Products

By default your store comes with some categories to get you started, and changing them is easy:

1. Go to the Products section of your admin area.
2. Click to add a new product or edit an existing product.
3. Under your list of categories, click the Edit categories link.

From there you can add, edit, delete, and re-order your categories as much as you’d like.

Big Cartel gives you the option to either charge no tax on orders or to use your PayPal tax settings. By default no tax will be charged, but you can change this on the Store > Settings page of your admin area.

Between PayPal and Big Cartel, you have a few different options for shipping.

First things first

Unless you’re using your PayPal shipping settings, you need to make sure shipping override is enabled in your PayPal account.

Country based shipping

You can charge different shipping rates per country and be as specific or general as you’d like.

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.

When your customer goes to checkout, we find the product with the highest first amount and then use the second amount for all other products ordered.

If you have country specific shipping, your customers will see a drop down on the cart page to select the country it will be shipped to. 

If you don’t offer shipping to a particular country, make sure you don’t have the country or Everywhere Else in your shipping list, and your customer will get an error if they select that country.

PayPal shipping

To use your PayPal shipping settings, simply leave shipping options blank in Big Cartel.

Don’t charge shipping

If you don’t want to charge shipping, just add one shipping option for Everywhere with $0 in each amount.

Options can be anything “optional” about your product. Ex: color, size, etc. There must always be one option, but you can add as many options as you’d like.

Default Option

If your product only has one option, and you don’t want it to display in your store, leave the option’s name as Default.

Combining Options

If your product comes in multiple options, like size and color, you can combine options: Small / Black, Large / Black, Small / Red, Large / Red

Tracking

Each option lets you track the amount you have sold and the amount you have left in stock (if your plan allows it). Learn how options work with inventory tracking.

Each plan allows you to upload a different number of images for each product. 

Having problems uploading images? Learn how to fix it »

Primary Image

The image on the far left is considered the primary image for the product. You can change the order of images, and the primary image, by dragging them into the desired location.

Image Sizes

When you upload an image, Big Cartel automatically creates different sizes of that image to be used in your store. Each size maintains your images aspect ratio. Here are the sizes in pixels:

• Thumb – 75 x 75 max
• Medium – 175 x 175 max
• Large – 300 x 300 max
• Fullsize – 1000 x 1000 max

File Size

To prevent your store from loading slowly for your customers, each image needs to be under 1 MB to be uploaded. This should be plenty big for web images, but if your image is bigger than that you can open it in a graphics program like Photoshop and reduce the size to a max of 1000 px by 1000 px, or use one of these tools to do the job:

Our inventory tracking feature is available to Platinum and Diamond plans.

Enabling inventory tracking

You can enable inventory tracking on the Store > Settings page of your store admin.

After that, go to the Products section and tell us how many you have and how many you’ve already sold. When someone buys one, we’ll subtract it from the amount you have in stock and add one to the amount sold.

An Example

Let’s say you sell a tee shirt that comes in 3 sizes: Small, Medium, and Large. You have a limited stock in each size, so here’s what you do:

1. While entering your product info, add all of the options your product comes in and tell us how many of each you have in stock. If your product doesn’t have options, like a CD for example, you only need one option named “Default”. For our example shirt we enter: Small – 10, Medium – 1, Large – 23
2. When your customer visits your store, they find the tee shirt and decide to buy one in Medium. So they add it to their cart and checkout.
3. After your customer pays for the shirt, we’ll reduce the stock by the amount ordered. In this case, they’ve ordered your last one so the in stock amount set to 0 and the product status is automatically changed to “Sold Out”.

What happens if my customer tries to buy more than I have in stock?

In our example you had 1 Medium left in stock. If your customer went to checkout with 2 Mediums, we’d notify them and reduce their cart to 1.

Inventory Reserve

If you have inventory tracking enabled, and overselling disabled, we activate our “inventory reserve” feature. This means that when your customer adds an item to their cart, it’s removed from your inventory for 15 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.

Product Overselling

Don’t want us to automatically mark your product as Sold Out when the stock hits 0? No problem, just Enable Product Overselling on the Store > Settings page of your admin and you can keep selling your products and we’ll still track your inventory.

Inventory bars show your customers a real-time chart of your product’s inventory level.

If your store has inventory tracking enabled, with overselling off, you can turn on inventory bars on the Design > Basics page under Options.

We calculate the percentage for each of your product options based on how many have been sold and how many are left in stock. Ex: 20 sold and 20 in stock will make a 50% bar.