News & Updates

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.

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.

Today is Big Cartel’s third birthday, and we can’t believe how truly big it’s become:

• 30,000 fine folks like you have a Big Cartel store.
• Millions of dollars have been paid directly to stores.
• We’ve seen some amazing designs, and heard some very kind words.
• Our service keeps getting better thanks to your feedback.

Thanks for making Big Cartel so much fun to be a part of.

We’ve just released a small, but handy little feature that not only allows you to upload multiple product images at once, but will also show you the progress of the uploads.

This should be a welcomed treat for anyone who has spent time uploading images one by one, and wondered when that spinning icon will go away.

In the past, a few stores have run into the issue of overselling a product. This could happen when the product had only one left in stock and two people went to buy it at the same time. That’s a pretty frustrating experience since it usually means emailing one of the customers explaining that they don’t actually get the item they thought they were getting. Well we weren’t very happy with that so we did something about it.

The source of the problem is a delay between the sale being made at PayPal and us being notified so we can update the inventory. To get around that, we’re trying a new feature we call inventory reserve. Now when your customer adds an item to their cart, it’s removed from your inventory for 10 minutes. This gives them time to checkout while preventing someone else from buying the same item. If they don’t end up buying the item, it gets added back to your inventory and becomes available for purchase again.

If you run a store that receives a rush of orders on limited products, please let us know how this new feature works for you.

One of the big requests from our last customer survey was for the ability to show larger images in your store. While the newest theme, Blocks, had this functionality already, the default theme did not. Until now!

We’re happy to announce larger images for the Sexy theme! Your customers will now be able to see a larger view of your product by clicking its image on a product page.

New stores will get this functionality automatically, but if you’re currently using Sexy as your theme and would like your product page to function this way, we’ve created a help article to walk you through changing it.

For those Flickr lovers out there, the Big Cartel Group is the place to be! Post photos of your awesome stores and products.

If you’ve been developing your store for a little while, you’d probably like to clear out all your stats before you officially launch. Well now you can »