Shopify on one hand is the leading name in the ecommerce world and Big Cartel on the other hand is taking its gradual steps upward in the ladder of the ecommerce world.

Shopify hosts businesses of all kinds and of all sizes. People across the world loved using Shopify and thus time and again preferred over any other platforms. It has a massive number of over one million lucrative companies running under it, all thanks to the powerful and sturdy sales and marketing tools of Shopify. Shopify is scalability and flexible according to the needs of the company. Many big names in the business world currently running their robust business in Shopify.

Big Cartel is another great ecommerce building platform, but how does it differ from Shopify?

Big Cartel is mainly aiming to support small scale businesses. Big Cartel currently powers over 50,000 websites. That’s quite a less number than Shopify’s as Big Cartel is preferred by bloggers, individual artists to sell their products as well as small business merchants. It is only in Big Cartel that in its Gold plan it allows the sellers to sell free without giving any monthly fee perfect for a starter to sell their few products with good features of Big Cartel.

From the overview it is quite evident who will win in this comparison blog. But it is far greater than just winning and losing. Both are best serving their purpose in their ways which we are to unveil in this blog. At the end it depends upon what is the capacity of your business.

Still confused which one you should go with? We made it easier for you with our simple yet detailed comparison between the big boys of the ecommerce landscape in our blog. And as the comparison will unfold, you will have a strong understanding about both the platforms and will be in a better position to decide which one of the platforms is best suitable for your business.

Apart from having excellent features that would certainly lure the customers, the platform should also provide ease in understanding and operating those features. Having to deal with an enormous amount of intricate steps before reaching the desired result would make anyone frustrated especially in the time where everything is moving at a fast pace. Let’s thus analyse which one of them could cope up with this speed and also would provide the best of features.

Shopify is the best when it comes to its simplicity. It is intuitive and has a simple and clear interface with no complicated instructions to follow. It has a drag-and-drop system which makes it beginner friendly to set-up their website. To build your simple online store there will be no requirement to be an expert in technology, one can easily follow the steps in the guide and you are good to go. For having a fully customised and integrated website, one needs the help of a professional website developer. But the simple changes in Shopify doesn’t require the knowledge of coding.

Big Cartel is by far the most complicated platform to perform any task. It certainly is made for the artistic stores but it requires coding in every change you make. Big Cartel though offers setup assistance but when you will go further in the set-up process of your store, things will get complicated. Big Cartel is good only for those who want to stay in a small segment, and most importantly who knows how to code to avail the basic features of Big Cartel.

When you are selling online, the way your website appears before the customers matters a lot. A dull and not well maintained and unattractive template creates a negative impression upon the buyers and statistically said many customers drop out of the idea of buying when they see anything as such. Regarding templates, there’s a vast difference between Shopify and Big Cartel. Let’s find out which one is better.

Shopify’s themes are one of its kind. It has very well customizable premium themes made ready by the professional designers for you to get enormous options to choose from for any kind of industry. The themes are mobile responsive means it will look absolutely stunning no matter what size screen your customer would view your website.

Shopify has a separate theme store named ThemeForest where you will get over 1,200 templates. While few of the themes are free, the rest of it is paid premium themes which range from $ 140 to $ 180. Paying for the theme is a one time investment and paying for such a polished theme for your ecommerce site will be worth investing when you are aiming for growth in your business.

Big Cartel contrarily doesn’t give much option in themes. As it has been mentioned both the platforms differ a lot, because Big Cartel has only 19 themes available for the users which are not very customizable. Also which in turn requires the coding knowledge for the basic changes you do.

Big Cartel’s themes are all mobile responsive as Shopify’s. Also it lacks many features which Shopify has such as allowing the user to edit through mobile.

Another feature which should have been there in Big Cartel but is not is zoom product image. This sometimes becomes the cause why customers cannot trust the quality of the product as they are not able to view it properly the way they like.

In ecommerce business sales feature is the heart of a platform. Sales tools are the most integral part, and without having a strong layout the website built would be futile as it would neither be able to fulfill the needs of the merchants and not of the customers.

Shopify in this regard is ofcourse stands out to have the best of the tools so much so that it is supporting enterprise level businesses worldwide. Shopify has each version set to support small, medium to large businesses without discarding from the useful tools in the starter plans. Here lies the big difference with Big Cartel as it has very basic sales tools, not anything to be gushed upon.

Listing here some of the best sales features of both the platforms. While learning about Big Cartel’s ecommerce tools it must be remembered that all of them are already available in Shopify.

