartel limits you to a maximum of 500 products on its highest plan, whereas Shopify allows you to sell an unlimited number of items on all of its plans. This makes Shopify the much more suitable platform for merchants with larger product inventories.

Both platforms allow you to add tags to products and organise them into categories, and create multiple product options and variants.

Big Cartel lets you create 150 options per product listing — these let you offer your products in different sizes, colors, flavors and so on. As you enter options, you also set a price for each option.

You can also use a feature called ‘product variant groups’ to further expand ways of combining product variables. This entails creating groups like size or color, to which you add variations like small, medium, large, or green, pink, black. Each variant group displays in a separate list, allowing customers to choose their preferred combinations. 

Shopify allows three options per product as standard and 100 product variants in total. So, it could be argued that Big Cartel offers more flexibility here.

However, third-party apps such as Infinite Options (by ShopPad) enable Shopify merchants to significantly expand the number of product options and variants.

So, for merchants with products that come in hundreds of variations, Shopify remains the more obvious choice, thanks to the functionality provided by third-party apps. This does often come at an additional cost, however.

Managing product collections

Shopify’s capability when it comes to managing product collections is excellent.

Products can be added to a collection manually or automatically — and if you have a large product range, the ‘automatic’ option can save you a lot of time.

This feature involves setting up simple ‘if-then’ rules — based on product titles, tags, type, price etc. — which automatically categorize your products so that they end up in the correct collection.

So, for example, you could set up a rule that automatically puts all products tagged ‘Vintage’ into a ‘Retro’ collection; or decide that any product with the word ‘Trousers’ in its title should go into a ‘Trousers’ collection.

Once you get to grips with how this works, and so long as you are consistent with how you tag and name your products, you can really save a huge amount of time with this feature.

Big Cartel does let you create categories and assign products to them easily enough — however, you can’t automate the process like you can in Shopify (a ‘bulk edit’ tool can be used to speed things up a bit, however).

Abandoned cart features

One area where there is no contest between Big Cartel and Shopify involves abandoned carts.

Cart abandonment refers to a situation where online store visitors add items to their shopping cart, but exit the store without completing their purchase. Figures for cart abandonment vary, with Baymard Institute estimating an average of 70.01% — that’s a lot of incomplete sales!

Abandoned cart recovery is your friend here — it allows you to email those store visitors who added something to their cart but didn’t complete the checkout process.

The good news for Shopify users is that abandoned cart recovery is a core feature, available on all its plans. The feature lets you send one automated email to users who abandon their cart.

Shopify’s abandoned cart feature allows you to create your abandoned cart emails in an easy-to-use email editor — and it gives you lots of control over the conditions under which these emails are sent to your customers. It provides ‘editable workflows’ (pictured below) that let you create if / then rules for sending these reminders.

By contrast, there is no abandoned cart functionality available out of the box with Big Cartel. You can however connect an email marketing app like AWeber or Mailchimp to proceedings in order to gain this feature — but more configuration will be involved.

So, when it comes to abandoned cart recovery tools, it’s a clear win for Shopify.

Point of Sale (POS) options in Big Cartel and Shopify

Online store owners increasingly have a need for point-of-sale technology to allow them to process transactions 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 is very limited however: you’re basically restricted to using a Stripe card reader.

By contrast, Shopify can service your POS needs out of the box – and an extensive range of POS hardware is available directly from the company.

Shopify has its own dedicated POS app for payment processing, inventory tracking and receipt issuance to customers, so Shopify POS is much more tightly integrated with your online store’s back end.

All Shopify plans cover you for on-the-go sales via the standard ‘Shopify POS Lite’ features. These let you:

However, to get the most out of Shopify POS, you may need to fork out a fee of $89 per month, per location for a ‘Shopify POS Pro’ add-on.

This allows you to do things like:

Ultimately, while you can meet basic POS requirements with Big Cartel, because of its ‘out of the box’ nature and considerably more extensive feature set, the winner in this area is unquestionably Shopify.

Selling digital products

From eBooks and music to printables and craft patterns, more and more people are selling digital products through their online stores.

So, how easy is it to do this with Big Cartel and Shopify?

To sell digital products, Big Cartel requires the use of an app called Pulley — and this brings significant extra costs to the mix.

Pulley provides 8 plans, which are priced according to how many products you wish to sell. Costs range from $6 per month (for a 25 product limit and a 100MB storage limit) to $299 per month (for selling an unlimited number of products using a 30GB storage limit).

