Big Cartel Review - A Good Ecommerce Platform?

what's up you awesome people it's paul from e-commerce gold back with another e-commerce platform review for you and in this video we're going to be looking at big cartel which is a very popular option amongst the creative types such as artists and designers so it's going to be very interesting to see what the platform brings to the table and to check it out what we're going to do is we're going to look at six different sections they are the pricing the features the theme selection and customization the support options are available for you as the user the hosting setup and finally how easy is the platform to use in general but before i get into the video i just want to say if you do find this video helpful and you enjoy this video i'd really appreciate if you could smash that like button because it really does help the channel out also if you want to see more ecommerce related content then consider hitting that subscribe button and the notification bell below so with the introduction out the way let's jump into the video so the first thing we're going to talk about is the pricing of beat cartel and as you can see on screen it's pretty reasonably priced now if you do want to see what's on screen for yourself you can go and check out my full written review of the big cartel platform which i'll leave a link to in the description below but the pricing is very reasonable and on top of this they also do a free package as well which as to be expected is pretty limited in terms of features and you are limited to five products on that plan but generally the pricing is pretty good it starts from 9.99 a month and goes up to the biggest package which is 29.99 now when it comes to what is the difference between these packages from what i could find out it pretty much just comes the amount of products you can actually list there's not much in terms of difference in features in allowances things like that that separates the different packages and this means that basically it just comes down to how many products you've got so if you've only got 20 products for example you're not going to need more than the big cartel platinum package but if you've got a large inventory so you've got 300 products then you're going to have to go for the titanium package but i couldn't find anything else that separates the packages it literally seems to be just the amount of products that you can list so the next thing is the features that big cartel offers and what seems to be a recurring theme with big cartel is it's very difficult to find any information about the platform because you actually go on their like a home page their main website they really don't offer what their platform offers there's not much in the way of features and on-screen is literally all i could find in terms of features this includes scouring the website and also signing up to the platform as well and trying it out these were the only features i could find which is things like google analytics stats inventory tracking discount codes shipment tracking and bulk editing other than that there wasn't really much i could find um there just doesn't seem to be any list of features that they offer and there's definitely seemingly no difference in features you get between the packages as i mentioned in the pricing it just seems to be the amount of products you get the features it doesn't matter whether you're on the platinum package or the titanium package you seem to get the same features so it just there's not much information out there there's not much information on the big cartel website it's just very very limited into what information i could find so that is the best i could do for you unfortunately so the next section is theme selection and customization and within big cartel the theme selection is quite small there are 19 themes you can choose from but they are all completely free to use but when it comes to actually customizing your theme it's a little bit strange as to how you access it because what you have to do is go into your dashboard actually have to go into the account section and then you click on the customize design button here and it will bring up the theme customizer there's no separate section within the dashboard which is a little bit strange to me but the theme customizer isn't bad but it's not great either so to change theme you just click on this button up here and it brings up all the available themes now these themes are very well designed there's a nice variety and it definitely does fit the kind of target market that big cartel is going for they're very design orientated very athletically pleasing which is great for like the creative types who are going to be using this platform but when it comes to actual customization this seems like there's a lot you can do but there's actually not that much so in the customization section you can change your background image your logo and your promo image you can change all the colors on the website and then you get to this section here which kind of edits the layout sections and alignments and things like that and it just it doesn't feel particularly easy to use to me because there's just lots of options that you bundled on top of each other and you have to work through each bit one by one i'd much prefer this to have been kind of a drop down menu or a main heading with drop down options underneath it would have made it a much easier way to work through rather than just being confronted by this block of options that you can use and why it seems is it seems there's lots of options but there's not that much you can actually do they're very small changes you can actually make to the layout of your website and the general overall look of your website so it looks like a lot but there's not actually that much there's not much control over layouts you can't add different sections to really customize the look and feel of your home page for example it's very much set by the theme that is what your website is going to look like so while not bad it's not great either there is definitely room for improvement on this but one thing you can do if you know somebody who does coding or you know coding yourself is you can actually go in and edit the code on your site obviously this is only available on paid packages i'm just using the free one for this review video but you can go in you can change the css and you can also change the html now while this is really really good in one way it's not great in another because a lot of people who are signing up to platforms like big cartel are doing it because they want the quickest and easiest way to actually get set up with a website they're not gonna generally know how to code or gonna want to go into these sections and start changing things and updating things it's just not something the majority of people are gonna do so i'd much prefer this to be removed and have more control over the look and feel of your website with kind of a live editor drag and drop kind of thing it would just make it a little bit more user friendly in my opinion so the next thing is the support options are available for you as the user now one of the reasons why people go with a fully hosted platform such as big cartel is to be able to contact the team behind the platform but be cartel is quite limited on their support options in fact you're limited to one and that is email support