Migrating away from Big Cartel to a custom store you own

Who Big Cartel is for, and who has outgrown it

Big Cartel is a hosted shop builder made for artists, makers and small independent brands. The whole product is shaped around that idea. The free Gold plan carries five products, the Platinum plan at $15 a month carries fifty, and the Diamond plan at$ 30 a month carries up to five hundred.¹² You pick one of a small set of themes, connect a payment account, and you are selling by the afternoon. For a printmaker with a dozen prints, a band with three records and a shirt, or a potter who lists a new batch each month, that is close to ideal, and I would not try to talk any of them off it.

This article is not for them. It is for the brand that started on Big Cartel, did the hard work of building an audience, and has now pressed up against the walls. The product list is full and a new range means deleting an old one. The checkout cannot ask the question your customers keep asking. The inventory is a spreadsheet you keep on the side because the shop cannot hold what you need it to hold. You want proper stock control, richer product options, a wholesale side, bundles, or simply a shop that is yours rather than one you rent by the product count. That is the move I run: off Big Cartel and onto a custom store built on Solidus, the open source Rails ecommerce framework, which you then own outright.

I build the new shop and run the migration. You own the result. Before any of that, you deserve an honest picture of what Big Cartel actually hands over, what it keeps, and where the genuine work sits. This article links out to the deep, platform independent detail in my migration series rather than repeating it, so read the pillar on what moves and what does not first if you have not already.

What you own on Big Cartel, and what is only rented

Start with the good news, because Big Cartel is fairer on ownership than most hosted builders. It charges no commission on your sales. Payments run through your own Stripe and PayPal accounts, and the processor takes its rate directly, with nothing skimmed by Big Cartel in between.³⁴ That single design choice means the most valuable and most painful part of any migration, the money plumbing, is already half yours. More on that below.

What is rented is the shop itself: the theme, the admin, the hosting, the feature set and the URL your products live at. None of that travels with you. Your product data, your order records and your customer list are yours to take, but the shape they come out in is set by Big Cartel's export tooling and its API, and that shape is the thing to understand before you plan anything.

The hard ceilings are the same everywhere and worth stating plainly. Customer passwords never export from any platform, Big Cartel included, because they are stored as one way hashes, so every customer either sets a new password on the new shop or signs in a new way. The detail of how accounts and addresses move is in the customers spoke. Raw card numbers never export either, which is a feature, not a flaw, and I come back to what that means for saved cards further down.

The export reality: orders through the front door, products through the one marked import

Here is where honesty matters most, because the gap between what people assume and what Big Cartel documents is real.

Orders export cleanly. From the Orders page in the admin you choose a set of orders, by tab or by selection, and download them as a CSV file.⁵ That CSV is the backbone of your order history migration: line items, totals, shipping and customer details, enough to rebuild a readable past in the new shop. How far back to bring it, and how to handle order numbers so your accounts stay straight, is covered in the orders spoke.

Products are the surprise. Big Cartel documents a CSV template for importing products in, from Etsy, Shopify, Squarespace or a manual file, but it does not document an equivalent one click CSV export for taking your catalogue out.² That is a genuine limitation and you should price it in. It does not mean your products are trapped. It means they come out through the API rather than through a download button, and for a shop of any size the API is the better route anyway. What moves, what has to be remapped, and how images and variants travel is the subject of the products spoke.

One more number to hold on to from the import documentation, because it also describes the model you are leaving: Big Cartel stores up to twenty five images per product, and up to one hundred and fifty variants per product, with the number of images actually shown depending on your plan.² If your real catalogue needs more images, more options, or option logic Big Cartel cannot express, that gap is part of why you are moving, and it tells me what the new product model has to do.

The two APIs, and which one actually moves your shop

Big Cartel has two application programming interfaces, and the difference between them matters for a migration.

The older one is a read only public API. It serves store.json, products.json and a page endpoint, needs no authentication, and returns only the data that is already public on your storefront.⁶ Big Cartel has marked it deprecated, which means it still works and is stable but will not change.⁶ For a quick, read only pull of your public catalogue it is usable, and for a very small shop it may be all you need.

The current one is the V1 API. It uses OAuth 2.0 for public applications that Big Cartel reviews and approves, but for your own store you can authenticate with HTTP Basic auth using your store subdomain, without waiting for an invite.⁷ That last point is the one that makes migration straightforward: as the shop owner I can read your own account, products, categories, orders, discounts, pages and shipments directly, and the API supports writes as well as reads.⁷ A couple of honest caveats come with it. The Carts resource, which exposes abandoned carts, is limited to shops on the Diamond plan.⁷ And Big Cartel states that the API does not currently enforce a rate limit but that one will be added later, so a migration script should be written to be polite rather than to assume unlimited speed.⁷

In practice I pull your catalogue, orders and customers through the V1 API, reconcile them against the order CSV so nothing is missed, and transform them into the Solidus data model. The read only public API is a fallback for the parts that happen to be public, not the main tool.

