A review of Big Cartel, an online e-commerce solution for creative entrepreneurs.

I recently set up a new store for my art and icons at Big Cartel. In just a couple of hours, I'd set up my shop, customised it and launched it. The same day I was making my first sales!

Big Cartel is a simple and beautiful shopping cart for independent artists, designers, crafters, writers, jewelers and musicians. It offers an easy-to-use e-commerce solution that gives users a way to create a small shop and sell their products through their own domain or a unique URL within the Big Cartel site. You can easily customize your Big Cartel store to fit your web site and brand.

FEATURES:

• Quick and easy to set up and maintain

• Easy to customize to fit your brand by changing the colours and graphics in the themes, or by using custom code and your own URL to match your site

• A permanently free plan for up to five products (!)

• Keep track of your inventory and automatically mark products as “Sold Out” when they’re gone

• Coming soon: sell digital, downloadable products online, such as e-books, music, video, art, photography and software through Big Cartel's equally beautiful and easy-to-use sister service Pulley

• You can turn on maintenance mode while you tinker with your store

• Friendly and fast support

• Customers can pay with a credit card or a PayPal account

• View your dashboard to get an instant overview of how your online store is doing

• You can reward loyal customers by creating discount codes to give them a percentage off their purchase

LIMITATIONS:

• There's a limit of 100 products

• No affiliate programme

COSTS:

Big Cartel doesn't take a percentage of your sales, instead there are three monthly plans. There's a completely free plan as well as monthly paid plans with expanded features. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your account at any time. For example, you could test the waters with the free plan, and upgrade when your hobby turns into a profession or simply when you feel ready for it. All you need to get started is a PayPal Business or Premier account. Here's how you sign up for a PayPal account and here are the current PayPal fees.

THOUGHTS:

Big Cartel is such a simple and beautiful e-commerce solution that I feel I can spend my time making art and icons instead of pouring my time into fiddling with web stuff which can be so time consuming for a one person creative indie business like mine. Big Cartel is an online shopping cart system that makes it easy to sell in style.