Merchants all around the world are sharing valuable products, releasing their own creativity to the masses. That’s why they are always seeking for better and better solutions.
A recurring question we get a lot from the eCommerce community is in regards to Big Cartel vs Shopify, and which one comes out on top.
With all of the designers, painters, photographers, crafters and authors, Big Cartel seems like the best solution to make money to support their desires and passions. But why do so many merchants want to migrate away from Big Cartel? And how can Shopify help merchants with features better than Big Cartel? This article will discuss the topic of Big Cartel vs Shopify and guide you through how to use LitExtension to migrate between these two platforms.
Table of Content
- Big Cartel vs Shopify
- How to migrate from Big Cartel to Shopify using LitExtension
- Is it worth it?
- Conclusion
Big Cartel vs Shopify
Big Cartel vs Shopify is an important question when comparing the best way of exploring ecommerce. Both of them have similar functions and features such as helping merchants to build their online store with easy steps and without any coding or designing skills. Additional marketing, shipping, billing, and CRM tools however, need to be looked at closer... Let’s draw a comparison between these two ecommerce platforms to see which one is more suited to you.
Figure 1: Search traffic on Google Trends of past 5 years between Big Cartel vs Shopify
Big Cartel
Big Cartel is the only platform on earth that allows you to create a store and sell for free with their Gold Plan . Suitable for beginners, small business and anyone who has a limited budget working on creating products based on individual creativity. People described above are often artists, painters, crafters... There are a lot of things you should consider if you are going to use Big Cartel for a long-term period. The main problem is Big Cartel lacks features that can not serve a business to scale up, to even medium size, not to mention large size. We can list out some factor that I consider as important such as:
- Limited number of products
This is really a big deal when you want to scale your brand. The amount of products you can list ranges from 5 to 300 products depending on your pricing plan.
- Themes and customization
There are not so many themes to choose from with Big Cartel - only around 19 themes. They cannot be customized too much using the Big Cartel website builder so you should be prepared for scarcity of design. Poor initial design and very constrained freedom are among the huge drawbacks of Big Cartel website creator.
- Lack of abandoned cart recovery feature
This is a huge drawback of Big Cartel, abandoned cart recovery is an important feature that every ecommerce website should have
With some of the limitations above, let's take a look and see if Shopify can break down the barriers of ecommerce better than Big Cartel.
Shopify
Shopify is the most famous eCommerce platform that anyone who wants to make a website and sell online should know. Shopify was established in 2004 by Tobias Lutke, designed to help merchants build their own, scalable online store with hundreds of built-in features, and tons of apps.
Shopify now has over 1,000,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries using it up until the end of 2019. Both Big Cartel and Shopify have easy to use features. But Shopify has a more powerful capacity, so you can sell products easily directly on your website and across multiple marketplaces and social media. We can list out some of the most powerful features of Shopify in order to compare with Big Cartel:
- Apps & Integration
Shopify has over 3,800 apps on its app store, making it easy to scale your store whenever you need to. If your store doesn’t have the features you want, such as marketing tools, dropshipping services or a reviews section, you can find it in the Shopify App Store.
Apps are like rockets to boost your business, expanding and adding more power to your store, without any technical or designing skills. Make sure to choose high rated apps within your budget. The Shopify App Store is a happy place for browsing and picking new features for your site.
- Product management
Shopify has a full range of product management tools.
One of the most useful features is its full option inventory management, which makes it easy to track your products, processing orders, and update your product listings. If you are selling a large number of products, it’s very important to make it as easy as possible for your customers to browse your site and find the product they want. Shopify helps you do this by giving you the power to organize products by category, type, sale items, price and so on.
- Payment gateways
Shopify supports over 100 payment gateways, including the most favourable ones like PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay and also the in-house Shopify Payments. Opposite with Big Cartel, they use PayPal and Stripe for online payment only. You must have a business PayPal account in good standing to use Big Cartel. That is somehow limited.