Shopify makes it much easier and cheaper to sell digital products: you simply use its free ‘Digital Downloads’ app to do so. In terms of file size limits, you can sell files of up to 5GB in size.

If the free Digital Downloads app doesn’t meet your requirements, there are plenty of other digital download apps available for Shopify that provide enhanced features and functionality.

For example, the SendOwl app for Shopify lets you stamp PDF files with your customer’s name — a great way to reduce fraud. It also lets you ‘drip release’ digital products to your customers over time and it even comes with a brandable streaming video player.

The SkyPilot app lets you bundle digital and physical products together, and sell files of up to 5TB in size.

(You can find out more about using Shopify to sell digital downloads in our ‘How to Sell Music on Shopify‘ article here).

So all in all, it’s a win in this area for Shopify — you can sell digital products out of the box with no extra charges being involved, but if you do want to use another app to sell files, a much wider range of options is available to you.

Custom fields and file uploads

Some merchants will require customers to provide some additional information when purchasing a product — usually in the form of some text, or an uploaded image file.

For example, jewellers might require inscription text; or a t-shirt maker might need an image to print on the t-shirt.

Big Cartel doesn’t let you do this — which is surprising really, given that many of its users work in the sort of creative industries that make personalized products.

Shopify does allow you to capture this data, but it’s a fiddly process. To capture additional text, you’ll need to create a ‘line item property’ by adding some HTML code to your template. The alternative is to pay for an app to do the job.

It’s a similar story with file uploads in Shopify: if you need to offer your customers the option to upload a file during their purchase, you’re going to have to get coding or buy a suitable app.

It would be better, as is the case with competing product BigCommerce, if this was simply a standard feature.

Automatic tax calculations and VAT MOSS

A particular challenge of selling online is that you can end up making sales in a variety of jurisdictions with different tax rates — and this is something that you have to reflect in your products’ pricing.

To help you out here, Big Cartel and Shopify both provide tools that perform tax calculations automatically.

Big Cartel’s system, Sales Tax Autopilot, works well for sellers based in the United States — it automatically applies the correct tax rate for each US state.

Big Cartel sellers outside the US have to set their tax rates manually, however.

Merchants selling to Canada can set tax rates for individual provinces, while merchants in the EU and elsewhere can choose to apply specific tax rates for each country they sell to.

As for Shopify, its automatic tax calculation features work in the following countries:

If you’re based outside these countries, you’ll need to create your tax rules manually, or find a third-party app that does this automatically for you.

One thing to pay particular attention to when it comes to tax calculations is something called VAT MOSS (short for ‘VAT Mini One Stop Shop’).

Regardless of your location, if the consumers of your digital goods are in the EU, you’ve got to apply country-specific rates of VAT to these products — there’s one VAT rate applied for Germany, another for Sweden and so on.

Unfortunately, there is no way to apply these complex VAT MOSS rates in Big Cartel. By contrast, Shopify calculates the relevant tax automatically for you (when you use its free ‘Digital Downloads’ app). This is a fantastic feature and fairly unique to Shopify.

So, because it offers more extensive functionality and in more countries too, the winner when it comes to tax calculation is definitely Shopify.

Now, how do Big Cartel and Shopify compare when it comes to getting your products to your consumer?

Shipping

Both Big Cartel and Shopify provide a wide range of shipping options, allowing you to offer your customers free shipping, flat rate shipping and  in-store pickup amongst other methods.

And, if the built-in shipping features of either platform don’t quite meet your business needs, you can turn to a 3rd party app to gain enhanced functionality. For example, you can use Shipstation with both platforms — this provides a suite of tools for automating aspects of your shipping and managing inventory more effectively.

Shopify’s shipping features are more comprehensive than Big Cartel’s, however.

For a start, Shopify lets you calculate shipping prices based on weight — somewhat inexplicably, Big Cartel doesn’t.

Second, Shopify’s built-in real time shipping quotes allow you to show your customers a ‘live’ shipping price for your items from a variety of postal companies.

Third, Shopify users on the ‘Shopify’ plan and higher can avail of free shipping insurance when they purchase Shopify shipping labels.

