Big Cartel vs Shopify: Which Is Right for You? 

In this post, we’ll delve into the pivotal decision of Shopify vs Big Cartel, providing insights to help you choose the perfect platform for your online store.

Key Takeaways

• Shopify is better than Big Cartel because it offers a more extensive feature set, scalability, and versatility. It caters to many businesses, from startups to enterprises, and provides robust SEO, marketing, and point-of-sale integration tools.
• Big Cartel is better than Shopify for artists, makers, and creatives who want a simple, user-friendly platform to sell a limited range of products. Its free plan with no time limit makes it accessible for starting. Big Cartel’s focus on simplicity and ease of use is ideal for hobbyists and individuals looking to showcase their creative work.
• Shopify is best for businesses of all sizes and industries, especially those with growth aspirations and needing advanced ecommerce functionalities. It provides scalability, a wide range of features, and comprehensive support.
• Big Cartel is best for artists, makers, and smaller-scale businesses looking for a straightforward platform to showcase and sell their creative products.

The Core Difference between Big Cartel and Shopify

Big Cartel and Shopify solve different problems. Understanding that gap upfront will save you from comparing features that don’t apply to your situation.

How Big Cartel works – built for artists, kept intentionally simple

Big Cartel launched in 2005 for musicians who wanted to sell merch without technical headaches. That focus hasn’t changed much. Today, over three million shops run on the platform – mostly artists, printmakers, ceramicists, jewelry makers, and independent designers who’ve collectively moved over $2.5 billion in goods.

The platform’s strength is its intentional simplicity. There’s no app marketplace to configure, no conversion funnels to set up, and no SEO architecture to think about. You upload your products, customize a basic theme, and you’re selling.

The trade-off is that Big Cartel doesn’t grow with you. The platform caps product listings at 500, offers limited marketing tools, and provides virtually no built-in SEO capability. It’s designed for people who want a clean, standalone storefront – not a business engine.

How Shopify works – a full commerce engine you build and own

Shopify launched in 2006 after its founders couldn’t find a decent ecommerce platform for their own snowboard shop. It’s now one of the largest commerce platforms in the world, with businesses on it processing over $1 trillion in cumulative sales.

Unlike Big Cartel, Shopify is built to scale. The same platform that powers a solo printmaker can handle a mid-market brand shipping thousands of orders a day. You get unlimited products, 16,000+ apps, built-in SEO tools, native email marketing, abandoned cart recovery, and integrations with Amazon, eBay, TikTok, and Instagram.

The catch: Shopify’s depth requires setup time and costs more as you add tools.

Big Cartel vs Shopify at a Glance

Feature	Big Cartel	Shopify
Best for	Artists, makers, small catalogs	Growing stores, all business sizes
Starting price	Free (five products)	$19/mo (annual billing)
Product limit	500 max	Unlimited
Transaction fees	None	None with Shopify Payments; 0.6–2% with third-party gateways
Themes	18 free	150+ (free and paid)
App ecosystem	~27 native + Zapier	8,000+
Built-in blog	No	Yes
Abandoned cart recovery	No (third-party required)	Built-in on all paid plans
Multi-channel selling	No	Yes (Amazon, eBay, Instagram, TikTok)
SEO tools	Basic (meta fields only)	Advanced (sitemap, schema, full control)
Support	Email only, Mon–Fri	24/7 chat, email, and phone

Now let’s get into the specifics — pricing first, since it’s where most sellers start.

Big Cartel vs Shopify fees

Shopify

Pricing looks simple on the surface. It gets more nuanced when you factor in transaction fees, payment processing, and what you actually get per tier.

Big Cartel offers three tiers

Plan	Monthly price	Annual price	Product limit	Key features
Gold	Free	Free	5	Basic storefront, no credit card required
Platinum	$15/month	~$12/month	50	Inventory tracking, discount codes, and real-time stats
Diamond	$30/month	~$24/month	500	All Platinum features plus priority support

Big Cartel doesn’t charge its own transaction fees on any plan. You still pay payment processor fees through Stripe or PayPal, but Big Cartel takes nothing extra per sale.

Shopify pricing plans (2026)

Shopify has four main plans, plus a Starter option for social-only selling:

Plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing	Staff accounts	Best for
Starter	$5/month	$5/month	1	Social selling and link-in-bio only, no full storefront
Basic	$39/month	$19/month	2	New stores, full online storefront, 10 inventory locations
Grow	$105/month	$49/month	5	Growing stores, professional reports, lower transaction fees. Formerly “Shopify Plan,” renamed in 2024.
Advanced	Higher	$299/month	15	Advanced reporting, 0.6% third-party transaction fee
Plus	$2,300/month (3-year term)	—	Unlimited	Enterprise, customizable checkout, wholesale and B2B

Shopify’s current promotional offer is $1/month for the first three months on Basic, Grow, and Advanced. Annual billing gives a 25% discount across all three plans.