Overall, Big Cartel is great for beginners, but not ideal for medium & large online stores. It doesn’t have much to offer as bigger and better ecommerce builders like Shopify. But it does give you a range of standard features to build a basic, functional online store. Shopify is way more powerful for merchants, not to mention their support and community create a very strong bond between merchants who are involved. If you’re looking to expand your operations online, then these Shopify statistics can make this transition easier than ever. And let’s see how merchants talk about these two platforms and why they have made their decision on migrating.
The process of migrating to Shopify from Big Cartel may be too hard for some. They have to deal with a lot of data, products and codes. And the process of hiring developers from job hiring platforms is very expensive. That’s why merchants want a solution like LitExtension as a third-party professional service to help them with Shopify migration. Next, we're gonna find out how to migrate to Shopify from Big Cartel using LitExtension.
But first, let’s take of quick tour on how LitExtension works with the introduction video:
How to migrate from Big Cartel to Shopify using LitExtension
Step1: Create & Setup New Migration
On the Dashboard, click on Create New Migration to getting started
Then, the Migration Set Up field will appear.
In this area, you have to fill all of the information needed. It includes the ecommerce platform you want to migrate, in this situation is Big Cartel. The Source Cart URL in this area must be filled exactly like the instructions with the form of: https://api.bigcartel.com/store-name/products.json
For example in this situation, Store-name is Beariestore, so the Source Cart URL is: https://api.bigcartel.com/ beariestore /products.json
Select Shopify as Target Cart Type and input Target Cart URL into the blank with the domain of https://store-name.myshopify.com .
And again, the store-name part will be replaced into https://beariestore.com/
Follow the instructions of LitExtension to get your API information and fill them in API Key & Password Field.
Step 2: Entities Selection
This is the easiest part of the whole migration. If you want anything, you can choose it. In this area, you can check the box of data that will be migrated. From the basic option of Products, Categories, Customers and Orders to something more complicated like Strip HTML, Preserve Order IDs,... LitExtension will charge differently on how big the data was. You can prefer LiteExtension Pricing to compare with others same function apps.
Step 3: Process for migration
On this step, all you have to do is settle down and wait for the process. When everything is done, an email will be sent to you from the LitExtension system.
But what if you're too busy with the business side and want to dedicate this part to a trusted partner?
In case your business is too large and you don’t have time to do it yourself, LitExtension provides a solution called All-In-One Migration Service, which will help you to save time and labor.
LitExtension All-In-One Migration Service is the full service in which their data experts will take care of your data migration process from the very beginning until the end. It will reduce all of the errors that may happen in your migration process. The service is a one time charge. You will receive full support without paying extra for hours to get assistance service. All you need to do is provide necessary information to LiteExtension, and the data experts will do the rest for you.
Find out more about the All In One Migration Service .
Is it worth it?
From a personal perspective, LitExtension is an extremely easy to use software, and a simple but powerful solution. With a reasonable price, it has all the features that a merchant needs when migrating from a platform to another platform. It’s worth a try.
To be more objective, let's take a look at some of the reviews of people who have used LitExtension based on 88 reviews that have been compiled on Trustpilot.com - Customers review site.
The average score is 4.8. That is an excellent score because the rating of 5-stars is about 91%. Below are what customers said about LitExtension after using it for migration. We can see most of them are truly satisfied.
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Conclusion
Before coming to a conclusion, if any of you don’t have a store yet, you can easily open your online store now with Shopify and get a 14 day free trial.
So, to sum up the migration guide from Big Cartel to Shopify and quick review of LitExtension, there are four main steps that we have to remember.
- Register LitExtension account
- Set up & Create New Migration
- Entities Selection
- Process Migration
With the nature of its ease to use, powerful operation and reasonable charging, you can totally save time and reduce costs with both manually processes and the All In One Migration Service. It is worth it to give LitExtension a try for migrating. Otherwise, the Free Demo Migration is available for every merchant to first seeing how LitExtension works.
I bet you all gonna love it!
P/S: If there are any problems that occur during the process of migration, you can easily ask through the chat support of LitExtension, they will guide you from the beginning till the end.
Please note that LitExtension is one of the PageFly Partners, they give a helping hand together with PageFly on building a strong ecommerce community with the mission of sharing values and growing.
