Every business that sells products and services is adopting a native shopping cart for its own control over the stock, pricing, and delivery instead of depending on pre-established e-commerce brands.
The third-party e-commerce stores impose charges for the listing of the products which would eventually increase the price of the product before it goes into the customer’s hands. Sometimes, it is the price that affects the number of sales directly.
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What shall be done?
Easy! Setting up own store will solve this problem.
The next probably quick question that comes to mind would be ‘How much does it cost?’
If you pick any ‘from-the-scratch’ solution from any software, it would cost you 10 times more than your actual budget. Moreover it’s important to learn how to use the dashboard that you will be given to control your stock, listings, orders, and everything you should do as a business owner.
Good for you
You are here means that you have already done your research about setting up a ready-to-use store for your business.
Good for you! Because it is the best solution when you cannot spend a mountain over building a store. Moreover, ready-made solutions will help you with everything, easily manageable from your end.
What are the best ecommerce store solutions available?
If you come this far, you should know about two big platforms, Shopify and Bigcartel. These two shopping cart solutions are the best and most confusing to choose from.
We will take you on a tour of these two platforms. It will make it easy for you to pick up one platform for your business needs.
[Shopify vs Bigcartel store side by side]
Shopify features:
Powering over 600,000 businesses over the internet and having 1M+ users, Shopify has a record of selling $55B+ valued products from its stores. This quick setup store solution offers the following features for its users.
Website features:
- Fully customizable online store and blog – With 100+ professional themes and a mobile commerce platform.
- Can edit the website’s HTML and CSS as per the business needs.
- Built-in mobile commerce ready.
- Blog feature.
- Web-based website builder.
- Own domain name; Can purchase domain name directly from Shopify.
Inventory features:
- Can control the availability of stock through an inventory tracker.
- Can offer different variations of the products related to color, size, price, material, and more.
- Can organize products based on the type, season, sale, and more.
- Can upload multiple images of the same product.
- Product-specific meta tags, titles, and URL handles.
- Can buy physical products right from the website and download digital products.
- Unlimited product listings.
- Can import/export product details from/into CSV format files.
Apart from these major features, Shopify features the sales channels like Pinterest and Amazon through one-time listing on Shopify.
Bigcartel features:
- Simple and resourceful in building a store in easy steps.
- Easily customizable images, fonts, colors, and themes.
- Can tweak the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of the store for a complete customized store.
- Real-time stats for live tracking of the sales and inventory.
- Search engine optimization to bring the products to the top of SERPs for users.
- Order management since the customer places an order till the product is delivered.
- Promotional tools and user-based ease-of-use interface, tools, and options.
- Mobile-friendly store for mobile phone and tablet users.
- iOS app for sales handling in person at crafts fairs, concerts, and other live events.
Shopify vs Bigcartel:
Both Bigcartel vs Shopify have similar options as they both focus on customers with less or no technical knowledge. The ability to edit the code for more flexible customization holds both platforms on equally weighted pans.
So, what’s the actual difference between them both?
Business style:
Shopify focuses its solution on every common man who wants to merchandise his/her inventory online without spending much on it whereas Bigcartel focuses on the customers who are passionate about selling their craftworks.
They see art in every product that is put to sale on their platform through merchant’s stores.
Those who are customers of Shopify are the army of artists. It pulls a newcomer to Bigcartel with their heart-warming welcoming notes on their website.
Shopify keeps it simple and just cares about keeping it simple and straight to newcomers.
Clarity of features:
Anything that’s out of clarity could never impress the customers. If you are buying something at a supermarket, would you buy things that are just out of detail?
The same applies when it comes to Shopify vs Bigcartel. Shopify lists out all the features that it has to offer its customers.
They have listed out every feature in detail that they offer, from website design to inventory management and delivery management.
User interface:
The user interface comes into play when it is about favoring the customers with less technical knowledge.
It is also to be remembered that the e-commerce store’s admin panel would be one complex report card and toolbox to handle.
In that context, Shopify takes the lead with its modern full-screen easy-to-use interface.
It allows the store owners to add or remove products, manage customer orders, manage discounts, and view and export reports in one place which is a handy and adopted method of user interface design.
Bigcartel, on the other hand still uses that old school boring display with icons on the header and narrowed or boxed layout to add or manage products.
I feel Shopify looks more comfortable for a store owner to have everything under the fingertip with easily identifiable labels on the options and organized layout.
Pricing:
When we are talking about the budget while creating an online store, the pricing makes a huge impact over the decision of picking up a platform.
Unless the platform is particularly dominating over the other ones, one would not pick a service that charges higher.
Pricing plans of Shopify:
The basic plan in Shopify starts with $29 with unlimited storage access and unlimited product listing. This package takes 2% of the transaction charges of the total paid by the customer while buying a product.
The medium plan costs &79 with 1% transaction charges and the same unlimited storage and listing. The third plan is the costliest plan and it costs $299 which takes only 0.5%.
The benefit features like fraud analysis, professional reports and gift cards are included in the medium and premium plans. Take a glance at the total pricing plans of Shopify once to get a clear idea of what you will be offered.
Pricing plans of Bigcartel:
The good thing is that Bigcartel offers a free plan to sell just 5 products and the store must carry the subdomain of Bigcartel.com in the URL.
It would look something like mystore.bigcartel.com when created. If you are looking to test out Bigcartel’s platform, this is a great opportunity.
The basic plan starts at $10 with only 25 product listing capabilities and full customization features. The pricing extends as the product listing requirement goes up. It takes $20 for 100 products and $30 for 300 products.
Which one to pick?
To be honest, the pricing plans of both the e-commerce platforms broke the ice for me. It helped me make a decision quickly. Here is what I analyzed from it.
- Both have good features and both are customer-centric
- Shopify starts at $30 which is the highest plan on Bigcartel.
- Comparing the $30 packages, Shopify takes over the edge by offering unlimited storage and unlimited product listings.
- I will get free SSL, website and blogs, discount codes, and manual order creation features within $30 and why go for Bigcartel?
- I am even getting staff accounts with Shopify. Bigcartel says nothing about it.
- Advanced reports and fraud analysis can be possible with Shopify whereas Bigcartel just said nothing about it. It upsets to see a passionate platform doing that.
What do you think? Which one do you think looks promising? Comment your opinion below.