Big Cartel vs Shopify - Which is the better Ecommerce Platform?

what's up guys paul here from e-commerce gold and i hope you're all having an awesome day now in this e-commerce comparison we're going to be doing very much a david versus goliath because we're going to be looking at the little guy that is big cartel against the behemoth of the e-commerce industry that is shopify so it's going to be interesting to see how these two platforms compare and for this comparison video we're going to be looking at six different things we're going to be looking at the pricing the features the theme selection and customization the support options are available for you as the user the host and performance before finally looking at how easy these platforms are to use in general before wrapping it up with the conclusion at the end so make sure you stick around because i am going to cover lots of different things in this video so with the introduction of the way let's get into the comparison so as i said the first thing i'm going to be looking at is the pricing of these two platforms and for this i wanted to choose two packages that were similar in terms of pricing which happened to be big cartel's top titanium package which is 29.99 a month against shopify's basic package which is 29 a month now big cartel do offer smaller packages they actually have a free package but this is limited to five products and you do get limited features but then their paid packages start from 9.99 a month and then go to 19.99 a month up to the full titanium which is now 29.99 it comes to the difference between these two packages i couldn't actually find that much difference in fact the only real difference i could find was the amount of products you're allowed to list on each package there wasn't much difference in terms of features which i'm going to cover in the next section but there wasn't any difference in features between the packages it doesn't matter whether you're on the 9.99 a month one or the 29.99 a month one you're gonna get the same features from what i could find with big cartel this isn't the case with shopify shopify starts with the basic package now this is the basic package that gives you access to their website builder as well they do have a smaller package but you don't get the website builder included in that so if you do want to build a website with shopify you are going to have to go for the basic package which is 29 a month and this goes up to all the way up to their advanced package which is 299 a month but there is some differences between these packages the first is the transaction fee because on the basic package you are charged two percent on any payment that's taken not using shopify payments this drops to 0.5 on the advanced package you also get more features as you move up through the packages so not only are you basically saving money on transaction fees but you're also getting more features that are going to allow you to build your business and take it to that next level so with shopify when it comes to difference in packages you do get more as you move up through the packages but let's say for this comparison we're just going to be looking at the titanium and the basic because they are the two closest in terms of pricing now as you can see on screen under the big cartel listing i've got some unknowns this is because there's not a lot of information on big cartel's website which is going to be a recurring theme through this video because there's only so much information i can get from big cartel in terms of what they offer whereas with shopify are very upfront about what you get with all their packages so you get unlimited products unlimited bandwidth no turnover limits unlimited data storage a free style certificate and 24 7 support compare that to beat cartel you can have up to 500 products i don't know how much bandwidth you can get there's no turnover limits no transaction fees i don't know how much data storage you get but you get a free ssl certificate and you also get email support so that is the difference between the two packages so the second thing we're going to be looking at is the features that these platforms offer now as i mentioned in the pricing big cart out aren't particularly upfront about what you get so i looked through the big cartel website when i was trying the platform out and this was all the features i could find so you get google analytics you get real-time stats you get inventory tracking discount code shipment tracking and bulk editing i couldn't find any other information around on the big cartel platform as to other features that you get it's very like restrictive in terms of the information that they give out which i don't think is great for a platform to do but one good thing with big cartel is they do have a range of apps now this is quite limited in terms of the amount of apps available but they do generally integrate with third-party platforms or add other features to the big cartel platform now this app selection isn't bad it's a bit on the small side but it is a small platform but the one thing is you do need to be aware of when you're integrating with other platforms or some of these are offering new features you are going to have to pay for these apps things like if you want to add digital products you're going to have to pay i think it's around six dollars a month on top of your existing big cartel plan to be able to sell digital products it's not included with the core big cartel platform so when you are looking at features that you do want for your business it's going to be worth going through these apps to see if you're going to have to pay for extra apps on your big cartel store and then factor that into the pricing because if you do want these features it could make big cart out more expensive than shopify now when it comes to shopify it's understandable that shopify is pretty loaded when it comes to features it's a fully functioning e-commerce platform and as you can see on screen there's lots of different features you get you get e-commerce tools so you can integrate with drop shipping uh suppliers you can have flexible shipping rates you product reviews you can sell digital products you can sell gift vouchers there's lots when it comes to marketing and seo so you can sell on facebook there's lots of social media integrations with shopify you can create discount codes abandoned cart recovery social share lots of different marketing and seo features are included with shopify which is really really good they've also got really good reporting