Big Cartel Blog

With the dawn comes the rise of a new Big Cartel site. Last night we launched some updates to our main site and store directory that we hope will explain Big Cartel more clearly and make things easier to use. In addition to revamping the design, we’ve changed the organization of the site to provide more upfront information and examples, the ability to sign up for any plan right from the start, and a bunch of other little bits and pieces.

We’ve also given the store directory its own space now and added in a highly-requested search feature. While our aim continues to be to provide simple, individual stores, as opposed to becoming a community marketplace, these changes to the directory should expose more of the awesome stores using Big Cartel.

Coming off the holidays, we’ve been hard at work on a host of performance improvements for Big Cartel. This past week, we finished migrating all store images to Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront ensures that visitors to your stores download images from a lightning fast server near them, no matter where they are in the world. This results in faster page loads and, hopefully, more traffic and sales for your stores.

Less visibly, we’ve been making some nerdy (technical) changes under the hood that, in addition to speeding up page loads for your stores, will enable us to handle ever more traffic without breaking a sweat.

As ever, thanks. We’re looking forward to a great year.