Shopify offers 3 primary pricing plans of $29, $79 or $299 per month. For enterprise or high-volume merchants, Shopify Plus is also available. For Shopify, there are no product limitations, so merchants are able to see as many products as they wish on all plans.
With four plans available: Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Titanium, Big Cartel have a plan for almost every budget. In fact, Big Cartel is the only eCommerce platform which lets you sell online for free, but it’s best suited for individual products (such as a piece of art). Anything for free comes at a cost. In this case, that cost is functionality and power.
On Big Cartel, there is a product limit for each plan. This contrasts starkly with the unlimited products available on all Shopify plans.
Shopify boasts an exhaustive list of features including unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, full HTML and CSS access, mobile POS, major shipping carrier integration, coupon code generation, SEO features, built-in analytics, inventory management, gift cards and so much more. Any additional features not built-in can be found in Shopify’s app store – with 2500+ apps, including favourites such as Klaviyo, Smile.io and ReCharge, making Shopify highly customisable, functional and feature-rich.
With a feature set that’s a little sparser, Big Cartel still boasts some good features including HTML and CSS customisation on paid plans, WYSIWYG editor, up to 500 products, unlimited bandwidth, inventory tracking on paid plans, integration with Facebook, mobile admin app for iPhone and more.
Design is one of Shopify’s strongest features. With beautiful, sleep and responsive designs, Shopify is known for its professionally designed themes and ability to customise with full HTML and CSS access.
Although free design options are limited on Big Cartel, they are also easy to edit by using a simple editor or by editing the raw files.
The Shopify app store is quite remarkable, with over 2500 apps available for merchants, Shopify is truly able to go above and beyond in terms of functionality and features. There’s a wide range of options to enhance our store’s reporting capabilities, orders and shipping, marketing, design, selling channels, customer support, security, finance management, and so on. There’s simply no denying that Shopify is way ahead of Big Cartel when it comes to integrations.
Big Cartel supports a few decent app integrations, with the most popular being Facebook. This integration connects the merchants inventory with Facebook, enabling them to sell directly from the social platform. Merchants are also able to link to a brick-and-mortar store with Big Cartel’s mobile POS integration. The iOS app is also handy for accepting card payments via iPhone or iPad. Big Cartel’s limited integrations would only be sufficient for a typical art business only requiring the bare essentials of eCommerce functionality. For growing businesses, Shopify has more to offer.
While Big Cartel and Shopify both offer solid web-based eCommerce solutions, Shopify clearly emerges as the better platform when comparing them head to head. Big Cartel has more than enough for many creatives, but Shopify has much more to offer bigger stores and businesses. If you need a beautiful and responsive online store, talk to our eCommerce and Shopify Experts today.
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