and analytics so you can really analyze how well your store's doing directly from your shopify dashboard and the one thing that is really good and does set shopify apart from big cartel is the amount of payment gateways you can use because with big cartel you're basically limited to two payment gateways which is paypal and a credit card processor this isn't the case with shopify shopify has lots of different payment gateways in fact there's over 100 different ones to choose from within shopify and a lot of these are country specific so there might be certain payment gateways are available in your country and shopify may cater to these there's a massive amount of payment gateways you can choose with shopify it's a really really good selection as you can see on screen i was just some of the main ones that i pulled out from the list now also with shopify you get the shopify app store which is the largest app selection of any fully hosted e-commerce platform in fact there's over 3000 apps you can choose from and these range from free apps to fully paid apps so as with big cartel you do need to be aware of how much these apps could potentially cost you and how much you're gonna have to pay on top of your monthly fee but there are a massive selection of free apps as well they can add different functionality and integrations with third-party software so it's a much better selection and you get a much better selection of free apps as well so the third thing is theme selection and customization which is a really important part of building an ecommerce website because you want to make your website fit your business and brand so with big cartel to access all of your theme customization options and your theme selection what you need to do is go into account then under your shop section click on customize design this will take you through to the theme customizer and the theme customizer actually isn't bad and if you want to change the theme you just click on the button there and you can scroll through and look at all the different themes now these themes are really well designed especially the fact that all free to use but when it comes to theme customization they are a little bit limited so if you go into the customization options you can change your logo you can change the background image add a promo image then you can change all the colors related to your site and then you've got some options down here for alignment text options and things like that but there's no real control over the layout of your site so you can't add sections to the site you can't add kind of content sections product sections things like that you're very much limited by what the theme will allow you to do so while it's not a bad thing customizer it's not great either because it doesn't give you complete control of the look and feel of your website but considering all the themes are free to use and there are some customization options on there it's really not a bad selection but what's this like to do on shopify well let's jump into the shopify dashboard and the first thing i want to talk about is the theme selection in shopify now within the shopify theme store there is over 70 different themes you can choose from but unfortunately not all these are free to use in fact there's only nine free themes that you can choose from and the others range from 140 to 180 but outside of the shopify ecosystem there are also a massive number of themes this is because shopify has a large developer community and if you go on themeforest and search for shopify themes it'll return a result of over 1200 different themes that you can choose plus there are also developers who make themes independently and sell directly through their own websites so the amount of themes available for shopify is really incredible especially for a fully hosted solution but when it comes to theme customization shopify has always been known as one of the best ones out there and if we click on customize it will take us through to the theme customizer and this is a fantastic tool this is because it gives you so much control over the look and feel of your website this because you can control the layout so you can add and remove sections as you want this allows you to really make your homepage fit your brand properly you can also go into the theme settings you can change the color typography you can link your social media accounts for the social sharing and things like that you can add a favicon there's just lots of different things you can do to the look and feel of your website now the one thing that is a little bit on the downside for me when it comes to shopify is the fact that all of these sections don't apply to your pages so if you create a custom set about me page you don't get access to all of these kind of sections you have to build it off a pretty basic text editor it's a little bit of a let down for me i'd love to see this basic theme customization expanded into all of your pages because it would make shopify arguably the best tool on the marquee for theme customization so section number four is the support options and what is available for you as the user because this is one of the reasons why people go with a fully hosted e-commerce solution it's because they want to know there's somebody they can contact if things start to go wrong now big cutout is quite limited on this all i could find was email support tickets there was no live chat phone number anything like that so you can actually instantly contact and speak to somebody this is a bit of a letdown for me because if you've got something that you need to get fixed urgently you don't know how long you're going to be waiting for somebody to reply to your support ticket this isn't an issue with shopify this because shopify offer full 24 7 support to every single user and there's a variety of different mediums that you can use to contact them you can contact them via live chat you can contact them over the phone you can contact them via email tiki there's also a community support forum which is a great place to ask non-urgent questions but having all these support options is great and knowing that you can contact them 24 hours a day seven days a week is a great comfort to have knowing that there's somebody there at all times should you run into any problems so section number five is hosting and performance and once again this is a very important section because when people are choosing a platform to build their website on they want to know that it's going to be run on reliable and secure servers but once again