News & Updates

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 »

Good news! We’ve just added Hong Kong Dollars, New Zealand Dollars, Singapore Dollars, and Swiss Francs to our list of supported currencies.

We’ve just released some new shipping improvements that we think will really help out. These new features are a direct result of the great feedback we received from our recent shipping survey, so a huge thanks to everyone who participated.

So what’s new?

True International Shipping

You can now charge different shipping rates per country and be as specific or general as you’d like. Add a bunch of countries and give different rates to each, charge everyone the same amount, use your PayPal shipping settings, whatever. It’s up to you.

If you do have country specific shipping, your customers will see a simple drop down on the cart page to select the country it will be shipped to. No more “This will be shipped inside blah blah” checkbox!

True Combined Shipping

PayPal has long supported a form of combined shipping where you could charge one shipping amount for the first item and a different amount for each additional item. The problem was it only worked when you were buying multiple of the same item. That sucked… so we fixed it.

Just like before, you enter one shipping amount for when the product is being shipped alone and a second amount for when it’s being shipped with other products. The difference is now this will be applied across all the products in the cart. We simply find the product with the highest first amount and then use the second amount for all other products ordered. Much better.

Save and Load Defaults

We don’t want your poor lil’ hands going numb from entering shipping and size options for each product. So now you can save defaults! Just enter the options you like once and click Save as default.

Then when you add a new product, those options will be there waiting for you. Want to add your defaults to an existing product? Fine! Just click the Load default link and here they come.

Check out the Products help for more dirt.

We’re happy to announce that one of our most requested features is now here: discount codes! Platinum and Diamond stores can now create discount promos to entice new buyers and reward loyal ones. Find out how it works »

Note to custom CSS stores: we’ve added some new styles to your store for the new discount code area on the cart page. This should look just fine on most stores, but if you’ve done some heavy customization on that page you’ll wanna give it a look.

Curious to see who these Matt and Eric characters are that made this here Big Cartel? Well we’ve just launched a brand new site for our company, Indie Labs, and we’d love you to check it out and see what we’re all about.

In a perfect world, this feature wouldn’t be required. However, lately we’ve received word of a couple stores receiving spam through their contact form. So before it can get out of hand, we’ve added a CAPTCHA spam filter to make sure your inboxes are full of new orders and not Viagara ads.