Transaction fees compared

One important note on Shopify’s transaction fees: Shopify charges 0.6–2% per sale only if you use a third-party payment gateway. If you use Shopify Payments (available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and 15+ other countries), there’s no transaction fee on any plan.

Plan	Shopify (third-party gateway)	Big Cartel
Entry level	2% (Basic)	0% (all plans)
Mid tier	1% (Grow)	0%
Higher tier	0.6% (Advanced)	0%

If you’re using Shopify Payments, this comparison doesn’t apply. If you’re outside the supported countries, Big Cartel’s zero-fee structure becomes a meaningful cost advantage.

Which is cheaper? A break-even by monthly revenue

Say you sell $1,000 worth of products in a month using a third-party payment gateway on Shopify Basic:

• Shopify Basic (monthly billing): $39 platform fee + $20 transaction fee = $59 total
• Big Cartel Platinum (monthly billing): $15 platform fee + $0 transaction fee = $15 total

The gap narrows if you use Shopify Payments, bringing Shopify Basic down to $39/month. Still more than Big Cartel’s $15, but Shopify Payments’ card processing rates offset some of that difference.

For sellers with under $1,500/month in revenue, Big Cartel is almost always cheaper on paper. Above that threshold, the question stops being about platform cost and starts being about whether Shopify’s tools (abandoned cart recovery, email marketing, SEO, multi-channel selling) generate enough additional revenue to justify the price difference. For most growing stores, they do.

User-Friendliness

Shopify

Shopify has built its reputation as one of the most user-friendly ecommerce platforms in the market. Designed to cater to both beginners and professionals, its intuitive drag-and-drop interface ensures that setting up a store is relatively straightforward. It involves four steps: adding your products, customizing your theme, creating a domain, and specifying tax and shipping details.

The dashboard is cleanly designed with clearly marked sections for inventory management, sales analysis, customer information, and more. Plus, with its extensive library of themes, users can easily pick a design that suits their business without any design expertise.

Big Cartel

Big Cartel is tailored specifically for artists and makers, and this niche focus is evident in its simplistic and minimalist approach. For those who are just looking to set up a basic online store without delving deep into complex ecommerce functionalities, Big Cartel offers a straightforward experience.

The dashboard is clean, making tasks like adding products, setting up prices, and managing orders pretty straightforward. While it doesn’t offer a vast range of features like Shopify, this stripped-down approach can appeal to its target audience.

The Verdict

Shopify’s user interface is slightly superior to Big Cartel. For those who want more expansive features with a gentle learning curve, Shopify is the go-to.

Web Design

Shopify

Shopify provides a broader range of web design options. Users can choose from over themes, with 1 available for free and others premium themes requiring purchases ranging from $140 to nearly $200. These paid themes offer extensive customization capabilities, allowing businesses to create unique online stores.

All Shopify’s themes are optimized for mobile, ensuring that online stores look great and function seamlessly on all device types. They are also structured for conversions, with built-in design elements that cater to best ecommerce practices.

For those who have a deeper understanding of web design, Shopify uses its own templating language called Liquid, which allows for advanced customizations.

Big Cartel

On the other hand, Big Cartel offers a selection of 16 mobile-optimized themes for designing websites, all of which are free.

The available themes are clean and minimalistic, focusing on showcasing products in an aesthetic light. While it may not boast the extensive library that Shopify has, Big Cartel allows for custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The Verdict

Shopify takes the lead in web design. While Big Cartel offers simplicity and more free themes, Shopify outshines it with a broader selection of themes and greater customization freedom. Its themes are designed for a broad spectrum of industries and can accommodate businesses of all sizes. Big Cartel’s focus is only on simplicity and its niche appeal to artists and small brands.

Ecommerce Features

Product limits and catalog size

Big Cartel caps at 500 products across all plans. For most artists selling prints, handmade goods, or small clothing runs, this is workable. If you’re building a catalog with variants, seasonal collections, and bundles, you’ll hit the ceiling faster than you expect.

Shopify has no product limit on any paid plan. You can list 50 products or 50,000.