with big cart out it was hard to find any information about their actual servers i couldn't find where they were pci compliant what bandwidth allocation you get what data storage you get all i could find out was that you get a free ssl certificate with every single package this isn't the case with shopify shopify are very upfront and honest about what their hosting environment is so all websites are hosted on pci compliance servers you get a global cdm with every single package it's got 99.98 uptime yet unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage as well as a free ssl certificate on every single package so shopify has a very robust hosting setup but how do these platforms actually perform now i like to put them to the test because especially when you've got someone like big cartel doesn't really tell you what their host environment is like i like to test them out so what i did was i took three of their customer example sites run them through pingdom speed test tool using the washington dc and san francisco servers and also run them through google's page speed insights once a day for three days and on screen you can see the results and actually they were both very close in terms of performance especially on low times because there was really nothing to choose between the two platforms and they are both near the top when it comes to load times when it comes to google scores be cartel does just take it over shopify especially on the mobile side of it it was a lot better scoring 59 out of 100 compared to shopify's 38 out of 100 but still both of these platforms were near the top when it comes to google scores as well so when it comes to hosting performance you haven't got any issues with either of them it'd just be nice to know exactly what big cartel offer in terms of their hosting so section number six is how easy are these platforms to use and i'm going to look at three different things for this first going to be how easy are they to get started second is how is to manage your inventory and third is how easy it is to manage your orders because that's what you're going to do most of when you're in one of these platforms so getting started with big cartel is really simple all you need is an email address and to create a password you can sign up for their free package you can then later upgrade on their paid packages if you want to but once you've gone through the signup process which is very very simple you'll be taken into your dashboard but on your first signing it won't look like this this is because the actual main dashboard is a setup guide when you first sign up and you need to work through this setup guide before you get access to your dashboard which includes things like your analytics so they do this to make sure that you've actually gone through the process of setting up your basically your e-commerce website before you can send it live and actually start using it as an e-commerce website but what's this like to do on shopify well actually signing up to shopify is really simple all you need is an email address and a password and you can sign up for one of their free trials if you want to you can do so using my affiliate link in the description below and i'll also leave a link to big cartel there as well so if you want to go and check that out for yourself you can and i do appreciate it if you go through those links because it does help me out massively but signing up to shopify is very simple you just need an email address and a password and then you'll be asked what stage is your business currently at are you an established business are you a new business because it helps them tailor the dashboard a little bit more to you and your business which is quite good and then when you actually go through and go into your dashboard for the first time you'll be met with something similar to this which is a setup guide which is very simple but it does take you through the basic steps you need to do in order to get your site set up properly i would like to see a few more options added to this because i think it is a little bit on the light side but shopify do have their own academy where you can go through and there's a series of 27 videos that actually take you through step by step setting your store up it's a really good thing to actually go through and you do learn a lot by going through that process it's definitely something i would recommend but what's it like to actually use this so what's it like to use it for your products so we'll go back into the big cartel dashboard we'll click on products and then we'll add a new product so the add new product page on big cartel is very simple in fact it is the most simple add new product page i have seen on any of the e-commerce platforms that i've tested you literally put your name description choose a category set the status set the price and then you can add some options if you want to set your shipping and you're good to go it is as simple as that there's an add an image obviously but it is really really simple but what about when it comes to actually managing your inventory now i'm only on the free package here so i don't have the bulk editor but on the paid package there is a bulk editor that's available so you can come in and update your products from the product overview menu so you don't have to go and edit them individually this is a great addition and it's and it's one of the things that does make the paid packages a better option over the three packages but with the free package you only get five products anyway so you are quite limited on that one but the bulk editor does make it easier to go through and manage your inventory now one thing that is really simple to do in big cartel is to create a category all you do is click on the three circles here click on manage categories click the plus icon type the category name and click save that is it that is how you create a product category very simple to do but it's almost too simple there's no kind of seo things you can do for this so you can't create a meta description for it and also one thing that is a bit limited with big cartel categories is you can't create parent and child categories you're just limited to parent categories which if you haven't got many products is quite good but if you have got a large product inventory you may want to put them in parent and child categories which is something unfortunate you can't do with big cartel but what's it like in shopify well we'll go into the shopify dashboard go to products and click add product in the top right hand