Enter Parkestry my new service that provides features for those using Big Cartel as their shopping cart. A paid account on Parkestry provides secure image hosting for paypal for 2 images that can be used to style your checkout page. I created a quick walkthrough video on how to get this setup with your premium account.

Using Secure Image Hosting For PayPal from Parkestry

If you sell on Big Cartel and haven’t signed up yet you need to create an account at Parkestry to start improving your online e-commerce presence.

Related posts:

1. Parkestry Premium Released
2. Save Money Each Month With PayPal
3. Get a free SEO report of your Big Cartel Shop

Join Parkestry Today and start Improving your Online Presence

Slideshow Builder (Premium)

Everyone wants to add a custom slideshow to their shop home page, so we made this super easy and so it requires you don’t need a host other than Big Cartel or Storenvy. Parkestry will host your slideshow images in the cloud and provide you with code to copy and paste into your website template. You can simply determine the transition style, speed and number of images to display. Each image can be a link to a specific page and have a caption. Check out a sample of adding the slideshow to your Big Cartel theme.

*images in the slideshow courtesy of Lake of the Ozarks Photographers Lighter Focus

Secure Image Hosting for PayPal (Premium)

Did you know that you can customize the checkout and order summary pages in PayPal that your Big Cartel shop customers use when buying your awesome products? Well you can but there is a catch, they need to be hosted on a secure server to avoid security warnings in browsers. Parkestry provides secure hosting for 2 images to be used on your PayPal checkout pages. One image is a logo and the other is a banner. Don’t deal with getting a hosting plan and then paying for a SSL certificate. We took care of all that for you.

Google Product Feed URL (Premium)

We have provided this in the past but we are working on improving the service and keeping up with all the changes Google makes to defining and posting your products in the Google Product Search.  So as part of your premium plan you will get access to a live data feed that you can use to submit to your Google Merchant Data Feed to pull updates on a regular schedule rather than having to upload manually each time.

SEO Review (Premium)

The basic plan allows for an initial review of your shop page on Big Cartel. With the premium plan we display reports from Google Pagespeed and SEOMoz Rank as well. Just a few more tools to keep in touch with how your online shop is seen by search engines.

7-Day Free Trial on all Premium Features

Join Parkestry Today and start Improving your Online Presence

Related posts:

1. Get a free SEO report of your Big Cartel Shop
2. Screencast: Secure Images for your PayPal Checkout Page
3. Premium Big Cartel Theme Tonka Released

Dynamic Nested Categories on Big Cartel

Skip the setup and just buy a theme with this built in, The Label, a Big Cartel theme with subcategory support.

Layout Template Code Changes

To achieve nested categories the first step is to install a new categories menu template code in the Layout template. Within the new Big Cartel design editor this is a change you can make and preview before saving to your live store. The new snippet will display your category links in LI html elements with the subcategories being in a nested UL list.

Below is the sample of the nesting code you can use in the Sexy theme to replace the categories UL.

<ul class="categories-list">
	{% for category in categories.all %}
		{% assign parent_cat_name = category.name %}
		{% capture sub_cat_list %}
			{% for cat2 in categories.active %}
			{% unless cat2.name == parent_cat_name %}
         		{% capture parent_cat_string %}{{parent_cat_name}} - {% endcapture %}
				{% if cat2.name contains parent_cat_name %}
					{% assign has_sub_cats = 'true' %}
                 	{% capture new_sub_cat_name %}{{ cat2.name | replace_first: parent_cat_string, "" }}{% endcapture %}
					<li>{{ cat2 | link_to: new_sub_cat_name }}</li>
				{% endif %}
			{% endunless %}
			{% endfor %}
		{% endcapture %}
 
		{% unless category.name contains ' - ' %}
			<li>{{ category | link_to }}{% if has_sub_cats == 'true' %}<ul class="sub-categories">{{ sub_cat_list }}</ul>{% endif %}</li>
		{% endunless %}
 
		{% assign has_sub_cats = 'false' %}          
	{% endfor %}
</ul>

Styling the list of links will be an important step as this code does not include the CSS to make it work since most themes are different and some menus are vertical others horizontal and some people might even want to make this into a drop down menu on hover for the subcategories.

Setup your Nested Product Categories

Within the product editor for any product you can manage all your categories. The setup for nested categories requires that you follow a strict naming convention for one level deep nesting of categories. The top level categories can be named like you always have. For instance a top level category many will have is Women’s. Then you will create additional categories that would fit as subcategories. The first subcategory might be Shoes so we would name the category “Womens’s – Shoes”. You will see that the format is a space hypen then space to separate the name of the parent from the name of the subcategory. Follow this pattern and you will be ready to go.

Create Subcategories in Big Cartel

Things to Keep In Mind

There are a few limitations to the nested categories script we are providing. The nesting is only one level deep and the naming of categories has to be precise or the code will not be able to determine the proper nesting. Also please don’t forget I didn’t provide the CSS here so you will have to style your nested link lists to fit your theme.

Avoid the setup and styling and buy a theme with subcategory support. Buy The Label Big Cartel Theme.

Related posts:

1. SEO Tips For Using Categories and Tags
2. A Better Related Products Big Cartel Option
3. How To Add A Third Column To Big Cartel Theme