Payment options and checkout

Big Cartel processes payments through Stripe and PayPal. That covers most buyers, but it excludes a significant share of international payment methods and modern alternatives like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and buy-now-pay-later services.

Shopify supports over 100 payment gateways globally. Shopify Payments includes Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay installments (buy-now-pay-later), and one-click checkout for returning buyers. For international sellers, this breadth matters. A checkout that works the way your customers expect is one of the simplest ways to reduce abandoned orders.

Abandoned cart recovery

When a customer adds items to their cart and leaves without buying, you lose that sale unless you can follow up.

Shopify has built-in abandoned cart recovery on all paid plans. It automatically sends a follow-up email with a direct link back to the customer’s cart. The recovery rate varies by store, but the feature costs nothing to run and consistently brings back a portion of otherwise-lost revenue.

Big Cartel has no native abandoned cart recovery. You’d need a third-party integration through Zapier or a paid external tool. For a platform used by small sellers to watch their costs, that’s a notable gap.

Multi-channel selling

Shopify lets you sell on Amazon, eBay, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google Shopping from a single inventory. Stock levels sync automatically across every channel. If you’re selling in more than one place, Shopify handles the complexity so you’re not manually updating product counts across platforms.

Big Cartel doesn’t support multi-channel selling natively. You can link to your Big Cartel store from social media, but there’s no inventory sync, no marketplace integration, and no centralized order management across channels.

Point of Sale

If you sell in person at markets, pop-ups, or a physical shop, POS matters.

Shopify offers comprehensive Point of Sale (POS) capabilities, making it a versatile choice for online store owners who also need to process transactions in person at events, festivals, markets, or brick-and-mortar retail outlets. Shopify provides a dedicated POS app for payment processing, inventory tracking, and issuing receipts to customers. This app is tightly integrated with your online store’s backend, ensuring seamless data synchronization.

With Shopify, you can access a wide range of first-party POS hardware. Shopify includes standard “Shopify POS Lite” features in all its plans. For more advanced POS capabilities, Shopify offers a “Shopify POS Pro” add-on priced at $89 per month per location for more advanced features.

Big Cartel’s POS primarily relies on using a Stripe card reader for in-person transactions. While this may suffice for some basic POS needs, it lacks the comprehensive features and hardware integration that Shopify provides.

The Verdict: About Point of Sale (POS), Shopify is the clear winner. It offers a more extensive and tightly integrated solution for online store owners requiring POS capabilities and a wide range of POS hardware options. While Big Cartel offers some basic POS functionality through a Stripe card reader, it falls short of the robust and versatile POS system provided by Shopify.

Shipping

Shopify has a built-in shipping system with carrier integrations, discounted label rates, and label printing directly from the dashboard. You can set up shipping zones with flat rates, weight-based rates, or free shipping thresholds.

Shopify Shipping is available across multiple markets including the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and more. Real-time calculated rates (showing live carrier prices at checkout) are available on Advanced and Plus plans. For dropshipping, Shopify connects natively with apps like Printful and DSers, letting you sell products without holding any inventory.

Big Cartel covers the basics: flat-rate and weight-based shipping options, with the ability to set different rates by region. It doesn’t have live carrier rate quotes at checkout or built-in label printing.

For more advanced shipping needs, Big Cartel connects with ShipStation, which handles label generation, carrier rate comparison, and order tracking. For dropshipping, Printful integrates directly with Big Cartel and is a natural fit for its core audience of artists, letting you sell print-on-demand products without managing stock.The Verdict: However, Shopify’s shipping features are more comprehensive than Big Cartel’s. Its built-in features, integrations, and partner apps are designed to simplify and optimize both processes, making it a preferred choice for businesses that prioritize efficient shipping and dropshipping operations.

Marketing Features

This is where the two platforms diverge most significantly. Big Cartel gives you a storefront. Shopify gives you a storefront plus the tools to fill it with customers.

Big Cartel’s built-in community and its limits

Big Cartel has a genuine community of artists and independent makers. The platform positions itself as an alternative to crowded marketplaces, and there’s real brand loyalty among its users. However, Big Cartel doesn’t have a built-in marketplace where buyers browse. You still need to drive all of your own traffic.

The platform has basic discount codes and a Facebook Pixel integration for ad tracking. There’s no native email marketing, no built-in newsletter tool, and no blog. If content marketing is part of your strategy, Big Cartel can’t support it without external tools stitched together.

