Big Cartel vs Shopify eCommerce Website Builder Comparison : Which is Better?

Big Cartel and Shopify are two eCommerce platforms that help you sell things online. They both provide comparable services— helping you build and manage an online store—but they go about it in different ways.

Big Cartel is best suited for artists and those who sell creative products. Shopify better suits those who plan to sell a wide range of products. Big Cartel merchants tend to be small independent stores, while Shopify typically serves larger businesses.

Shopify vs Big Cartel: Which is Better?

No two eCommerce website builders look the same, and that’s especially true when it comes to Big Cartel and Shopify. While Big Carter is more user friendly, Shopify has more features. Here’s a quick glance at how they compare.

Feature	Big Cartel	Shopify
User Friendliness	5	4.5
Value For Money	4	4.5
Creative Control	4.5	4
Features	3	4
Blogging	2	4.5
Marketing Tools	3	4.5
SEO	4	4.5
Support Help	4	5

User Friendliness

User-friendliness is how easily the average person can use these services. We don’t like website builders that require you to know a lot of code to understand. The simpler the features, the faster you can build your website.

Big Cartel User Friendliness

Big Cartel beats Shopify in terms of design. The site touts itself as being built by artists, for artists, so the site is certainly pretty to look at. But does aesthetic beauty translate to beautiful design?

We think so. Setting up your website is very simple. Once you purchase a membership with Big Cartel and create an account, you’re directed to a page containing 3×3 boxes, sort of in a cube shape. They walk you through adding products for your site, choosing a template, adding payment options, and tweaking the design.

Shopify User Friendliness

Shopify doesn’t have a major learning curve, but setting up a website isn’t as straightforward as it is with Big Cartel. Shopify has more features, so your eye has to wander around each section before finding what you’re looking for.

One example is the home page. It shows your earnings, top products, top pages people visit, and the money you made that day. It’s not a bad looking page, but the amount of information could make you feel a bit lost or overwhelmed when you first use it.

The Winner: Big Cartel

Big Cartel beats Shopify in terms of user-friendliness. You can tell Big Cartel put a lot of effort into its graphic and user design. Setting up a website doesn’t feel overwhelming, and each page looks organized and elegant.

Value for Money

An eCommerce platform is only valuable if it can meet all your needs as a merchant. Both Big Cartel and Shopify offer multiple plans that cater to different business needs and budgets. Here’s how they stack up:

Plan	Price per Month	Products Allowed	Key Features
Big Cartel
Gold	Free	Up to 5	1 image per product, sell online & in-person, accept cards & PayPal, mobile apps
Platinum	$15	Up to 50	5 images per product, shipment tracking, inventory tracking, bulk editing, custom domain
Diamond	$30	Up to 500	25 images per product, prioritized support, audience-targeted ads
Shopify
Basic Shopify	$29	Unlimited	2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, 77% shipping discount, 10 inventory locations, POS Lite
Shopify	$79	Unlimited	2.7% + 30¢ per transaction, 88% shipping discount, 5 staff accounts, POS Lite
Advanced Shopify	$299	Unlimited	2.5% + 30¢ per transaction, 88% shipping discount, custom reports, 15 staff accounts
Shopify Plus	$2,300	Unlimited	Custom rates, 88% shipping discount, 200 inventory locations, priority support

Big Cartel Value

While Big Cartel is more affordable, it’s also more limiting when it comes to the products you can sell and the number of images you can use. On the other hand, they do have a free option, which is great for artists who are just wanting to dip their toes in with a few products.

Shopify Value

Shopify’s Basic plan is about the same price as Big Cartel’s Diamond plan, but you can sell unlimited items and you get a discount on shipping. However, you will have to pay a transaction fee on each item sold.

Where Shopify stands out is its inventory and staff management systems. This is great for businesses who have multiple locations or a large team that helps them manage sales.

The Winner: Shopify

While Big Cartel is cheaper in the beginning, it’s very easy to outgrow. If you plan on scaling your eCommerce store, it may be better to start with Shopify’s Basic plan and upgrade as you grow. This will save you the hassle (and costs) of changing eCommerce platforms down the line when you need more features.

Creative Control

This section is for the perfectionists. Do you spend forever trying to pick the right shade of blue? Do you want to have full control over the font you use when describing yourself on the About page. That’s what design flexibility is all about. Full creative control means the website builder allows you to tweak whatever you want without diving into the site’s code.

Big Cartel Creative Control

While Big Cartel says it was built by artists, for artists, it offers a disappointing amount of design flexibility. You’re basically stuck with Big Cartel’s out-of-box templates for your store’s design. This doesn’t mean your store will look ugly—quite the contrary—but there aren’t many features that allow you to tweak the template’s colors, fonts, font size, and typeface.

In order to customize Big Cartel’s design, you’ll need to edit the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript directly. That’s great for developers and graphic designers, but not everyone using the platform will have that skill.

Shopify Creative Control

Shopify also comes with breathtaking templates that can be customized with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can also alter products, discounts, checkouts, and payments with a range of coding experience—or none at all.

Not only does Shopify give you the option to customize everything, but it also gives you the information on how to customize your site. For example, Shopify links to a blog post that explains how familiar website designs increase the likelihood of getting sales.