Where Big Cartel stops: the product cap and the feature ceiling

The real reason to leave is almost never the data. It is the ceiling.

The product cap is the hard one. Five, fifty or five hundred products, depending on plan, is a deliberate limit, not an accident, and it is the single most common wall a growing Big Cartel shop hits.¹² Deleting last season to make room for this season is a sign you have outgrown the model, not a workflow. A custom Solidus store has no such cap. The only limit on your catalogue is your own ability to manage it.

The feature ceiling is the quieter one. Diamond adds abandoned cart recovery, scheduled product drops, password protected products and a Zapier connection, and that is roughly where the built in feature set ends.¹ There is no app store in the Shopify sense where you bolt on a hundred extensions, which keeps Big Cartel simple and is part of its appeal, but it also means that when you need something the platform does not offer, there is often no way to add it. A trade price list for wholesale customers, a build your own bundle, a delivery date picker, deep stock control across variants, an integration with your accounting or fulfilment system: on Big Cartel these range from awkward to impossible, and on Solidus each is ordinary application code written with tests. I compare the platforms on exactly this axis in Solidus versus Shopify, Shopware, Magento and WooCommerce, and the honest five year money question is in the total cost of ownership article.

Payments: the one lock that is not a lock

This is where Big Cartel is genuinely kinder than its larger rivals, and it changes the hardest part of most migrations.

Because Big Cartel does not provide its own payment processor and takes no cut, your customers' cards are saved inside your own Stripe account, not inside a Big Cartel vault.³⁴ When I build the Solidus shop, it connects to that same Stripe account. The saved cards and their tokens stay exactly where they are, under your control, and most customers never have to re enter a card. That is the opposite of the situation on platforms that run their own gateway, where saved cards can be stranded. The full detail of how tokens move, and the one condition that makes it work, is in the payment tokens spoke.

Two honest qualifications. First, the card data itself still never leaves Stripe in raw form. What moves is the relationship between your two accounts, so this is a question to settle with Stripe early, not on cutover day. Second, Big Cartel has no native subscriptions or recurring billing, so if you have been running memberships or repeat orders through a workaround, that is a rebuild rather than a migration, and the subscriptions spoke explains why recurring payments are always the hardest thing to carry across. For most Big Cartel shops, though, payments are the part that goes right, and that is worth knowing before you dread the whole project.

Themes, URLs and the SEO you carry across

Your Big Cartel theme does not come with you. Themes are Big Cartel's own, customised within its editor, and the design work is effectively rented alongside the shop.¹ A new storefront is part of the build, which is a cost but also an opportunity: the new shop looks like your brand rather than like a Big Cartel template, and it is built to current accessibility standards from the start.

The part that quietly loses money if you ignore it is the URL map. Every product and category on Big Cartel has an address that customers have bookmarked and search engines have indexed. When the shop moves, every one of those addresses has to redirect to its new home with a permanent server side redirect, or it becomes a dead page and the ranking behind it evaporates. This is not a Big Cartel specific trap, it is true of every migration, but it is the mistake that shows up as a traffic dip blamed on the new shop when it is really a few hundred missing redirects. The method, and why the redirects belong inside the new shop rather than in some service someone forgets, is in the products spoke.

What moves, what is locked, and the plan

What you are moving	How it comes off Big Cartel	What it means for the move
Products, options, images	V1 API (HTTP Basic for your own store), no documented product CSV export	Remap to the Solidus product and variant model, carry up to twenty five images and rebuild option logic properly
Orders and history	CSV export from the Orders page, reconciled against the API	Imported as read only history, with order numbers continued past the old sequence after a gap
Customers and addresses	V1 API, passwords never export	Accounts recreated, customers set a new password or sign in a new way on first visit
Saved cards	Stay in your own Stripe account	New shop connects to the same Stripe account, most cards never re entered
Subscriptions or memberships	Not native to Big Cartel	Rebuilt as a new capability, not migrated
Theme and storefront	Does not transfer	New storefront built to your brand and to accessibility standards
URLs	Product and category addresses	Full redirect map, permanent redirects held inside the new shop

A worked example: Harland Press of Brighton

Harland Press (harlandpress.example) is an invented business that is typical of the ones that write to me. It is a Brighton studio that screen prints posters and presses enamel pins, started on Big Cartel six years ago with nine products, and now turns over about £420,000 a year. It sits on the Diamond plan and has hit the five hundred product ceiling: every new drop means retiring an older design, which is costing sales from a back catalogue that still has fans. It has started selling wholesale to a handful of shops and is tracking that trade in a spreadsheet because the shop cannot hold two price levels. Stock is guesswork across pin colourways. The founder wants a real shop, owned, with room to grow.

