Big Cartel review

Big Cartel is an online shop builder for artists and makers. You put your products into one of its themes, and customers pay through Stripe or PayPal. Big Cartel hosts the shop. If you sell your own work, you probably want to know what the free plan covers and what can go wrong.

To find out, I set up a complete shop for a made-up illustrator on the free plan. It sells coastal art prints in two sizes, with or without a frame. It also sells a set of postcards. I set up shipping and VAT for a shop in Germany. Then I designed the shop with the free theme and opened it to customers.

Setting up the shop was quick, and it looks good on a computer and on a phone. The free plan stops at five products with one photo each. The checkout only opens once you connect your own Stripe or PayPal account. Big Cartel has no test mode, so I could not place a test order. Shops in the EU have a second problem, because Big Cartel adds VAT on top of the price at checkout.

The short answer

As a shop, Big Cartel suits you if you sell a small range of your own work, like prints or shirts, and you want a shop that looks good on a phone without much setup.

Look elsewhere if you sell from the EU. Big Cartel can only add VAT on top of your prices, and EU shops have to show consumers prices with VAT included. It also fits less well if you sell a lot of products and don't want to pay much, because Platinum stops at 50 products.

As a website, Big Cartel is a storefront with a few fixed pages. Pages of your own, like an About page, need a paid plan. A blog is only possible through an app on a paid plan.

Price: free for up to five products. Platinum costs $15 a month, or $12 a month on yearly billing. Diamond costs $30 a month, or $24 a month on yearly billing. Big Cartel takes no fee on your sales. Stripe and PayPal charge their own.

I tested Big Cartel on November 3, 2026, and checked the prices the same day.

Not tested: paid plans and a real order with a connected Stripe or PayPal account. I also did not test the contact form or the mobile app. Big Cartel did not pay for this review, and there are no affiliate links.

What I liked:

• The free plan needs no card and has no time limit.
• A size option and a frame option turned into four variants, and I gave each one its own price.
• Shipping profiles take a price for the first item and a smaller one for each extra item. Local pickup is a rate type of its own.
• The free theme looks calm. Google's PageSpeed test gave the home page 86 on a simulated phone and 99 on desktop.
• The free plan has policy pages, including a legal notice, and they show up in the shop footer.
• One switch blocks AI training crawlers.

What bothered me:

• Without your own Stripe or PayPal account, customers can't check out at all. There is no test mode, and a product can't cost zero, so you can't try an order without paying.
• Outside the US, tax is added on top of the price at checkout. You can't enter prices that already include VAT.
• Only one photo shows per product on the free plan, so a framed print can't be shown next to the unframed one.
• Stock tracking and discount codes need Platinum.
• Big Cartel built the free shop address from my email address.
• The 7-day Platinum trial needs a card and turns into a $15 subscription if you don't cancel.

The shop I built

Tidewren Prints is a made-up illustrator's shop, and its footer says so. It sells coastal art prints. Three of them come in A4 and A3, with or without an oak frame. They cost €28 to €95. The fourth is a signed limited edition for €55, and a set of six postcards costs €12.

The shop uses Cosmos, the only theme on the free plan, with my own colors and logo. On a phone, the products sit two per row, and the menu opens as a list with the categories and the policy pages.

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Open the shop. It is a demo, so nothing can be bought there.

Signing up and the first questions

On Big Cartel's pricing page, the free plan sits below the two paid plans as a small link. It's called Gold. Sign-up asks for an email address and a password, or you use a Google account. It doesn't ask for a card or a phone number.

Before the admin opens, Big Cartel asks a few short questions, starting with your name and the shop name. Then it asks if you already sell somewhere and what you plan to sell. Apart from physical and digital products, you can also pick memberships and appointments. After that, Big Cartel wants the email address confirmed within 24 hours. The link arrived within a minute.

The admin then opens with a checklist of five steps.

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Setting up the shop

A new shop starts in maintenance mode, so visitors only see a page that says "We're getting things ready." You can't switch that off until you save a location. The form wanted a street address and a postal code, even for a shop in Germany. Big Cartel uses the location for shipping and taxes. It had already picked euros and the Berlin time zone.

Big Cartel built the free web address from the first part of my email address. I would not want that in a link I share. I changed it under Settings to tidewrenprints.bigcartel.com. A domain of your own needs a paid plan.

The settings also have pages for your shop policies, like returns and a legal notice. Each one is a plain text box without a template, and each shows up as a link in the shop footer. German shops need a legal notice, and the free plan has one.

Further down are two switches called AI shield. One blocks AI training crawlers. The other blocks AI shopping assistants that buy things for people. When I turned on the first one, Big Cartel added ten crawlers to the shop's robots.txt file, among them OpenAI's GPTBot and Google-Extended.

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The online shop

On all three plans, you can sell physical products. Big Cartel takes no fee of its own on sales.

Products and variants

New products start out hidden, and digital downloads need Platinum. The free plan shows one photo per product. Right after the first photo, Big Cartel showed "Plan limit hit". Platinum shows five photos and Diamond 25.

My prints come in two sizes, so I added a size option with A4 and A3. Then I added a second option for the frame. Big Cartel turned the two options into four variants, and I gave each one its own price. A product can have up to 150 variants.

Stock tracking needs Platinum, so on the free plan you can't say how many prints you have left. For the limited edition of 30, the shop doesn't stop selling by itself. You would set the product to Sold Out by hand.

Each product can also have a category. Categories show up as filters on the products page and as links in the shop footer. A Duplicate button copies a product with its options and prices. I used it for the next two prints.