Shopify doesn’t just provide the necessary tools to alter your website—it gives you the information on how you should design it.

The Winner: Shopify

Shopify offers surprisingly more design flexibility than the eCommerce website builder built by artists. It allows you to control different aspects of your website from the product to checkout, whereas Big Cartel mostly leaves you with templates and rigid structures. Shopify also beats Big Cartel when it comes to giving users the best information on how they should design their website.

Features

Your website can’t just look pretty—it needs the tools to market your products, create promotions and discounts, send out alerts, and a host of other features. The more features you have to choose from, the better you can optimize your website and find paying customers.

Big Cartel Features

For a platform that’s cheaper than Shopify, Big Cartel still offers a sizable number of site features, including:

17 clean themes
Up to 500 products
Unlimited bandwidth
Full HTML and CSS customization, regardless of price plan level
Integrated Google Analytics
Coupon code generation
List “sold out” or “coming soon” on a product
Facebook integration
Mobile admin app for iOS

Shopify Features

Compared to Big Cartel, Shopify offers a wider range of features that cater to bigger businesses, including:

More than 160 professional, elegant themes
Unlimited products
Up to 15 staff accounts
Unlimited bandwidth
Gift cards
Mobile POS, allowing physical stores to sell from mobile devices
SEO marketing tools
Built-in analytics
Easy Google Analytics integration
Coupon code generation
Inventory management
Full HTML and CSS access
Integration with popular shipping carriers
Customer profiles to allow users to log-in to your store

The Winner: Shopify

Shopify has 4x the number of features Big Cartel has. These features are better for larger merchants who plan on expanding their business to different locations. If you’re serious about growing a company, Shopify’s features are better suited for your needs.

Blogging

High ranking blog posts on search engines allow customers to find your eCommerce store organically. They also help you educate customers about your product, update on them on important news and events, and just generally engage with your audience.

eCommerce website builders that offer blogging platforms allow you to forgo setting up a different website for your blog, which could get especially tedious if multiple staff members help run your website.

For simplicity and cohesion, it’s best to keep your blog attached to your eCommerce store.

Big Cartel Blogging

It doesn’t look like Big Cartel allows you add a blog in the traditional sense. When we say “blog,” we mean a tab on the website where you can add different posts. The blog is embedded on the site, and doesn’t redirect readers elsewhere.

Big Cartel tells you all the ways that blogs are helpful for generating traffic to your website, but we found that you can only add custom pages like an About or Bio—you can’t have multiple posts on one page. Therefore, you cannot use Big Cartel to build a blog for your eCommerce store.

You can still use static pages to give readers information about your store or policies, show off work with an embedded Instagram gallery, and increase user engagement with a newsletter sign up. It’s still not a blog, though.

There are Big Cartel plugins that allow you to create a blog, such as through Powr.io, but you can’t create a blog directly through Big Cartel’s layout.

Shopify Blogging

Shopify does have settings that let you create a blog, and doing so is very simple. You can even add feature images, embed media into the blog post, and add tags so that you can better categorize the post. The Shopify blog post content management system looks a lot like WordPress, so it shouldn’t be a huge learning curve if you’re already familiar with that.

The Winner: Shopify

Shopify easily beats Big Cartel in the blogging category because Big Cartel doesn’t even have a blog option. Shopify’s blog content management system has everything you need to create attractive, optimized blog posts for your eCommerce store.

Marketing Tools

Marketing tools grow your online business. You can design advertisements to target certain audiences, write a newsletter about upcoming products to create interest, and create promotions to draw audiences towards a sale.

Every good eCommerce website builder needs to have a robust set of marketing tools. Here’s how Big Cartel and Shopify compare.

Big Cartel Marketing Tools

Big Cartel lets you embed the following marketing apps into your online store:

Chaty—Talk to your customers on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Elfsight apps—Embed social media, customer testimonials, FAQs, Google Maps for physical locations, and more into your online store.
Fera—Gather and showcase customer reviews of your products.
Instagram—For displaying pictures of products, people, locations, etc.
LiveChat—Facilitate customer support through instant messages.
Lucky Orange—Utilizes traffic data to help you understand why visitors don’t convert.
Mailchimp—Create targeted campaigns, automatically follow up with customers after they purchase a product, recommend products all through email.
Poptin—Build custom popups and forms that customers see when they visit your shop.
POWr.io—Create a microblog, social feed, customer review, and other marketing material.
Zapier—Automate tasks such as email marketing, customer management, social media promotion, accounting, and more.

All in all, these apps help small businesses grow their customer base. They’re all relatively simple to use too.

Shopify Marketing Tools

Shopify lets you:

Set up a blog
Access SEO tools
Create marketing campaigns through Facebook ads, email marketing, and Google Smart Shopping
Automate marketing through Kit—allowing you to boost awareness, drive sales, and email customers
See in-depth data behind your marketing efforts, taking the guesswork out of which campaigns are effective or not
Visit the Shopify App Store for even more marketing tools
Connect with Shopify Experts to help you strategize marketing campaigns.
Access high-quality 24/7 customer support should you experience any issues with your marketing tools

The Winner: Shopify

It’s hard to quantify the exact number of features Shopify has, but it’s more than Big Cartel. Shopify not only gives you access to top-tier marketing tools, but it also includes their knowledge base, data, expert advice, and customer support to make sure you’re using it efficiently.

