A few of you may be experiencing some slow page loads today. We’re working hard to fix this and hope to have it resolved ASAP. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: Things should be better now. Thanks everyone.

Yowza, we’ve been busy! Today we’re happy to announce some big improvements to Big Cartel. We’ve made a ton of tweaks and upgrades, but here are a few we’re really excited about:

Better Customization

You can do a lot with CSS, but now we’ve opened up a world of possibilities with the addition of pages. Now you can customize the HTML of your store’s pages and even add new ones for things like About Us, Return Policy, Sizing Charts, whatever you’d like.

And if that wasn’t enough, you can now choose how many products to show per page, display shipping and tax amounts to your customers, upload product images of any size, and more.

New Theme

To show off a bit of what our new features can do, we’ve built a brand new theme for Platinum and Diamond plans called Blocks. Blocks uses our new HTML and JavaScript APIs to create a really smooth shop.

New Admin

To tie all of this together, we did a major overhaul on your store admin. You’ll notice all sorts of little gems as you check the dashboard, manage your products, and customize your store.

Help Section

We’ll be blogging about many of these new features in the coming days, but for now our new help section should whet your appetite.

Big Cartel will be down this Saturday night, May 3rd, starting at 11 PM EST. The downtime will last approximately 4 hours while we switch over to a beefy new server and make a few other changes.

We apologize for such a lengthy timeframe, but these upgrades will be well worth it.

UPDATE: All done!

In case you missed them before, here are 3 tips you need to know:

• Don’t use frames!
• Enable PayPal shipping override!
• Don’t add an “International Shipping” product, do it up right!

I was recently interviewed by e-commerceguide.com, check it out! I sound a bit nerdy, but luckily Secret Penguin had my back.

Sometimes we could all use a little help. View Store »

Today is Big Cartel’s second birthday! It’s been a wonderful and rewarding two years for me and Eric, and we’d like to sincerely thank all of you for that.

Also, by some freaky coincidence, this morning we opened our 10,000th store. WTF?! It took us 18 months to hit 5000 stores and less than 6 months to double that.

Big Cartel FTW!

How cool would it be to show your customers a real-time chart of your product’s inventory? Well now you can! Find out how it works »

Well it finally happened, we put Big Cartel on MySpace. We’re a bit lonely at the moment, so let’s get some friendships started! Oh yeah, join the Big Cartel Stores Group too.

Many of you have asked us how you can put a link back to your website in your store. Well we’ve just made it really easy! Find out how »