• Multi-channel selling- Multi-channel selling enables companies to integrate their ecommerce site to various social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and on Amazon, Ebay etc. which gives a huge exposure to sell products to a large number of people.
• Abandoned cart recovery- Shopify has an inbuilt feature to recover cart abandonment. Card abandonment takes place when a customer goes through the check out process but leaves the cart without making the purchase. This creates a negative impact in the inventory by reducing its level. Shopify aids by sending automatic emails to buyers to recover cart abandonment.
• Unlimited Product- Shopify is highly scalable and can handle a large volume of workload. It supports unlimited products to sell and doesn’t limit the merchants.
• Partnerships- Shopify to help its users in every way possible has even made things easier for the companies regarding shipping by partnering with courier services USPS, DHL Express, Ups and Canada post. You can choose which shipping service you would like to work with. With Shopify Shipping Service, you can print multiple labels at a time and ship your products quickly.

• Inventory Management- Big Cartel provides good inventory management, keeps track of the products of your online store and sends you alerts for running low on products.
• Analytics- Big Cartel in its paid plan allows linking your ecommerce site with Google analytics to get an in depth stats about sales reports, customer’s behaviour and helps monitoring the performance.
• Apply Discounts- Big Cartel allows you to give discounts codes to your customers which is a good way to let them think they are saving a lot by purchasing from you and would make a good impression out of you.
• Free Themes- There are limited themes available in Big Cartel but all are free of cost.

Apps and plugins increase the functionality of your online store in a variety of ways. Let’s compare both Shopify and Big Cartel and see which of the platforms has the edge.

Shopify’s number of apps is really overwhelming having more than 4000 apps to choose from. There are apps for whatever you many think of, both free and paid. These extensions enhance email campaigns, provide better shipment functionality; Plug in SEO is one of the best apps for SEO optimization. Shopify has apps to enable drop shipping service means you can ship your products directly from the suppliers to the customers. The apps are really alluring because of the awesome functionality it has, so one would have to be cautious while integrating your online store with lots of plugins as it would add up to your charges as well if chosen from the paid apps.

By now one must have guessed what Big Cartel would offer in comparison to Shopify. Big Cartel has less apps than Shopify, with only over 1000 apps through Zapier, a company that allows users to integrate the apps they use. Apart from that Big Cartel has very few add-ons on its own. Though whatever it provides it is good enough to support small artistic stores.

The second last stage to judge a platform is to check its help and support service. A platform should be active to help its users when they are stuck at any technical issues while running the ecommerce site. Let’s checkout the ways in which Shopify and Big Cartel would aid its users.

Shopify again in this aspect is many steps ahead of Big Cartel and provides dedicated support to the customers. Look at the multiple ways Shopify keeps open for its user to get the desired help:

• Video tutorials
• Shopify community
• Webinars
• Changelog
• 24/7 phone support
• 24/7 live chat support
• Email support
• Social media support
• Shopify Expert (in the Plus plan)

Big Cartel again lags behind in help and support. It doesn’t have such a broad system to provide help but is only available through mails from Monday to Friday within time limit. There’s available in Big Cartel’s help center many articles about various topics which one may seek help from.

The last stage to judge a platform is which one will be cost effective, means which of the platforms would provide the best of features and would be worth paying for. Also a part of it depends upon your requirements as well.

Let’s have a parallel comparison of the monthly price of both the platforms.

Of course Big Cartel has cheaper monthly plans than Shopify as it focuses more on the smaller segment of the industry to support them. But still Shopify is a value for money platform as Big Cartel’s starter plans would bind you in all ways to expand having only 5 product limits in the free Gold plan and 50 product limits in the Platinum plan. The pricier plan itself has only 500 product limits. Whereas in Shopify the starter plans has all the powerful tools with unlimited products and bandwidth. It also has staff accounts, abandoned cart recovery and much more which are all needed for a proper ecommerce business.

Shopify takes transaction fees for not using Shopify’s own payment processor and it is different for each plan. Have a look at it:

• Shopify Basics- 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction
• The Shopify Plan- 2.6% + 30¢ per transaction
• Shopify Advanced- 2.4% + 30¢ per transaction

Big Cartel for supporting small merchants doesn’t take any processing fee on itself but the third party payment gateways charge transaction fees. Big Cartel is partnered with only Stripe and PayPal so the transaction fees of Stripe is 2.9% + $ 0.30 and the same for PayPal. Which again is similar to what Shopify has. Overall it further proved that Shopify is the best value for money.

• Shopify is a simplistic platform with powerful tools whereas Big Cartel is a very complicated platform with not so impressive ecommerce features.
• Shopify supports businesses of all sizes whereas Big Cartel is only limited within the small sector supporting only the artistic stores.
• Shopify has a vast range of themes whereas Big Cartel has very limited themes with limited customization options.
• Shopify doesn’t require coding knowledge for small changes whereas Big Cartel requires the knowledge of coding for any kind of changes you make.
• Shopify has far better customer support than Big Cartel.

Shopify wins in every round. It has everything one needs for their ecommerce site. It is scalable and flexible and doesn’t devoid the small businesses to take advantage of the best tools and features. Shopify is all you need to have a robust business.