eBiz Profile: BigCartel.com Rocks the Indie E-tail World By Amy Mayer
November 29, 2007
Matt Wigham's desire to put some merchandise from his band into an electronic store morphed into a new full-time job for him. But that's pretty much what he hopes to help you avoid. Wigham and his business partner, Eric Turner, launched BigCartel.com to give musicians, visual artists, clothing and t-shirt designers, and other creative "do-it-yourself" types, as Wigham calls them, a quick and easy way to get an e-store up and running.
"The biggest thing was being able to update your store, or even start your store, without having to know HTML," Wigham said. He happened to know programming and had worked in the Web industry. So while he could get his goods for sale online fairly comfortably, many of his friends couldn't. He created some simple tools for them and after they responded positively, he said, "I realized if I'm going to take this much time to do it I may as well see if anyone else wants to use it as well."
Storefronts for DIY Rockstars: BigCartel caters to the creative crowd.
The storefront solution site launched in October 2005 from Salt Lake City, Utah. Turner has since relocated to rural Washington state, but the partners continue working together.
There are now about 12,000 BigCartel stores, Wigham said. And Indie Labs, the BigCartel parent company Wigham and Turner run, hasn't spent a dime on advertising.
"It's 100 percent word of mouth," said Wigham. "We let other people do the selling for us."
The philosophy behind BigCartel is to provide only features sellers will actually want, need and use and to make them straightforward and simple, Wigham said.
"What we found, and the reason I think it's [BigCartel] been so popular with this group of people, is that most storefronts are rather complicated." Although others promote themselves as simple, he says for super-small companies many features of other storefront solutions are unnecessary and potentially muddy the process. BigCartel stripped out all the features that a simple, one-person, everything-made-on-site, creative operation wouldn't need. Many store owners appreciate the way BigCartel handled and displayed product inventories.
"Inventory was a really big one for us," Wigham said, because stores wanted to be able to show customers when a product has only a few left in stock. BigCartel stores can also show that a product is sold out after the last one gets nabbed. The inventory management options are one reason Secret Penguin turned to BigCartel.
"We could have built a store ourselves and we just didn't want to keep track of inventory," said Dave Nelson, owner of the design company in Omaha, Nebraska.
Since he opened an e-store, he said, the inventory management features have gotten even better, without complicating anything.
"I'm super picky about how things work and all their stuff seemed to work just seamlessly," said Nelson.
Creative Community Wants Simplicity BigCartel appeals to bands, specialty clothing companies, small record labels, artists and producers of other niche products. Wigham said the storefront owners are inclined to get things done themselves.
"They're fulfilling their own orders, they're making their own products, they don't want to go out and deal with PayPal" or anyone else, he said. Though he and Turner take questions every day from users, many stores operate with little or no direct contact with them. Users sometimes get all the help they need from a forum and a blog at BigCartel.com, which have nurtured a sense of community among some store owners. "We thought it would be kind of cool to be part of a community like that," said Nelson. "Also, another reason we did it is to see if it could be a good solution for some of our clients."
Secret Penguin used BigCartel to create a store for Autopilot, a custom clothing company. The client, Nelson said, wanted something with easy maintenance that wouldn't cost too much. So Secret Penguin used BigCartel to set up her store, customizing the appearance to match her existing Web site.
"That seemed like the easiest solution for her," Nelson said, and once the BigCartel store was built, the client was able to manage it herself.
The BigCartel template results in shops that look similar, a fact that might cause bigger e-retailers to turn away. But Wigham said he's happy to have the community of users BigCartel has attracted. "We're fine with not being the right fit for every type of business."
Star Storefronts: BigCartel jams with the indie crowd.
The storefronts use PayPal and setting one up involves selecting a level of services. The number of products and number of images allowed increase with higher monthly fees. A free starter account lets you display and sell up to five products (one image of each), but you don't get any inventory tools. Paid monthly service also expands your customization options, including a custom domain option. Typically, the store URL is the company name followed by .bigcartel.com. From a store, there's usually a link back to the store owner's home page. Companies can easily link from their own sites to their BigCartel stores.
Among the thousands of users-far more than Turner and Wigham ever imagined-are many overseas.
"The UK is very big for us," Wigham said, as well as Australia and Canada. "Those are places we never would have imagined we'd have reached." Whether they came to BigCartel because it offered an international shipping option is impossible to know, but Wigham said that's another feature that stores appreciate. PayPal didn't have a simple, reliable way to calculate international shipping, he said, so BigCartel set one up.
Happy Birthday: Two Years of Success On the company's second birthday in October, Wigham posted a note on the blog saying the day began with the opening of the 10,000th store. "It took us 18 months to hit 5,000 stores and less than six months to double that," he wrote. Earlier this month, he estimated another 2,000 had come on board in the past few weeks.
Although the forum and blog get BigCartel storeowners talking to each other, anyone can read them. A cursory visit illustrates what types of stores are using BigCartel and how the owners are interacting.
"I've never had any problems with them," said Nelson, of Secret Penguin. "They've been more than helpful. It's been fun working with them and working with this thing that they created."
And if you're wondering whether BigCartel is easy enough to get you a functional storefront up and running in time for the holidays? "Absolutely," said Wigham.
Amy Mayer, a new contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com, is a freelance writer and independent radio producer based in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!
Tools:
Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
