Big Cartel Reviews 90

Intuitive, Easy to use and simple. Im an artist and sell art prints and original art. I set up my store on the couch at my mother in laws house in 2019/2020 and have used it for the past 5 years. There are limitations - but if you are just starting out- it’s a perfect choice.

Any company that hides their address and phone can't have good customer service. I'm sorry. Filed under not trustworthy. I was thinking about setting up a store, but not without a way to contact someone. Stay away.

They raised their prices and guess they don’t care about people who always supported them and paid for a store even with no sales ever. Asked about a discount coupon and they said they don’t do that. Tired of trying to stay with a company that does not care about the seller. Raised their lowest from $9.99 to $15.99. Crazy!

I believe a lot of the negative reviews here are with the businesses using the Big Cartel platorm, rather than Big Cartel itself.

I'm a photographer who was looking for an online store to sell my prints. I looked at a few options such as Squarespace and Shopify, but this one suited me best.

Its relatively simple to set up and the ability to import your Etsy store items into the shop is great. That saved a LOT of time. The only issue I had was pointing a domain to the store, but Big Cartel's support was very good at sorting that out.

I would say that improvements could be made to the design of dashboard and the store designer, plus the templates you are given to work with are a bit basic in functionality and design. More control over SEO would be good too, but so far I'm happy with everything.

It works well for starters as it can help you build a simple platform however you have to pay for support and specific features I kept the website for a year then out of the blue the package I had went from 19.99 to 30.00. I know the economy is in a need right now but geeeeesh a $10 increase. This was a bit drastic for what they offer. Limited payment options as well. Much more better options available

FRAUD. NEVER RECEIVED ORDER

I would highly recommend using Big Cartel, it's very easy to use , lots of different themes to use as your website, affordable and the customer service is excellent.

This ecommerce platform is good for small businesses. If you're just starting out then I would recommend, very straight forward, easy to use and affordable. One thing I would say is that there needs to be more options in terms of designs. It's a bit limited but once you change colours, layout and fonts you're good

Had a beautiful meal, the meat and salad freshly cooked, beautifully presented, tasty, I would definitely eat from here again. Excellent

This platform is a joke for artist that sell out quickly. I’ve been a poster collector for a decade and I’ve always had nothing but issues with this site. If you are an artist and you take your web store seriously I would switch immediately. Yesterday I was charged for my purchase and my order was not confirmed. This happened to me quite. Few times in my ten years of collecting posters. Go with something better. As an upset customer. Please switch… for the fans.

Great survice free platiform and they have alot options on the free one

As a libertarian, I am all about personal freedoms. But when it comes to business, nobody should know what the people inside the company support in their personal lives. If you're publicly supporting political agendas and posting your professional position with it, bringing the reputation of the business with it, I can't support your business. Sorry, but you just lost a customer.

This is what I got back after inquiry of my order
Don't buy anything it is a scam.
Package lost in transit sorry we will refund 30% great result, Not good enough.

Purchased a Ludo doll from WolfTummy.
WolfTummy refused to send, refused to refund and blocked me on social media.
BigCartel refuse to get involved.

From reading the reviews on Trust Pilot regarding Big Cartel it's obvious some poor reviews are about private sellers on a website with "...bigcartel.com" at the end of their url, not about Big Cartel itself. I love using Big Cartel. I've been with them for years. I pay $9.99 a month and did buy my own domain name for my online store which is a must if you're going to be an online retailer and want people to take you seriously. So I don't have the "[store name].bigcartel.com" on my url. It's just [storename].com for my url. I do have the "powered by bigcartel" text at the bottom. I don't see any problem with that. Customer service for Big Cartel is very responsive.

They do collect and remit sales tax on all orders in the United States. Some states may have issues with that but California is a state that works with them. I live in California. I had an issue with California because I had a seller's permit and also Big Cartel was remitting sales tax to California for all orders in my store. California contacted me and said I had failed to file my sales tax paper work and pay sales tax. I went back and forth with California and told them several times even though I have a valid seller's permit Big Cartel is remitting the sales tax from my store to California. Eventually a representative from the state of California got on the phone with me and explained to me they did find the info Big Cartel was submitting about my store to California but the problem was that is separate from my own personal seller's permit I have with California. California told me if I'm going to only use Big Cartel's services then I should cancel my personal seller's permit because I don't need one if I'm just using Big Cartel and relying on their services to remit sales tax for me. After that I canceled my personal seller's permit in California as I'm not selling in a physical location in California; I'm only using Big Cartel. If I was also selling my products outside of a website powered by Big Cartel then I would need a California seller's permit.