And, if you are based in the USA, Canada, France, Australia, Italy, Spain or the UK, the ‘Shopify Shipping’ service gives you discounted rates from several local postal services (USPS, UPS, DHL Express, Canada Post, Sendle, Colissimo, Mondial Relay, Evri, DPD, Chronopost, Correos and Poste Italiane). These discounts can be as high as 88%, depending on the plan.

For more detailed info on ‘Shopify Shipping’, check out the video below.

But what about that other type of shipping that is all the rage — dropshipping?

Dropshipping with BigCartel vs Shopify

Dropshipping is a way to sell products online without incurring the cost of ordering stock. Rather than making, storing or fulfilling goods yourself, all you do is take an order through your online store, and leave its fulfilment to a supplier.

Big Cartel offers two useful dropshipping options, via Printful and The Art of Where. Both these services let you upload artwork which is then printed onto products that you can sell to your audience — with manufacture and delivery being handled by the companies involved.

(The below video shows you how the integration between Printful and Big Cartel works).

Shopify is the hands-down winner in the dropshipping department, however, giving you the option of working with hundreds of suppliers. A quick search for dropshipping integrations in the Shopify app store currently returns 486 results.

Importantly, most of these apps do not restrict you to just selling items involving printed artwork or logos — they let you dropship a really wide range of products.

The bottom line here is that Big Cartels’s dropshipping options are a good fit for its user base of artists and visual creatives, who will appreciate the opportunity to turn their artistic efforts into printed goods — but Shopify simply offers too many options for Big Cartel to keep up.

Multi-currency selling

Displaying prices in your customers’ currency — or, at the very least, giving your customers the ability to change the currency to their own one — generally leads to more sales. The ability to sell products in local currencies is therefore very important.

Different degrees of multi-currency functionality is available from Big Cartel and Shopify — with Shopify’s being more extensive.

Although Big Cartel lets you use 25 different currencies in your store, only one can be enabled.

By contrast, thanks to its ‘Shopify Markets’ feature, Shopify facilitates true multi-currency selling, prompting users to pick their relevant currency (via a country selector) and enabling them to check out in that currency.

There are restrictions to multi-currency functionality in Shopify however, which depend on your plan.

First, you can only adjust currency conversion rates manually if you’re on a (fairly expensive!) ‘Advanced Shopify’ or ‘Shopify Plus’ plan (doing so gives you fine grain control over product pricing for different markets).

Second, it is only on the enterprise-level ‘Shopify Plus’ plan that you can avail of fully automatic currency conversion — where IP addresses are used to work out visitor locations and automatically display the relevant currency for your customer.

And finally, the built-in multi-currency features only work if you use Shopify Payments, Shopify’s own payment gateway.

You can do away with these restrictions however by using a third-party app to handle currency conversion – there are a lot of these available in Shopify’s app store.

I would prefer to see automatic currency conversion available on all Shopify plans — not just Shopify Plus — but the functionality provided is nonetheless significantly better than what’s on offer from most key competing platforms.

So all in all, when it comes to multi-currency selling it’s another clear win for Shopify.

Integration with other apps

Both Big Cartel and Shopify feature ‘app stores’ that provide you with ways of increasing your store’s feature set, or allow you to integrate it with other web applications. 

Big Cartel has around 27 apps available, which include tools for:

Now, while a selection of 27 apps might seem rather small — and pales in comparison to the 8,000 or so available for Shopify — it is important to note that Big Cartel also integrates with syncing service Zapier, which lets you hook Big Cartel up to approximately 5,000 apps.

The downside here is that using Zapier often means paying an additional monthly fee — not all integrations are free, or are limited to a certain number of ‘syncs’ between apps each month.

Shopify’s app and integration options are much more extensive. The 8,000 or so apps in the Shopify app store testify to the sheer number of merchants using Shopify and also the broader ‘ecosystem’ that has grown up around the Shopify platform.

You’ll find everything under the sun here: accounting apps, CRM tools, email marketing integrations, social media add ons — there’s a really wide selection of apps to choose from.

The only downside here is that given the large number of apps available for Shopify, finding the right ones for your project might feel a bit daunting. However, the search box in the Shopify app store — along with clearly defined categories — make finding an app to suit your needs pretty straightforward.

Always remember to factor in the additional costs associated with adding paid apps, however — those monthly charges can start to add up!

But overall, when it comes to apps and integrations for your online store, the winner is — again! — Shopify.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is absolutely vital to the success of any online store — without traffic, it’s impossible to generate sales.