Shopify’s marketing tools

Shopify comes with Shopify Email built in: 10,000 free emails per month and competitive per-email pricing above that. It integrates natively with Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and every major email platform. There’s a built-in blog, discount and gift card creation, affiliate marketing support, and direct connections to every major ad platform.For stores focused on building long-term customer relationships, Joy Loyalty lets you run points-based loyalty programs that increase repeat purchase rates. Air Reviews adds product review social proof that converts first-time visitors into buyers. These aren’t workarounds. They’re native Shopify apps that take minutes to set up.

Blogging and content marketing

Shopify has a built-in blog. Big Cartel doesn’t.

This matters more than it might seem. Content marketing (writing articles that rank in search results and bring in organic traffic) is one of the most cost-effective long-term growth strategies for ecommerce stores. If you’re building a brand around a niche like sustainable jewelry, handmade ceramics, or indie apparel, a blog lets you publish content that educates your audience and drives traffic to your store without paying for ads every month.

Big Cartel sellers who want a blog have to set one up on a separate platform (WordPress, Substack) and maintain it alongside their store. Most sellers never do it, which means they forfeit one of the most reliable organic growth channels available.

The traffic reality

Neither platform generates traffic for you. Both put you in charge of attracting customers. The difference is in the tools you have to do it.

On Big Cartel, your main options are social media, word of mouth, and external tools connected via Zapier. On Shopify, you can do all of that plus run SEO content, automated email flows, loyalty programs, retargeting ads, and multi-channel selling. Shopify gives you more ways to acquire and retain customers. For sellers who are already driving traffic through social media and just need a checkout, Big Cartel is sufficient. For sellers who want to build sustainable customer acquisition, Shopify is a better foundation from day one.

SEO Capabilities

Getting your store found on Google is another area where the two platforms have a meaningful gap, particularly for sellers who want long-term organic traffic.

Big Cartel SEO: basic meta fields, nothing more

Big Cartel lets you set a page title and meta description for your storefront and individual product pages. That’s roughly the full extent of its SEO functionality. There’s no XML sitemap to submit to Google Search Console, no structured data markup for products, no automatic schema generation, and no control over canonical tags.

For most small stores selling to an existing social media audience, this doesn’t matter much. But if organic search is part of your long-term plan, Big Cartel’s limitations will show quickly.

Shopify SEO: sitemap, schema, structured data, apps

Shopify generates and automatically updates an XML sitemap you can submit to Google. Product pages include structured data markup (schema) by default, which tells Google exactly what your products are and makes them eligible for rich results in search, including price, availability, and rating stars.

You get full control over title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, alt text, and canonical tags. Apps like Avada SEO Image Optimizer extend this further: automatically generating alt text for product images, compressing images for faster load times, and running store-wide SEO audits. Faster pages and better image SEO are two of the most consistently impactful improvements for ecommerce stores.

Combined with Shopify’s built-in blog, you have both product-level SEO and content-level SEO working together. That’s a significant advantage over any platform that offers only one or neither.

Security

Shopify includes two-factor authentication (2FA) and is fully PCI-DSS compliant for payment card data. All stores get HTTPS and SSL automatically. Shopify manages the security infrastructure, so you don’t need to.

Big Cartel provides SSL certificates for all stores. However, there’s no two-factor authentication available, and Big Cartel itself is not PCI-DSS certified. Compliance falls to the payment processors (Stripe and PayPal) it uses. For small stores with a straightforward setup, this isn’t a practical problem. For larger stores handling high transaction volumes, Shopify’s direct PCI compliance adds a layer of clarity.

Apps and Add-ons Integration

Shopify

Shopify’s app store is a robust marketplace with an impressive selection of over 168,000 apps, offering solutions for virtually every aspect of running an online store. These apps cover various functionalities, including accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, and social media integration. Shopify’s app store is well-organized, making it user-friendly and allowing store owners to easily find and select the right apps to enhance their e-commerce operations.

Big Cartel

Big Cartel, while more limited in its native app offerings with just 27 available, compensates by integrating with Zapier. This connection opens the door to approximately 5,000 additional apps, extending functionality options for users. However, it’s important to note that utilizing Zapier often incurs additional costs, and not all integrations are free or unlimited.

The Verdict: About apps and add-ons integration, Shopify secures a clear victory due to its extensive app store and user-friendly interface. With over 8,000 readily available apps catering to various needs, Shopify provides users a comprehensive ecosystem for enhancing their online stores. While Big Cartel offers integration with Zapier, Shopify’s vast selection and convenience make it the superior choice for expanding your store’s feature set and capabilities.

