Big Cartel

Nope! It’s your money – you keep it.

Unlike other services, Big Cartel does not charge any fees per transaction. The normal PayPal fees still apply.

To open a Big Cartel store, you need a PayPal Business or Premier account.

To sign up for PayPal account, follow these steps:

1. Visit PayPal’s website and click Sign Up Today.
2. Select your country or region, your language and choose either the Premier or Business account.

If signing up for a Premier account: fill in all of the required fields presented and click Agree and Create Account.

If signing up for a Business Account:

1. Select Website Payments Standard for your Payment Solution and click continue. 
2. After selecting your Payment Solution, follow the three steps to complete your registration process.
   *Note: While completing Step 1, you’ll be asked about your Sales Venue(s), select Other.

You’re free to sell digital goods, but Big Cartel doesn’t currently offer automated digital delivery, so you would need to manually send each product. However, digital delivery is something we hope to add in the future.

Big Cartel was designed for smaller shops. Someone with 500 products has significantly more complex needs than one with 50, and there are plenty of services out there to accommodate them.

We may consider expanding the limit in the future, but for now it’s a good way for us to stay focused on the little guys.

Nope. Community marketplaces like eBay and Etsy are essentially one big shopping cart that you can add your products to. Customization is very limited, and you’re sharing the spotlight with millions of other products.

On the other hand, Big Cartel is your own shopping cart. You can setup your store to look any way you’d like, and your products are the center of attention. Not just one more lost in the crowd.

No. We provide you with a lovely online store, but getting products made and orders fulfilled is up to you.

Nope! Your customers are not required to have a PayPal account to use your Big Cartel store. They can pay using only a credit card if they choose. This is a feature available to Premier and Business PayPal accounts. Learn more »

Making PayPal accounts optional

This should be enabled by default, but just in case you can head to the Profile > Website Payment Preferences section of your PayPal account, and turn on PayPal Account Optional:

Why don’t I see the credit card option?

If you don’t see an option to pay with a credit card on the PayPal checkout screen, and you’ve enabled PayPal Account Optional as we mention above, then it’s probably because PayPal has set a cookie on your computer that remembers you’ve used a PayPal account in the past. To see the option you can remove all cookies from PayPal.com.

You can change your currency on the Store > Settings page of the admin. Big Cartel supports the following currencies:

• Australian Dollar : AUD – $
• Canadian Dollar : CAD – $
• Euro : EUR – €
• Hong Kong Dollars : HKD – $
• New Zealand Dollars : NZD – $
• Pound Sterling : GBP – £
• Singapore Dollars : SGD – $
• Swiss Francs : CHF – SFr.
• U.S. Dollar : USD – $
• Yen : JPY – ¥