corner and it'll bring up the shopify add new product page now for me this is a more complete page than the one in big cartel because there's a few more sections that just give you more control over creating a new product so you've got all the standard things like title description your media pricing inventory management shipping variations but then you get the seo settings at the bottom and with this you can edit your page title your description and your url it just gives you more control over the product and say it just feels like a more complete add new product page to me than the one in big cartel now the next thing is managing your inventory because once again this is a very important thing so if you're going to all products this is one area where shopify is very very strong because they have a variety of different bulk editors so i do is we select the products click edit product and it will take you into the bulk editor now this is really good because what you can do is you can add new fields so if you want to add cost per item into this bulk editor you can do it's very customizable and it makes it really easy to go through and edit your products without having to do on an individual basis and as you can see with the sterling silver proposal ring you can go through and edit your variations from the bulk editor this makes it a really useful tool but they also have another editor as well so if you go into products and go to inventory what you can do is you can quickly and easily update your product inventory without having to go into the previous editor you can just do all from this overview page this is a really good tool and if you've got a large inventory having something like this is going to make it so easy to just go in and update your start quantity it's a very useful tool now as we pick cartel shopify is a little bit strange when it comes to its categories well they're not actually categories they're called collections within shopify so if we go into the collections section and then we click create a collection it actually produces a page it's not just a case of inputting a name and it's good to go so with this you can add a title you can add a meta description if you want to and then you can choose which collection type it is this is where shopify gets a little bit more complicated because there are some options here and if you want to learn more about that i'll leave a link to my tutorial video where i'll go through this in much more detail but to summarize manual you add products to the collections yourself with automator you set up rules and then it will add the products to the collections for you it does take a little bit of time to learn how to do it so yeah go and check that tutorial out because i do cover it in much more detail but it does work when you learn how to do it now as with big cart out you are limited when it comes to collections in terms of parent and child collections there is a way you can do it which i do cover in the tutorial but it's not the same as you get with other platforms where you can create a dedicated parent and child like category system it is quite limited in shopify but there is a workaround for it so finally what's it like to manage your orders unfortunately i can't actually test this out in big cartel because i don't have any orders and i can't create one within the big cartel system it doesn't allow me to do that which is quite frustrating that i can't test this functionality out with within big cartel but as soon as i find a way to do this i will update all these videos so i will show you exactly how to do this what's it like to manage your orders within shopify we'll go back into the shopify dashboard we'll click on orders and within the shopify order menu you can actually do quite a bit within bulk so you can fulfill orders which means you're changing the states of them you can capture payments for them and a new feature they've recently added is you can print the packing slips this used to be something you could only do by installing an additional app this wasn't actually a native feature of shopify so it's great to see this feature added another thing you can do is you can export all your order information to a third party so if you're using say third-party order management software or third-party accounting software you can export all your order information and it goes in a csv format which you can then upload to your third-party software so the oil management in shopify is pretty good especially with the new edition being able to print the packing slips directly from the shopify dashboard without having to install an app now before i give you my conclusion of these two platforms i do just want to make a quick request if you found this video helpful i'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button because it helps the channel out massively also if you want to see more ecommerce related content consider hitting that subscribe button below because i post videos on a weekly basis so my conclusion of these two platforms which one is the better option for me it's shopify it just feels like a more complete platform and it just does everything better than what big cartel does all right big cartel is a little bit better performance wise in terms of google scores but general as a platform as a complete platform everything is just better in shopify in my opinion for me i feel like big cartel isn't quite a finished product yet it feels like they just need to add some more things to it and it could be a very good platform it does have great potential but the moment it just doesn't feel like a finished product for me also the fact that you can't get access to all the features there's not a list of features out there and you just generally struggle to find information about the platform just isn't great for me i'd like to know exactly what i'm dealing with so yes for me shopify is the better option out of the two now as i mentioned earlier in the video you can go and try both these platforms out for yourself by clicking the links in the description which are affiliate links so if you do go through them i do get a small commission which does help me out massively so thank you so much for watching guys i really do appreciate it stay awesome and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 14,374

Keywords: Bigcartel vs Shopify, Big Cartel vs Shopify, Shopify vs Bigcartel, Shopify vs Big Cartel, Big Cartel vs Shopify 2020, big cartel

Id: zpTAcfRAO-k

Length: 23min 8sec (1388 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020