Big Cartel offers a fantastic, affordable platform to artists and makers who are just starting in ecommerce. As your business grows, it could become too expensive.
There are many awesome alternatives available to Big Cartel. In this post, we will review and compare each one to help you decide which is best for your needs.
The best Big Cartel alternatives – summary
If you want to create an online store quickly and easily, this is the best option.
It can be used to sell physical goods, digital products, and subscriptions. It’s also very easy to use.
Shopify is an excellent option for those who want to launch an ecommerce site with many products.
If you need a website creator that has ecommerce capabilities, it is worth a look.
Sellfy
We recommend Sellfy as the best Big Cartel alternative. Sellfy and Big Cartel have similar target markets, but both are easy to use. It offers many additional features and advantages that Big Cartel does not.
Sellfy, unlike Big Cartel, allows you to add unlimited products, regardless of the plan you choose. This is especially important for sellers with a large catalog.
Even if you haven’t got many products to sell, you still don’t want your ecommerce platform to limit the growth of your company. Sellfy gives you the flexibility to grow your business in the future.
Sellfy supports a wider range of products than Big Cartel. Sellfy allows you to sell not only physical products but also digital downloads and subscriptions, as well as video content.
You’d have to integrate Big Cartel with a POD fulfillment service like Printful or the Art of Where in order to sell printed merchandise. Sellfy comes with print-on-demand right out of the box.
Sign up for Sellfy, select the products that you wish to sell from their POD catalog, and upload your design.
Sellfy prints and ships the order from their fulfillment centers around the world when a client places an online order. You pay the base price of the product and keep the profit. Cool, huh?
It is also super simple to create your store with Sellfy. In less than an hour, you can have everything ready to sell online. You can also use the marketing and sales tools built into the platform to convert more customers.
Shopify
The best Big Cartel Alternative for serious ecommerce business is Shopify. It has one of the most powerful feature sets and one of our favorite features.
Shopify offers unmatched flexibility and scalability, making it the ideal choice for serious owners of ecommerce sites.
Shopify offers unlimited bandwidth and products, so no matter how busy your website is or how many items you sell, you will never outgrow the platform.
The software comes with a number of powerful tools to help you run your business and increase sales.
This includes robust tools for order and inventory management, a drag-and-drop store builder with a variety of options, a network for shipping and fulfillment, a chatbot called Shopify Inbox, customer analytics, emailing, social media integrations, and automation tools.
Shopify App Store has over 6,000 add-ons from third parties. Install them in your Shopify store with a few clicks and instantly expand its functionality. Big Cartel, on the other hand, only offers a handful of add-ons. Shopify’s flexibility is also a result of its extensibility.
Shopify is also a winner when it comes down to SEO. It offers SEO best practices, clean URLs, and robot.txt access. Alt text is also available.
Shopify has a simple, clean interface. It’s very easy to use. It offers around 100 themes for your store (mostly premium themes, but there are also some great free themes). Big Cartel, on the other hand, only offers 18 store themes.
Shopify will take a small percentage of your merchant sales (0.5% to 2%) if they choose a third-party payment gateway. Shopify does not accept any other payment methods. Shopify earns the majority of its revenue through this little extra cost.
It’s possible to get around this by using Shopify as your payment processor. However, if you prefer PayPal or Stripe, it is not the best option.
Payhip
Big Cartel’s biggest problem is that it does not allow you to sell digital goods natively. Pulley is a third-party paid tool that you must sign up separately for and then connect to your store.
Payhip, on the other hand, makes it easy to sell digital products of all kinds. It supports digital downloads as well as online courses, coaching, memberships, and more. No third-party integrations are required.
It’s packed with features that will help you to create digital products and to deliver them to customers.
It allows you to set up the checkout so that your customers can download the files instantly after purchasing them on your website. You can also email the link to download to your customers immediately following the purchase.
Payhip’s PDF stamping function can be used to limit the number of downloads and discourage illegal sharing. Use Payhip for software license keys.
You can create online courses and then deliver them to your students using a course player that is branded.
Students can access multimedia content such as videos, quizzes, and text from their account page. You can also set up drip-content delivery to control the time students have access to individual modules and lessons.
We also appreciate how simple Payhip is to use. The store builder and checkout process are seamless.
Payhip will even detect your customer’s location and automatically apply the appropriate VAT and tax rate to their transaction. This makes it easy for new sellers and ensures they are tax-compliant.
All plans offer unlimited revenue and products, but only Pro offers no transaction fees.
Squarespace
Due to its extensive television and influencer campaigns, Squarespace has become one of the best-known website builders in the industry. The solution is known for being easy to use and allows you to create a store with just a few mouse clicks.
Squarespace’s drag-and-drop store editor allows you to customize the responsive templates easily.
Squarespace, although best known for site-building features, also offers a range of ecommerce tools that can help you grow your business. Squarespace allows you to manage your entire store from a single dashboard. This includes shipping, taxes, and fulfillment.
Squarespace is also compatible with your favorite payment gateways and e-commerce tools, such as PayPal and Stripe. Printful, for POD products and FedEx are all included. Squarespace also offers a wide range of SEO tools, as well as other marketing options.
Squarespace allows you to connect your social media accounts and create automation that will push your website content out to your social audience.
Squarespace can also be a great option for those who want to sell services instead of products. Create intuitive websites that allow you to manage calendars, take bookings, and more.
Squarespace allows you to build a professional and sleek online store with just a few simple clicks.