Ease of Use

Both platforms are genuinely accessible. Big Cartel is faster to get started on. You can be up and selling within an hour. The dashboard is minimal by design: products, orders, stats. There are fewer decisions to make because there are fewer options.

Shopify takes slightly longer to configure because there’s more to configure. Setting up shipping zones, tax rules, payment methods, and a theme takes a few hours for a basic store. Once set up, the dashboard is clean and the learning curve flattens quickly.

If you’ve never run an ecommerce store, Big Cartel requires less onboarding. If you have any prior experience with online selling, Shopify won’t feel unfamiliar.

Help and Support

Shopify

Shopify offers a comprehensive set of support options. They provide chat, email, and phone support, accessible 24/7. The support materials are available in over 20 languages, making it more inclusive for international users.

However, it’s important to note that Shopify encourages users to search for answers in their help site before providing direct contact details for support. This additional step can be a bit cumbersome for users seeking immediate assistance.

The quality of Shopify’s support may also vary depending on whether you’re inquiring about Shopify-built apps or templates versus third-party ones. In-house support for Shopify’s products tends to be more comprehensive, while support for third-party products relies on the developers of those products.

Big Cartel

Big Cartel provides a decent support center with various helpful articles covering various aspects of running an online store on their platform. These articles are well-written and informative.

However, Big Cartel offers email support Monday through Friday, 8am to 6pm EST, in English only. For a free or $15/month platform, this is reasonable. But it means no help on weekends and no real-time support during a sale or a product launch when things go wrong.The Verdict: About help and support, Shopify offers a more extensive and accessible support system compared to Big Cartel. Shopify provides round-the-clock assistance, multiple contact options, and support in various languages, making it a more user-friendly choice for those who value customer support.

Who Should Use Big Cartel?

Big Cartel gets unfairly dismissed in comparisons because it’s set up against platforms with far more features. It has a specific use case and it does that well within its boundaries.

Big Cartel is a good fit if

• You’re an artist, illustrator, ceramicist, musician, or maker with a focused catalog under 50 products
• You already have an audience from social media or in-person and just need a place to sell to them
• You want zero transaction fees and the lowest possible monthly cost
• You don’t need SEO, email marketing, or a blog in the near term
• Simple setup and minimal maintenance matters more than growth tools

When Big Cartel stops working for you

• You’re hitting the product limit and regularly deciding what to cut
• You want to run email marketing campaigns or automated abandoned cart follow-ups
• You need to sell simultaneously on multiple channels
• Organic search traffic becomes part of your growth strategy
• You want real-time support when something breaks during a launch

The moment you start needing things beyond a basic storefront, the cost of third-party workarounds starts to exceed what Shopify would have cost from the beginning.

Who Should Use Shopify?

Shopify is a good fit if

• You’re building a store you intend to grow over time
• You sell or plan to sell more than 50 products
• You want email marketing, abandoned cart recovery, and loyalty tools built in
• SEO and content marketing are part of your customer acquisition strategy
• You’re selling across multiple channels: your own site, Instagram, TikTok, or Amazon
• You need reliable 24/7 support

Shopify is not just for large businesses. Many stores start on Basic at $19/month and stay there for years. The benefit isn’t that you need every feature today. It’s that the platform won’t limit you when you do.

Selling on Both: The Hybrid Approach

Some sellers run both platforms simultaneously. It sounds complicated, but there’s a practical logic to it.

Why do some sellers use Big Cartel and Shopify together

A common pattern: an artist has a Big Cartel store they’ve had for years. They have loyal customers who know that URL, and they don’t want to disrupt that relationship. But they also want to expand their product line, run email marketing, and start appearing in Google search. They open a Shopify store for the main catalog while keeping Big Cartel for limited drops or older products that their existing audience expects.

Another pattern: Big Cartel for original art and physical prints, Shopify for digital downloads and higher-volume apparel. Each platform handles what it does best.

How to sync inventory between the two

There’s no native sync between Big Cartel and Shopify. The most practical approach is to treat them as separate storefronts with separate catalogs. If you’re selling the same products on both, you’ll need to manage inventory manually or set up a Zapier workflow to push stock updates between platforms.

Bottom Line

Shopify is the winner in the battle of Shopify vs Big Cartel, offering a robust and versatile ecommerce platform suitable for businesses of all sizes. Its extensive feature set, scalability, and superior customization options make it a top choice for those looking to build a successful online store. While Big Cartel’s simplicity and budget-friendly options cater to smaller ventures and artists, Shopify’s comprehensive offering and exceptional support make it the winner for ecommerce entrepreneurs.

FAQs

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