After five products, the Add product button went gray, and a banner said I was at my plan limit. A product also can't cost zero.

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Shipping and taxes

Shipping works with profiles. A profile is a set of regions with their rates, and every product uses the primary profile unless you give it another one. Big Cartel had already made a primary profile for Germany, with standard shipping at zero euros.

Each rate has a base price for the first item and a price for each extra item. A rate can also be local pickup or local delivery, with a short text for the buyer. A region can be a single country or a whole continent.

The postcards go by letter post, so they got a profile of their own. Big Cartel says the buyer pays a single shipping fee when the rate names match across profiles. According to its help text, all the rate names and delivery details have to match. If they don't, the shipping costs add up. Free shipping above an order amount needs automatic discounts, which come with Diamond. Shipping labels and tracking need Platinum.

How taxes work depends on the shop's currency. If your shop sells in US dollars, Big Cartel's help center says it collects US sales tax on orders to the US and pays it to the states. Everywhere else, taxes are manual. You add a rate per country and choose whether it also applies to shipping. I added 19% for Germany. Big Cartel then adds the tax on top of the price at checkout.

There is no setting for prices that already include VAT. In the EU, shops have to show consumers the final price with VAT. A seller in the EU would have to put the VAT into the product prices and leave the tax rate empty.

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Payments and the checkout

Customers pay through Stripe or PayPal, and you connect your own account for each. With Stripe, customers pay by card or with a wallet like Apple Pay. PayPal adds PayPal itself, and Venmo for US orders. Buy now, pay later options like Klarna need Platinum. There is no option for bank transfer or cash on an online order.

I found no test mode in the admin or in the help center. To test the checkout, the help center suggests a small test product, for example for $1. That means a real payment.

When I switched off maintenance mode, Big Cartel warned me that customers could not buy anything without a payment method. I opened the shop anyway. The product pages and the cart worked. A customer picks a size and a frame, and the button shows the price of that variant. The Checkout button then led to a plain page that said "We're not set up to take payments." So without Stripe or PayPal, you never see how the checkout handles the address and shipping.

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Order emails

The communication settings have a button that sends you a sample of the order receipt. It arrived in my inbox within seconds. The sender was the shop's name with a Big Cartel email address.

The sample used my logo and three of my products, with a made-up customer in Utah. The totals were also made up. The items added up to €120, while the email showed a subtotal of €51.89. A custom message in the receipt needs Platinum, and so do emails that tell customers their order has shipped. Emails that remind customers of a cart they left behind need Diamond.

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Designing the shop with the free theme

The shop designer looks different from the rest of the admin and shows a live preview next to the settings. Big Cartel has twelve themes. The free plan gets Cosmos, and the other eleven show a "Start free trial" button. Custom pages also need a paid plan, and so does any change to the CSS or the theme code.

Fifteen preset styles set the fonts and colors, and about twenty color fields take hex codes. I picked a preset with a serif font and changed the colors to the cream and navy of the prints. The home page takes a welcome image or a slideshow of up to five images. You can also add a featured video. There is a banner across the top of every page, and I used it for the free pickup. The shop's own texts, like the buttons, can be switched to one of 21 languages. Each shop has one language.

Changes are saved but don't go live until you click Publish. The Big Cartel logo stays in the footer unless you upgrade.

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Search engines and speed

Each product has its own search title and description, and the shop description becomes the home page's search description. Big Cartel creates a sitemap with all products and categories. The product pages carry structured data with the price and the shipping details, which Google can use for product results.

I ran the published home page through Google's PageSpeed Insights once. On a simulated phone it scored 86, and the largest image appeared after 3.9 seconds. On desktop it scored 99, and the largest image appeared after 0.9 seconds. Accessibility scored 96. The only problem it found was a missing language tag. Screen readers use it to pronounce the text correctly.

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Other features

The dashboard shows visitors and orders for a date range you choose. Google Analytics and ad pixels need Platinum.

Big Cartel's app center has print-on-demand services like Printful and sales channels like Instagram. On the free plan, Big Cartel's own print-on-demand studio is locked, and the plan table lists apps for paid plans only. That matters for an illustrator, because print-on-demand lets a print shop produce and ship each order. Memberships and selling in person with the app also need Platinum.

What Big Cartel costs

I checked Big Cartel's pricing page and the plan page in the admin on November 3, 2026. Big Cartel lists its prices in US dollars only. From Germany, the trial page also showed dollars, plus tax.

The 7-day free trial of Platinum asks for a card first. After seven days it turns into a $15 monthly subscription unless you cancel. Big Cartel says it sends a reminder two days before.

For Tidewren Prints with four prints and the postcards, the free plan is enough. An illustrator with ten prints would need Platinum, which costs $144 a year on yearly billing. Stripe or PayPal fees come on top of every sale.

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Leaving Big Cartel

The help center describes a CSV download of your orders. I found no product export in the admin. The shop has a public product list in JSON format with every product's options and photo links. A developer could use it to move the products. The theme and the design stay with Big Cartel.

Who should use Big Cartel

Big Cartel fits an artist or maker who sells a few of their own products and wants a good-looking shop quickly. Platinum's limit of 50 products is a lot, because sizes and frames count as variants.

It fits less well if you sell from the EU, because of how it adds VAT. It also fits less well if you need stock tracking or discount codes on the free plan. And it fits less well if you want a website with many pages next to the shop.

If you try it, connect Stripe or PayPal and buy one of your own products before you share the shop. That is the only way to see a real order with its shipping and tax.

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