What's Next for the Big Cartel Product

With the holiday shopping season approaching, our biggest priority is keeping the platform strong and stable, so you can rely on it to do its job of processing your sales, even on your shop's busiest days.

We're really excited about a bunch of new features we have planned: some already available in beta and others just around the corner. Here's a brief look at what we have coming up.

Sharing features earlier

In the past year, Big Cartel's Product team has switched up how we build and release new features for your store. We've focused on smaller beta releases to give you earlier access, and so you can weigh in on what's working.

The old way of building things was to keep our heads down and work on a feature until we felt like it was fully done. That meant a longer wait for shops, but a more finished final product. A beta feature is still being built: it may have fewer bells and whistles, or just be a little rougher around the edges. It's not fully finished, but it lets shop owners get in there and give it a try. And since it's still being formed, we can take input via surveys (or even a few phone calls) and make improvements before the paint dries.

So far, we've used this process to incorporate feedback from folks using the Shipping Profile and Subscriptions Beta to improve these features and make them more effective for everyone.

We're announcing beta features and upcoming releases, as well as collecting feedback for all of it, on our help site. We'd love to have you try out these features and share your experience.

What else is in the works?

Expanding Shipping Profiles: our Shipping Profile beta already offers more control over pricing for the destination of your packages and the methods of delivery. Next up, we'll be offering more control over how items ship together and how items with special shipping needs are handled.

More management tools for Subscriptions: as folks have started using Subscriptions, we've seen them offer rewards and recurring product shipments. Our next update will include some tools to help you manage fulfillment and charge sales tax where required.

Refreshed Customization area: we want you to have a better experience when designing your shop, including improved accessibility and an easier way to customize from a mobile device. This first phase of work will set us up for significant improvements to managing how your store looks and feels.

iOS and Android app updates: We've rebuilt our apps from the ground up to be much faster, easier to navigate, and more efficient for managing tasks on the go.

This only covers what's planned for the next few months. We have a list of big ideas and dream features that we think our community will be excited about. Thanks for your patience as we add new functionality to your shop. While some of our competitors have hundreds of people tinkering with code, the Big Cartel Product team is about 20 smart and big-hearted people, who are working hard to build the best, most thoughtful thing that we can.

Stay informed about what we're working on by keeping an eye in the What's Next section of the help site. And of course, let us know if you have any input about how we can improve these features.