Setting up an online store can be a hassle if you think about using WooCommerce or Spotify. If you are looking for a lightweight ecommerce builder with no or little plans to scale soon, Big Cartel is the way to go. The builder offers just the right mix of pre-designed themes, search engine optimization tools, order management system, real-time stats, and a few other things that make it powerful enough for a small business.
Big Cartel is often considered as a “light” ecommerce platform and its sets of features, advantages, and disadvantages do justify its plans & usability. If you are planning to use Big Cartel for your business, here’s a straightforward Big Cartel Review 2020 that sums up answers for all your questions.
Pros & Cons of using Big Cartel?
Pros
- Big Cartel is a basic easy to use ecommerce platform.
- It is free to use suitable for small stores and businesses
- Clean navigation & user interface
- Time Sensitive Discounts & other promotional tools
- Let’s you tweak site’s code with a powerful HTML & JavaScript
Cons
- Basic and pre-designed themes
- Requires coding knowledge to blow its lack of customization barrier
- It is not very flexible or scalable
- It has limited payment options
- Lacks in-depth features and tools for a large ecommerce store
What types of businesses/online stores it is suitable for?
In our brief Big Cartel Review 2020, we found out a perfect clientele that the platform works well for. First up, businesses and stores that aren’t looking for scaling and those with limited products use Big Cartel. It is essentially used by artists and creatives such as Malika Favre. Since it can be customized extensively by writing codes, it is a great option for creatives as they can customize it beyond someone’s comprehension.
Big Cartel Review 2020: Features & Tools
You won’t use any product or service without knowing the actual features it embodies, would you? Big Cartel isn’t as powerful as Shopify but it does bring a lot on the table.
With Big Cartel, you can create a customized checkout page. You can access everything about the orders and tracking transactions and more using its website or app version. Big Cartel supports Stripe, Square, and PayPal and isn’t PCI compliant so you will have to adhere to PCI guidelines by yourself. The best thing here is that Big Cartel doesn’t charge any fees whatsoever except the 2.2% + 30p rate that credit card companies usually charge on any transaction.
Big Cartel supports a plethora of apps and integrations under its Store Management Apps feature. This includes Google Analytics, LiveChat, Zapier, Pulley, and others. You can also use it to create promotional pop-ups, sell goods online, and drop-ship products.
Next up Big Cartel sites don’t have any customer login which means anyone can order something as a guest which saves time as well as prevents users from getting discouraged while transacting on the sites. There’s no option to bulk upload a whole lot of products so that’s a bit of letdown but considering the fact that Big Cartel isn’t made for a highly scalable business, it is the right choice and it is free to use. Also, there’s no abandoned cart recovery as well so you could be missing on some incomplete orders there.
Big Cartel does offer a “lite” experience of ecommerce with a few features on-board. It has customer support via emails five days a week between 9 am to 6 pm EST. So yes, this was a very brief Big Cartel Review 2020.