Here is how the move went, and what each part actually involved.

What exported straight away: the order history, as a CSV from the Orders page, three years of it brought across as read only records so customer service and returns still work, with the full archive kept for the accounts.⁵ The customer list and the live catalogue came through the V1 API, authenticated against the shop's own subdomain, with the product images and the existing variants pulled down and remapped into Solidus, where pin colourways finally became a proper variant structure with its own stock figures.⁷

What had to be rebuilt rather than moved: the storefront, now designed around the brand instead of a theme, then the wholesale side, built as a trade price list with login, which Big Cartel could never express, and finally a build your own set of six pins, which had been a manual back and forth over email and is now a feature of the shop.

What we flagged first, before anything else: the payments. Harland Press already took card payments through its own Stripe account, so the new Solidus shop connected to that same account and the saved cards stayed put, with no customer asked to re enter a card.³ The one job there was a short conversation with Stripe to confirm the account move, booked in week one rather than left to the end.

The result two months later is a shop with no product cap, real inventory, a wholesale channel that pays for itself, and a Stripe account that never moved. The founder pays for hosting and my maintenance rather than a monthly product allowance, and owns the code once it is paid for.

When you should stay on Big Cartel

I will be as plain here as I am in the rest of this article. If your catalogue fits comfortably inside your plan's product count, if the feature set does what you need, and if the low monthly cost suits a business where the shop is one channel rather than the whole operation, stay. Big Cartel is a good, low cost, well made tool for exactly that situation, and a custom build would cost you more in year one for capability you would not use. A move pays off when you have outgrown the caps, when the missing features are costing you real money or real hours, and when the shop has become central enough to your business to be worth owning. If you are weighing smaller hosted options against each other rather than against a custom build, migrating away from Ecwid and migrating away from Square Online cover two neighbours in the same part of the market.

How I would run the move

The shape is the same as any migration I run, scaled to a shop this size. Discovery settles what moves, who on your side owns the data, and the payment account question. The build recreates the catalogue and the features through the V1 API, running the import again and again against a copy of the real data until it is boring. A short parallel run freezes the Big Cartel catalogue while the new shop is tested with real products and test payments. Cutover happens on a quiet weekday morning: redirect the domain, place and refund a real order on each payment method, check the top redirects by hand, and keep the Big Cartel shop exactly as it is for thirty days as a fallback before you cancel it. The underlying principle, that your business is the controller of its own customer data and every tool in the chain is a processor, is set out in who actually owns your business data.

Nothing here is a reason to fear the move. Big Cartel hands over more than most, the payments usually stay put, and the work that remains is honest work with a known shape. The reason to do it is not that Big Cartel is bad. It is that you have grown past what it was built to do.

If you want a second opinion on your own shop, bring it to a free workshop and the first two weeks of work are on me. I will tell you honestly whether you have outgrown Big Cartel yet, and if you have not, I will tell you to stay.

Big Cartel, Pricing (Gold free, Platinum $15 a month, Diamond$ 30 a month, monthly and annual billing, plan feature lists), accessed 14 November 2026, https://www.bigcartel.com/pricing ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Big Cartel Help, Importing products (Gold supports 5 products, Platinum 50, Diamond up to 500, with up to 25 images per product and 1, 5 or 25 shown by plan, up to 150 variants per product, import from Etsy, Shopify, Squarespace or a CSV template, and listings or images beyond the limits are not imported), accessed 14 November 2026, https://www.bigcartel.com/resources/help/article/importing-products ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Big Cartel Help, Accept online payments in your Big Cartel shop (Stripe and PayPal, connected through your own accounts), accessed 14 November 2026, https://www.bigcartel.com/resources/help/article/accept-payments-in-your-big-cartel-shop ↩ ↩² ↩³
Big Cartel Help, Processing fees explained (processing fees are charged by Stripe and PayPal, not by Big Cartel), accessed 14 November 2026, https://www.bigcartel.com/resources/help/article/processing-fees-explained ↩ ↩²
Big Cartel Help, Download order data (choose orders on the Orders page and export them as a CSV file), accessed 14 November 2026, https://www.bigcartel.com/resources/help/article/download-order-data ↩ ↩²
Big Cartel Developers, API v0 deprecation notice (old, deprecated, read only public endpoints store.json, products.json and page.json, no authentication required), accessed 14 November 2026, https://developers.bigcartel.com/api/v0 ↩ ↩²
Big Cartel Developers, V1 API (OAuth 2.0 for reviewed public apps, HTTP Basic auth for your own store without an invite, read and write across accounts, products, orders, categories, discounts, pages and shipments, Carts limited to Diamond, no rate limit enforced yet), accessed 14 November 2026, https://developers.bigcartel.com/api/v1 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