Big Cartel Blog

Today is Big Cartel’s 4th birthday!

Without getting too sappy, on behalf of all five of us here at Indie Labs (our new support guru Karen isn’t listed yet), I’d just like to thank all of you for creating such awesome stores, selling so many cool products, recommending us to your friends, and just making Big Cartel so much fun.

Cheers!

On Tuesday, September 29th, we’ll be changing the way we handle taxes. Currently Big Cartel allows you to assign tax settings to each product, now however, taxes will be applied store-wide in your Store > Settings section. This makes it easier to have consistent tax settings across your store, without needing to hassle with each product individually.

Along with this change, we’ll be removing the field to charge a flat tax amount through Big Cartel, and you can instead use PayPal’s extensive tax features.

What does this mean for me?

If you don’t currently charge tax, or you’re already using PayPal’s tax features, then you don’t need to do anything! Everything will work exactly like it does already. If you currently charge a flat tax rate using Big Cartel, then you’ll just want to setup your PayPal tax settings to match those rates.

Lastly, if you’ve made changes to your cart page HTML or have a totally custom theme, you’ll want to make note of the changes to tax related variables in our HTML API.

As always, let us know if you have any questions.

Update: this change has now been made. You can learn more in the help area »

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.