now the email support is available seven days a week between 8 am and 6 pm eastern standard time but if you're in other time zones around the world you're going to find that your actual support window is limited depending on as i say what time zone you're in it would be nice to see other options available such as live chat or over the phone because sometimes you just want to be able to contact someone straight away know that somebody's on live chat or there's going to be somebody at the end of the phone so while the support options aren't bad it's better than nothing it would be nice to see a few more options added to the big cartel platform so the next thing is hosting and performance now this is one thing that be cartel excel app but the only thing is they don't give any information as to how good that hosting actually is the only thing i could find out was that you get a free ssl certificate with every single package there's no information on whether their servers are pci compliant if there's any bandwidth restrictions or if there's any uptime guarantees i couldn't find any information about this on the big cartel site so that didn't stop me testing the platform out so what i did was i took three of their customer example sites and i ran them through pingdom speed test tool using their san francisco and washington dc server and also through google's page speed insights once a day for three days to get a nice spread of data and as you can see on screen they've done really really well especially on the page load time because it had an average load time of 0.99 seconds through washington dc and 1.29 seconds through san francisco which puts it near the top of the table for all the platforms i tested especially the north american platforms that i tested they also come top in terms of google scores as well it's going 59 out of 100 on mobile and 94 out of 100 on desktop which put it way ahead of any of its competition especially on the north american side so when it comes to hosting the performance is really really good it'd just be nice to have a bit more information about what the hosting is actually made up of so the final section is how easy is big cartel to use now it's very easy to get started you just need to go to the big cartel website and click sign up and sign up to the free trial and you're good to go once you get into the dashboard it doesn't look like it does on screen you're actually greeted by a welcome guide which is pretty comprehensive but you can't get access to your main dashboard until you actually go through and complete all the steps in the setup guide which is a bit frustrating because there's some things that maybe don't apply to you as a business so that is a little bit frustrating but once you've actually got through to that the dashboard's very simple as you can see there's not a lot to it you've got five main sections at the top and there's not much within either of these sections so if you go into products there's really not much to choose from you're going to discount once again it's very simple even the account section is very simple there's really not much content to the actual kind of big cartel dashboard so what's it like to actually manage your inventory within big cartel what's it like to create your inventory create your products organize them things like that well it's not bad the actual create product page is very simple you just go to products click on the plus icon and you come in and as you can see it's a very simple page there's really not much to it it doesn't take long to fill out the product but what about when it comes to organizing your inventory because this is really important well the category system in big cartel isn't great in my opinion each because there's not a lot to it so to choose a category just click the plus icon in the add new product page as you can see you just choose whichever one you've created and if you want to create a new one you can click that plus icon there click plus icon and all you do is type the category name there's nothing else to create in a category there's no kind of seo information there's nothing like that all you do is literally type the category name and click save so we'll put this in as number two click save that is how you add a new category that's all there is to it there's no other options and from what i've tested there's no option to create subcategories either so you're literally limited to parent categories which are not a bad thing is quite limited in the ability to create a good product hierarchy so that's how you create a product and that's how you add the categories now on the paid packages there is a bulk editor which means you can come in and edit your products in bulk if you're on the free package you do have to come in and edit everything on a product by product basis but the bulk editor is a good option to have especially if you're going to have lots of products because managing products on a product by product basis is very frustrating so what about managing your orders well as i said i'm on the free package and it won't let me create an order so i can't test out the order management and i'm not going to buy a product off myself because that's just silly so when it comes to orders i haven't been able to test that out if i do i'll update that in the future don't worry about that so my conclusion of the big cartel platform is it any good it could be and the reason why i say this is because it just doesn't feel like a finished product to me it feels like it's almost still in its testing stages because it's just feeling like a lack of features and a lack of functionality within the platform and also the main website itself just isn't very forthcoming in what they offer so it just it doesn't really sell the product to me now the entry level package so the free one and also the platinum package which cost 9.99 a month is a good way for someone to get started with e-commerce and build a very basic website but when you move on to the top-tier titanium package it's putting it squarely up against the likes of big commerce and also shopify as well and it just really doesn't stack up in terms of features usability just general functionality it just really doesn't stack up to these much bigger more complete platforms so while it's not a bad option if you're just getting started you may soon find that you're running into problems because you haven't got the functionality you need and you may struggle if you're growing your business and your business starts to grow rapidly that the actual platform can grow with you which is something you're not going to have if you're with other platforms so while it does have a lot of potential and i did actually quite enjoy using it it just feels like it just needs that extra push to add some more features more functionality and just more information about the product in general there you go that's my conclusion of big cartel so once again i hope you've enjoyed watching this video i hope you've learned something if you have please smash that like button also as i said consider hitting that subscribe button as well so once again thank you so much for watching stay awesome and i'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 24,661

Keywords: Big Cartel Review, Big Cartel Review 2020, Big Cartel, Big Cartel Website, Big Cartel UK

Id: Wiq2pT6WCp0

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020