Lots of shops on Big Cartel are running with under 20 products. When you have less than 20 products Big Cartel works well without much customization needed other than perhaps a nice Big Cartel Template. But when you reach 50+ products you start wanting to design a site that has more features and allows more customizations to showcase your growing catalog. That is where I can help you. Below is a review of the elements for the most advanced Big Cartel template ever created, in my opinion.
I have worked with several shops now to bring creative solutions to expand the functionality of Big Cartel beyond what is in the admin panel. The following custom solutions are available in Big Cartel or Storenvy stores and I am ready to help implement these on your site. Contact me for rates.
See the website, Everyday Japanese, and continue reading about the custom features in the Big Cartel design.
Custom Images on Big Cartel
This is nothing new but I implemented a background image hosted on a separate webhost along with buttons and other graphics elements necessary to style the site. The overall design was provided in a layered PSD file which I modified and tweaked to fit into the Big Cartel design.
Mailing List Sign-up
Most shop owners want to collect emails to build up a newsletter list. Nothing special here but I can style your form code from email campaign apps like mailchimp, constantcontact, madmimi or others. I added the embed code provided by the 3rd party application to the LAYOUT template to display on each page.
Featured Product Categories
To help draw out attention to specific products the shop needed to have a way to show these products on the home page as the shop owner decided it was time to feature a product. This was done by adding a featured category and adding products to this category in addition to the normal category. Then on the home page of the big cartel shop the featured category is listed. Using the Drag and Reorder in the Products admin on Big Cartel the shop owner can then get the featured products sorted correctly.
Product Description Excerpts
For the home page and the category pages the shop needed to have a preview of the description. This can be accomplished using the Big Cartel template filters to pull a certain length of characters.
Alternate Product Images
Big Cartel offers up to 5 product images, so does Storenvy. Using this to our advantage any product that lands on the home page on big cartel will always show the last image. The shop owner has decided to always display a zoomed and cropped image on the front page as a teaser and then show the primary product photo first on the individual product page.
Alternate Product Titles
Do your products have descriptive titles that work well on the individual product page but are less ideal for the front page where room is limited? This was a challenge I was tasked to solve. So we came up with a solution so that the shop owner could set the product title in the Big Cartel admin as usual and then use a product image filename to define the alternate product name title to be used on the home page. This took some use of the liquid template filters and variables available in the Big Cartel template system and I feel confident saying this is the most innovative hack on Big Cartel to date. It is so powerful I won’t share the code unless you are a paying customer. If you find something better let me know.
Custom Size Images for Individual Product Pages
Big Cartel and other online hosted e-commerce sites typically limit you to 3 predefined product image sizes plus your original uploaded image. For this design I implemented the usage of the timthumb.php script to allow the individual product pages to have a zoom-cropped dynamically sized photo based on the original photo but fit to the width of the big cartel template design. This requires additional web host for the php script and the cached files.
Help Customizing Your Big Cartel or Storenvy Shop
If you need help building out new functionality in your online hosted shop with Big Cartel or Storenvy please contact me. I am ready to help install a new template for you or help build out new features like I described above to make Big Cartel or Storenvy a more powerful selling tool. Contact Matt today!
Comments are closed.