Big Cartel Blog

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.