Troubleshooting

If you see an error like “The transaction ID in your link is invalid” when viewing an order from Big Cartel in your PayPal account, it’s likely that you’re logging into PayPal with the wrong email address.

Your Big Cartel orders are sent to the PayPal email you supplied on the Store > Settings page of your admin area. This means you will only be able to view the order in PayPal by logging in with that same email address.

NOTE: If your order was sent to the wrong email address, you will want to contact PayPal to either claim or void the order.

This assumes you have already setup your custom domain using our instructions.

Why isn’t my domain working?

If after a couple of days your custom domain isn’t pulling up your Big Cartel store, something may not be setup correctly with your DNS host. You’ll need to contact them directly to look into the issue.

My DNS host wants to know your IP address / DNS servers

You don’t need to use our IP address or DNS servers, just a simple CNAME as described in our instructions. A records (IP Address) are particularly bad, as IP addresses are subject to change over time, which can leave your shop inaccessible.

Will this affect my email, FTP, etc.?

Nope! Since we’re using a CNAME it shouldn’t change any of your other subdomains. However, if you have additional files using the same subdomain as your store, you’ll need to move them to a separate subdomain.

This is rare, but typically happens when PayPal is experiencing delays with their IPN system. This means PayPal is receiving the order, but they aren’t notifying Big Cartel about it until a while later.

When this happens, PayPal keeps a backlog of notifications and sends them once the problems have been fixed.

Because of this, we recommend you always leave your PayPal notification emails enabled and use those as your primary indicator of new orders.

You can check PayPal’s Live Site Status for current issues.

You need to make sure you’ve enabled shipping override in your PayPal account. Here’s how:

1. Log into your PayPal account.
2. Click My Account.
3. Click the Profile subtab.
4. In the Selling Preferences column, click Shipping Calculations.
5. If you don’t see any shipping methods then you’re done! Otherwise, continue.
6. Select each shipping method and click Edit.
7. Select Yes for Use the shipping fee in the transaction instead of my calculator’s settings.
8. Click Save Changes.

If it’s still not working, check the amounts sent by Big Cartel to PayPal by quickly right-clicking and selecting View Source on the Checkout page. If those amounts look right, then PayPal is still overwriting your shipping.

When you go to checkout in your store, are you seeing product names like xxxBASE64_STARTxxxU3bDpHZuZCBOwroxxBASE64_ENDxxx? This can happen when you use special characters in your product names like ®, ©, ä, Nº, etc.

You have two options on how to fix this:

1. Remove the characters from your product names.

or

1. Log into your PayPal account at https://www.paypal.com
2. Click the Profile link
3. Click the Language Encoding link under the Selling Preferences column
4. Click the grey More Options button
5. Choose ISO-8859-1 from the Encoding drop down menu
6. Select Yes for ‘Do you want to use the same encoding for data sent from PayPal to you (e.g., IPN, downloadable logs, emails)?’
7. Click Save

If you’ve tried uploading a product image, and it’s not showing up correctly. Try updating your Flash player to see if that solves the problem: http://adobe.com/go/getflashplayer

Otherwise, if the upload went through fine, but your image just shows up blank or with an error, you may have a corrupted image.

This is likely caused by your jpg file using CMYK colors instead of RGB. Many browsers, including Internet Explorer and Firefox, aren’t able to display CMYK and will instead show a blank space or an error message.

Solution: re-save your image using RGB colors. If you have Photoshop, simply select “Save for Web…”. Otherwise, try using Picnik, a free online image editor.