Big Cartel is good for independent artists hoping to grow their audience. Shopify better suits large businesses striving to reach millions of people.

SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Good SEO allows products or blog posts to land among the first top five listings when searching on Google.

Readers aren’t likely to scroll onto the second or third page to find something they need, so good SEO is important for growing and converting traffic organically.

Big Cartel SEO

Big Cartel takes care of SEO on the backend, so you don’t have to do much if you’re not well-versed in it. They automatically generate unique meta descriptions using optimized keywords for your products. The also create the meta keywords and sitemap, which are important for ranking highly on search engines.

There are a few things you can do, though. Big Cartel users can create a custom domain that allows search engines see the URL as a unique brand. You should also write a description with lots of keywords to rank highly. You will need to write robust product descriptions for each product, and you’ll want to ask friends or other business owners to link to your site.

Shopify SEO

Shopify gives you an in-depth review of everything you need to know about SEO. It also lets you add keywords for SEO on your Shopify store, optimize site structure for search engines, among other useful things.

The Shopify App Store also lets you find other tools to boost your SEO, such as Smart SEO and TinyIMG SEO Image Optimizer.

The Winner: Shopify

Shopify has more tools, information, and app access than Big Cartel. Shopify even allows you to add SEO excerpts on each blog post to land higher on the page. Overall, Shopify inserts SEO into everything it does, whereas it feels like SEO was tacked onto Big Cartel’s website structure.

Support Help

We like it when a company offers 24/7 customer service, that way you’re never stuck waiting for someone to help you fix your problem. Quick, reliable support helps you get your site back on track and allows you to sell more products.

Big Cartel Support Help

Big Cartel states on their website that they have 10 humans (not AI) working their customer help desk. They are available seven days a week from 8am to 6pm EST. Big Cartel’s customer service is only available via email.

These are ample working hours, and it’s nice that customer service is available on the weekend. But these hours could be difficult to manage if you’re in a different time zone or run your business after working hours.

Shopify Support Help

Shopify offers a 24/7 help center with people based in 21 locations around the world.

You also get access to their community forum, where you can quickly read solutions for problems people have had before you.

There’s even a help center filled with answers to common issues people on Shopify have, as well as ways you can grow your business.

The Winner: Shopify

Shopify has more customer support technicians working across the world to help users fix their website issues. Shopify also has more resources to help customers fix issues without contacting customer support, such as the help center and community forum. If you’re shy or just like solving problems on your own, then this platform is for you.

Big Cartel works on a much smaller scale than Shopify. This means you don’t always have access to one of Big Cartel’s 10 customer support technicians, but you’ll probably get more care and attention when you do end up connecting with them.

Shopify, however, offers more support with more people in more locations. It’s simply a bigger company than Big Cartel, and thus has more resources to help merchants.

Big Cartel vs Shopify: And the Best eCommerce Platform is…

Let’s review the categories we had and the winner of each:

Feature	Winner
User-friendliness	Big Cartel
Design Flexibility	Shopify
Creative Control	Shopify
Features	Shopify
Blog Posts	Shopify
Marketing Tools	Shopify
SEO	Shopify
Customer Service	Shopify

Shopify is the clear winner in terms of categories won. Sure, it’s more expensive than Big Cartel, but the extra cost translates to more features and the ability to grow a larger online business.

When to Use Big Cartel Over Shopify

Big Cartel works best for individual or small shop owners. These merchants can’t afford a big staff to help run their company, and are probably doing everything out of their bedroom.

Big Cartel also suits people who want to save money. You can have a free eCommerce store and only sell five products, which is perfect for people trying their hand at selling online but aren’t sure they want to commit to a costlier plan.

Big Cartel also works best with people who just want to set up their site and forget about it. They’ll revisit it from time to time, but they aren’t obsessed with metrics, growth, marketing, SEO, or the like. Big Cartel has these features for those who want them, but it’s not the main point of who Big Cartel is for.

Big Cartel is for creative people who want a simple, beautiful website to connect with customers. Growth, marketing, SEO, and other tools help grow their audience, but they aren’t concerned with making millions of dollars. They sell for the sake of distributing their products.

When to Use Shopify Over Big Cartel

Shopify is for entrepreneurs who want to grow their ecommerce store into a large business. It gives you all the tools to grow big, complete with robust marketing tools, metrics, SEO, and hundreds of apps.

Shopify better suits online merchants with the capital to take multiple staff members on board, growing the company’s team in addition to its business. Shopify isn’t cheap, though, so businesses must be able to afford the higher price tag than Big Cartel.

Big Cartel vs Shopify: Different Platforms for Different Business Goals

Big Cartel and Shopify suit different business niches. Big Cartel is for smaller, independent online stores, while Shopify works better for those who want to grow as big as possible.

Shopify offers more features for online merchants, but both eCommerce website builders will help you make stunning websites and sell products online.