

Honestly, I find this technique quite cumbersome and it has the potential to ‘take people away’ from your main store site.Įven as I go through all the other stores created using Big Cartel, I found little to no existence of blogs on these sites. The way to go around this is by integrating with external blog sites such as Blogspot or Tumblr. They do allow you to create pages, but that doesn’t count. Unfortunately, Big Cartel doesn’t have a blogging feature. The more you write about it, the more people will notice your work. Storytelling is what distinguish artists in the modern eCommerce landscape. There are many things that you can write about – what inspires your work, what’s new in your product range and so on. In order to rank on the search engines naturally and to engage with a bigger size audience, you need to have a blogging feature. Even with 300 products, it doesn’t make any difference because they are merely images that lack textual information.

What this means is that a site with only product listings isn’t easily discovered on the internet. You can still set things up, but it just takes a longer time.ģ) While the platform is good for building an online store, it falls short when it comes to creating a business with content. It’s a very geeky thing that often confused people who don’t know much about web stuff. The bad news is, you need to wade through several technical steps in order to integrate the domain to the online store. The good news is, the domain and hosting aren’t bound together so it’s easier if you want to move to a different platform later. That’s not a lot of options when you consider the number of artists that are out there, craving to stand out from one another.Ģ) Using a custom domain name is the best way to start an online business, but Big Cartel doesn’t provide an in-house service for that. However, Big Cartel only offers 13 templates to choose from. Not every eCommerce platform is created equal and these are some disadvantages you need to be aware of when using Big Cartel.ġ) Every artist has his/her own branding style and that should be reflected in their store designs through customization or at least, with more template variety. This is particularly helpful if you already have a big social following for your work. There’s also a ‘classroom’ section which is basically a collection of blog posts that discuss the current topics in the eCommerce world.Ĥ) A feature that you may find interesting is the ability to integrate the store into a Facebook business page.

There are generous spaces provided to describe the product detail and sufficient image allocation for viewing.Ģ) The editor isn’t clunky either and you should be able to navigate with ease even if you don’t have any experience setting up an online store.ģ) The help section is only a click away and it covers the basic walkthrough for each feature available on the platform. The Prosįirstly, let’s start with the things that I like about Big Cartel.ġ) In terms of product listings, Big Cartel isn’t difficult to use.
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I always feel that creating your own online store is better than selling through crowded marketplaces like Etsy or CafePress. If you are looking to use Big Cartel website builder, chances are, you are an artist who has merchandise such as design prints, artwork or craft to sell online.