So, how do Big Cartel and Shopify compare on the SEO front?

Well, Big Cartel does some things that Google likes — it gives you:

However, it’s not all good news.

First, a key SEO feature, the ability to edit URL structure and create redirects, is very strangely implemented in Big Cartel.

The structure of page URLs helps Google understand what your content is about — so it’s important to have full control over this (you can read Google’s guidelines on URL structure here).

Redirects are important because when you change a URL, you are telling Google where the new version of that page lives, and asking it to index the new URL instead of the old.

It seems that in Big Cartel you can edit product URLs, but you can’t redirect them (old URLs automatically redirect to the home page, not your new product).

As for pages, you can’t edit their URLs (they are created based on the title you give a page), but you can redirect them.

This is a very weird setup which means that you will have to think extremely carefully about how you name your pages and products.

Another big omission in Big Cartel’s feature set is the ability to change meta descriptions (the page or product descriptions that are typically displayed under titles in search results).

This matters because the quality of meta descriptions can influence clickthrough rates (CTR) in search engines, which in turn can boost rankings over time (higher CTRs can lead to higher positions in search results). So not being able to create or change them is a definite SEO disadvantage.

By contrast, Shopify gives you full control over all these aspects of SEO.

There’s no issue with changing product or page URLs in Shopify; and redirects can be easily created (automatically, if you like). Adding and changing meta descriptions is very simple too.

It’s also much easier to get Shopify to meet Google’s new Core Web Vitals standards — a set of targets relating to the speed and responsiveness of a website. You can do this in Shopify using apps, or by editing the site code.

Now, because SEO is not exclusively about the technical setup of a website (strong content and external links to your site are hugely important too), it is definitely possible to attain good search rankings for a Big Cartel store.

But if you are serious about SEO, or operating in a highly-competitive niche, then it makes far more sense to opt for Shopify.

GDPR Compliance

Please note: I am not a lawyer and what follows isn’t legal advice; it is my personal take on how GDPR issues impact Big Cartel and Shopify store owners. 

In 2018, the European Union introduced its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — a comprehensive set of rules on data storage and online privacy. These rules apply to any website that receives visits from the EU, no matter where that website is located.

There can be significant financial penalties for breaching GDPR regulations. Large companies such as Google and British Airways have already been fined tens of millions of Euros for doing so — but financial penalties for transgressions apply to business owners of any size.

As I see it, the main aspects of GDPR rules require online store owners to:

While both Big Cartel and Shopify make it easy enough to meet the first three requirements, sorting out the cookie consent issue requires work on both platforms.

In the case of Shopify, you’ll need to find a suitable cookie banner app from its app store (many are available, but not all provide genuine compliance with the ‘prior consent’ rule).

Unfortunately no such apps are available in Big Cartel’s app store, so you’ll need to look into a separate solution like CookieYes to add a compliant banner.

So, Big Cartel and Shopify could both do more to make GDPR-compliance — at least in the area of cookie consent — easier.

(For the record, one platform that handles cookie consent particularly well is BigCommerce.)

But of the two platforms under discussion here, the winner when it comes to GDPR is Shopify — simply because its app store does offer adequate cookie consent banners, and Big Cartel’s doesn’t.

Security

The main advantage of using hosted platforms like Big Cartel and Shopify is that the companies that make the software take responsibility for the security of the platforms.

This differs, for example from running a self-hosted WordPress site, where you constantly have to stay on top of software, theme and plugin updates to ensure there are no security vulnerabilities that could lead to your website getting hacked.

There are a couple of Big Cartel vs Shopify security differences worth paying attention to, however.

Two factor authentication

Two Factor Authentication — or 2FA — is an additional layer of protection used to ensure the security of online accounts beyond a username and password.

Typically, an additional piece of information — such as an SMS message or code generated by an authenticator app — can be requested by online services before access to an account is granted. This makes that account much harder to hack.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to enable 2FA on a Big Cartel store; but Shopify lets you set it up easily (you can use SMS, an authenticator app or a security key as your second means of authentication).

PCI Compliance 

PCI compliance relates to all companies that accept or transmit credit cardholder data.

(The full name for this is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard; it’s usually shortened to PCI or PCI DSS).

Shopify is fully PCI compliant, so you don’t need to worry about the security of credit card transactions.

Big Cartel, on the other hand, is not PCI compliant.