From my experience Big Cartel is the best way to sell online. They have easy to follow instructions for integrating your domain name into their storefront and then your soter website is [storename].com. They remit sales tax for you in most States in the USA, that saves a lot of time, and they have never tried to upsell me with pointless addons. I used Shopify before and that was way more expensive. I got spammed by shopify to upgrade and buy their stuff all the time. Shopify also billed me a percentage of every sale. And I had to do my own sales tax. With Big Cartel I pay a small monthly fee and that's it. They handle sales tax for me. I use Stripe for collecting customer payments. I do have a contact page on my store and when customers send me a message it comes to my email.

In summary Big Cartel works and is simple without any gimmicks.

I opened my shop on Big Carel in the Fall of 2021 and everything has worked smoothly since. I appreciate it's just one price a month and that they remit taxes to states. I have my store integrated w/ my personal website and I appreciate all the tools. There's also effortless integration with PIRATE SHIP for shipping. I don't know what the bad reviews are about, but as an artist with a small sales side business, I didn't want a store to take over my life and this was the best option

I order two pair of shoes in August for 214 dollars haven’t receive my shoes yet n they won’t give me refund

I'd like to say first off: Big Cartel has NO control over people that use their cart system, they are only providing a cart system to users. All you can do is alert BC and hopefully they can remove those sellers.

Anyway, here is my experience:

I've been with BigCartel for 10 years. I am an independent shirt brand owner and printer. I've seen the ups and downs of this business.

When I first joined BC, I didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't even know if anything would sell. And they offered a free site where I could list a few products. So I did. And my business grew. So I upgraded my BC user plan, made my own domain name and all of that.

In the beginning of my time with BC, they seemed really active in making improvements. They added more payment options during checkout for customers. And they actively seemed to want to grow. Seemed to want input on what they could make better for us.

Over time, as my business grew, I partnered with a few retailers. And my Big Cartel site sort of stagnated. I wanted to have more control in order to get more direct sales via my site. I soon discovered that integrations with BC are SUPER limited. And they have no real plans to improve beyond the basics. And the basics are just sort of eye candy things in reality. They don't serve a great purpose. Nor have they evolved with the times.

The biggest kick in the teeth is when they finally set up automations in MailChimp. You could automate customer purchase emails, add a pop up subscribe box to the site. And send Abandoned Cart email reminders! That was THE biggest thing I wanted. So I diligently set it up. HERE we go!

But...MailChimp integration was set up and ready to roll. But no abandoned cart emails where being triggered? Why? Because even though BC touted that feature, they refuse to allow it or activate it. They claim it's due to privacy issues? Huh? I call it due to laziness.

If you go to BC today and look at their MailChimp integration descriptor. You will see that they still list abandoned cart recovery as a feature. They were too lazy to even remove that. Instead they put a couple asterisks at the bottom in case you want to know that they don't allow the feature. Maybe you won't notice?

When I complained about it to customer service, I was told that it sounded like "I was maybe getting too big for BC. And that maybe I should move on.".

So you see, certain features like Abandoned Cart are already set up on your email service providers side. But on BC's side? Nope. They can't be bothered!

You see, BC LOVES to call themselves "Indie". It's just another term for lazy when it comes to them. They're not indie at all. Lazyyyy.

So. Sadly. That is what I am being forced to do. Migrate to a new cart provider that offers all of the services that Big Cartel simply WON'T provide.

Here's the first kicker - once you get up to their top tier plan, it's not that cheap any longer. Especially when you consider their absolute disregard for what the customer desires.

Here's the second kicker - Big Cartel doesn't even offer a way to export your product catalog. Imagine having to manually add 200-300 products to a new provider site. All because Big Cartel is too Indie to be bothered.

Not ALL bad though! Customer service is usually prompt and polite.

If you want to try and see if you can sell a few products, then go for it. Set up a free site and see what happens.

But as soon as you decide that you want more, then run away quickly. Big Cartel has zero plans to help you grow. They're way too Indie (lazy) for that.

First time I bought from big cartel not a problem. Fast forward two years and place an order, I don’t receive my package, I write 3 friendly emails, nothing. I write a nice but pissed email, nothing, waiting on my charge back from the bank. Don’t buy from them, it sucks because I love the merch one band was selling. No customer support 0/10 don’t buy from boarder line scammers.