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 »

Exactly one year ago we launched the Big Cartel forum, and today we’re excited to launch a very new and improved forums area for our stores.

Aside from fitting in much nicer with the rest of the Big Cartel site, the new forums will make it easier for you to get help with your store, provide feedback to Big Cartel, get design tips, and chat with other stores about whatever is on your mind.

We’ve left the old forum up if you’d like to search through it for old posts, otherwise we’ll see everybody in our new digs!

View the Big Cartel forums »

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.

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 »