Now, given that all store payments with Big Cartel go through third-party payment gateways (Stripe and PayPal) you can simply avail of your payment processor’s PCI compliance. However — and as Big Cartel’s merchant user agreement makes clear, you still remain responsible for your Big Cartel store’s potential liability.

So, if greater PCI compliance is a must for you, the safer bet here is Shopify.

Customer support

If you’re new to ecommerce, then the quality of customer support is going to be a key concern. So how do both platforms stack up against each other in this department?

Well, Big Cartel has a decent number of help articles in its support center that provide plenty of insights for making the most of your store. These articles are clear, well written, and packed with useful tips and information on all aspects of running a store on the Big Cartel platform.

The picture is less rosy with Big Cartel when it comes to support from real people however — the availability of this isn’t great. The company’s 12 support staff are only available Monday-Friday from 8am to 6pm EST. Furthermore, Big Cartel’s only support channel is email — no live chat or phone support is available.

And finally, Big Cartel’s customer service is only offered in English — other ecommerce platforms (including Shopify) offer support in a variety of languages.

The support options offered by Shopify are much more extensive. Shopify provides chat, email, and phone support, and you can contact the company 24/7. The support materials provided come in over 20 languages, too.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that you only get access to the contact details for Shopify’s support team once you’ve already searched for answers on the help site. It would be better if Shopify removed this barrier and gave more direct support access.

Another thing to be aware of is that the type of Shopify support you get may vary depending on whether you’re enquiring about a Shopify-built app or template, or a third-party one. Shopify’s in-house support for its own templates and apps is very comprehensive, but the quality of support for third-party ones will depend on their developers.

Big Cartel vs Shopify: conclusion

So what’s the verdict? Well, all things considered, it’s hard not to view Shopify as the winner in a Big Cartel vs Shopify shootout. The platform provides merchants with a huge range of sales features that Big Cartel simply doesn’t — an unlimited product inventory, more templates, abandoned cart recovery, a huge app library, multi-currency selling, product export, 24/7 customer support and much more besides.

BigCartel has an edge over Shopify when it comes to pricing however — it is unquestionably cheaper; and its free plan is more than good enough for those with very simple selling needs. It’s also commendable for its plucky, independent, and ethically minded ethos; this a good fit for its target audience of ‘creative’ sellers. 

But in pure ecommerce terms, Shopify offers pretty much everything you need, whatever your size or industry — and it can facilitate the scaling of your business as it grows.

Below you’ll find a final summary of why I’d use either platform over the other, but I’d strongly recommend that you try both Big Cartel and Shopify for yourself — experimenting with these two store builders will help you figure out which platform chimes with your way of doing online business.

You’ll find links to the free trials of both Big Cartel and Shopify below:

Pros and cons of using Big Cartel vs Shopify

Alternatives to Big Cartel and Shopify

If you’re hoping to build an online store, there are plenty of alternatives to Big Cartel and Shopify out there.

If you’re working in a ‘creative’ area — as many prospective Big Cartel users will be — Squarespace is an obvious alternative to Big Cartel. It’s great for presenting portfolios of artworks, photographs or music — and on top of that, its ecommerce features are significantly stronger than Big Cartel’s. You can learn more about Squarespace here.

Similarly, Wix might work for some creatives as it is budget-friendly and provides a wide range of presentation options. You can learn more about Wix here.

If you’re hoping to build a feature-rich ecommerce site, you should definitely consider BigCommerce. It offers a huge range of selling features out of the box, and its multi-currency features are particularly strong. Dip into our BigCommerce review and our BigCommerce versus Shopify comparison to learn more about this platform.

Another option is GoDaddy — like Big Cartel, this is one of the more economical — but basic — ecommerce options available. Check out our Shopify vs GoDaddy comparison to see through how this platform stacks up against Shopify.

If you make a lot of in-person sales, you could also consider Square. It has a whole host of POS hardware and software solutions available and it comes with an easy-to-use online store builder. you can learn more about Square in our full Shopify vs Square comparison.

Finally, it’s worth investigating online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Etsy (Etsy, like Big Cartel, is targeted in particular at merchants operating in creative and artistic niches). You can learn about these platforms’ pros and cons  in our Shopify versus Amazon, Shopify versus eBay and Shopify versus Etsy comparisons.

Did you know? We also have an in-depth Big Cartel review available.