Art to ze cart, man.
Contrary to last week's "sellyourhandmade/indieartstuffonline marketplace" disastrous find, Big Cartel is a neat alternative to the current top dogs. The makers of Big Cartel just announced the 2nd anniversay on October 4th, as well as the fact that the site now hosts 10k shops. That's a neat growth curve. Big Cartel started out as MerchBoss, but after a complete rebranding the guys of IndieLabs, BigCartel's makers, felt much better with the new name. That's initiative.
After reading up on the general and overall idea, philosophy etc., I wanted to check up on three things that I know have been an issue at other indie/handmade shopping platforms.
Having a shop on BigCartel -
instead of taking a commission on sold items and fixed listing fees, BigCartel simply offer three plans: Gold, Platinum, Diamond (I love how they start at no less than the real precious stuff!). Depending on which plan a seller chooses, the numbers of items listed and photos included per listing are limited or unlimited. The Gold plan is free of charge, but accordingly limited in options and controls over one's shop. This seems like a nice option for testing and getting a feeling for the basic things around Big Cartel, and besides, upgrading to Platinum or Diamond is possible at any time. Needless to say that the Diamond plan offers nearly total control over design, amount of items listed, and so on. If you want to integrate your shop into your own domain - they can do it, too.
The cumbersome topic "shop stats" -
no biggie here! While Gold features very simple stats with items sold/listed, Platinum has visitors in addition to that, and Diamond even offers Top Referrer and Top Search Terms. That's what we call stats, isn't it.
Communicating with the user community -
reading the blog, it looks like the makers are listening to their users, and they use the blog as a means to document and communicate updates and changes (in a timely manner, as it looks), as well as a ground to hear their users.
I like, from the short browse that I took, that the forum does really well without cotton candy and cool*aid.
Anyways.
With $19.99 per month for Diamond you get a widely customisable shop of your own, while you don't have to worry about server and software. If you're serious about your business and if you don't need the whole "community" hype thing in addition, then a rough $0.66 each day plus PayPal fees per sale is a neat price. A very neat price.
