Having realised that Storenvy (who do a great service, let’s be clear, the amount they offer for free is pretty crazy) require you to signup for Storenvy and have a PayPal account to make a purchase, which I’m sure some of you might not care for. I quickly whipped up a Hide Your Arms Big Cartel Store for those of you that prefer making your purchases without having to sign up to another service, and if you’d just like to use a credit card (with no PayPal login) to make your payment.
I’ve also put Threadless Gift Certificates on sale in the Big Cartel store at $18 for a $25 certificate, stocks are limited, however, so that item could sell out quite quickly.
Let me know in the comments which you prefer, the HYA Storenvy store, or the Big Cartel Store.
Storenvy have a good rep for printing tees within the indie community, by which I mean that people on
Emptees rarely bitch about them, and from what I can tell their storefront hosting service is also held in high regard. A couple of days ago they released a new version of their site which aims to help those stores owners make more sales, and help make it easier for t-shirt buyers to find shirts across their network of stores. To put it basically, you can search what they sell, it’s that simple, I’d add more words to this sentence but they’d be superfluous.
Search isn’t the only new feature to be included in the new Storenvy site, they’ve also introduced a concept called ‘Markets‘ which groups together stores that have something in common (such as fine art, eco-friendly, or urban wear), it’s an idea I like and thin that as it evolves it would work well for people trying to discover new companies in the same vein as ones that they already like. The forum is likely to be a useful hub for store owners, though as you would imagine so soon after launch things are still a bit quiet around there.
In the past if someone asked me about a third-party storefront to run their brand from I would have immediately said Big Cartel, but Storenvy could be an option worth looking at for a lot of budding tee-preneurs.
