Small storefront for artists and makers

Crate vs Big Cartel

Big Cartel has spent a long time being deliberately small, and artists like it for exactly that. Crate is deliberately not small, which is an advantage only once a business has grown into it.

What Big Cartel is: A long-running, deliberately simple online store for artists, makers and independent bands, known for keeping the product small on purpose.

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How does Crate compare to Big Cartel?

Big Cartel is a storefront for artists, makers and bands, and it is deliberately narrow: a short setup, a small set of themes and a product list you can hold in your head. Crate is a commerce platform. It carries variants across locations, a point of sale that shares one stock count with the online store, staff roles and permissions, discounts and bundles, and selling in chat and on social alongside the storefront. Neither is the upgrade of the other for everyone. A maker selling a handful of pieces gets a faster, calmer experience from the smaller tool. A business with staff, a stall, a stockroom and orders arriving in three places has outgrown that calm and will feel the missing parts weekly.

Side by side

Qualitative and stable. No prices and no fee percentages for either side, because both change without notice and a comparison table carrying a stale number is worse than no table.

Crate compared with Big Cartel, by dimension.
What	Crate	Big Cartel
What it is	A commerce platform for a business selling across a storefront, chat, social and a counter.	A small storefront for an independent artist or maker.
Stated philosophy	Fewer settings that are already right, but the operational parts are all present.	Deliberately limited. Simplicity is the feature, not an omission.
Stock locations	More than one, with transfers between them.	A single stock view.
Point of sale	Included, on the phone you already have.	Not part of the product.
Selling in chat	Built in, as a first-class order source.	Not a native channel.
Staff and permissions	Roles, per-staff permissions and an activity trail.	Built around the owner.
Themes	A small curated set, all mobile first, edited in a visual builder.	A small curated set, with source editing available.

Which one you actually want

Both columns are real. If the right-hand one describes you, take it: a product that does not fit you is a refund with extra steps.

Choose Crate if

You have staff, or are about to, and need to control what they can see.
You sell at markets or a counter as well as online.
Orders arrive in chat as often as they arrive at a checkout.
You hold stock in more than one place.

Choose Big Cartel if

You sell a small number of pieces and want the platform to stay out of the way.
You are one person and expect to stay one person.
You value a product that has refused to grow for years, and that is a legitimate thing to value.

Where Crate is behind

Every comparison on this site carries this section. A page that only lists what we do better is an advert, and you already know how much to trust one of those.

Where Crate is behind: quiet. Big Cartel does less on purpose and a solo maker feels that as calm rather than as a limitation. Crate has more screens, more settings and more that can be configured wrongly, and no onboarding flow fully removes that. If your catalog is twelve pieces and you never want to see an inventory transfer screen, the smaller tool is not a compromise, it is the correct choice.

About switching to Crate from Big Cartel

Short answers, and none of them hedge. If yours is not here, ask us on the contact page.

Is Crate harder to set up than a small storefront?

There is more to it, because there is more in it. Onboarding covers only the parts you need in order to take an order, and the rest waits until you look for it.

Can I import my products?

Yes. Products, variants, prices, images and customers import from a CSV export, and the migration guides walk through the mapping.

How this comparison is kept honest

Last checked September 03, 2026

Everything said about Big Cartel here is a qualitative property of the product taken from what Big Cartel publishes about itself: what kind of product it is, which channels it sells through natively, and which capabilities it ships rather than leaves to an add-on. We publish no prices, fees, percentages or counts for any competitor, including ourselves, on these pages, because those change without notice and a table carrying a stale number does more damage than no table.

Claims about Crate on this page do not go beyond what our own feature, pricing and security pages already state. Where they would, they are not made.

Product capabilities change. This page states what was accurate on the date above and nothing beyond it. If a row is out of date, we would rather hear it than rank on it.

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Other comparisons

Same structure, same honesty rules, different competitor.

Try it before you decide.

Every plan starts with the same trial and the same full feature set. Import your catalog, take one real order, and judge it on that.

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