How to export Big Cartel orders to CSV

Before you start

• Access to your Big Cartel admin at app.bigcartel.com
• A decision about scope: a whole tab, or specific orders
• A spreadsheet app such as Numbers, Google Sheets or Excel

Steps

1. Sign in to the admin

   Sign in at app.bigcartel.com.

   You should see your store dashboard.

2. Open the orders area

   In the admin, go to the Orders page.

   You should see the Unshipped, Partially Shipped, Shipped and All Orders tabs.

3. Choose the scope

   On the Orders page, choose the view you want to export: Unshipped, Partially Shipped, Shipped or All Orders. To export a shorter list, select specific orders with the checkboxes instead.

   You should see either a tab holding the orders you want, or a set of ticked rows.

4. Export

   On the Orders page, select Export orders.

   You should see a CSV file downloading to your device.

5. Open the file and read the header row

   In your spreadsheet app, open the CSV and read the column names before you rely on any of them.

   You should see the columns Big Cartel chose to include, which it does not publish anywhere.

6. Check the row count against the tab

   Compare the number of rows with the number of orders in the tab you exported.

   You should see the same count, or a difference that tells you the file is line items rather than orders.

If it goes wrong

You exported the wrong tab

The tab is the scope. Exporting from Shipped when you wanted today's queue gives you a file of work already done, and nothing in the file says which tab produced it. Name the file for the tab as soon as it lands.

The columns are not what you assumed

Big Cartel does not publish the column list for this export, so treat the header row as the specification and read it every time the admin changes. Anything built on a guessed header name breaks quietly rather than loudly.

Postal codes lost their leading zero

This is the spreadsheet, not the export. Opening a CSV directly turns 02134 into 2134 in most apps, and a label bought from that row goes to the wrong state. Import the file with the postal code column set to text.

The export is a read, not a queue

Exporting changes nothing about the orders, so the same rows appear in tomorrow's file until they are marked shipped. Keep the Unshipped tab as the source of truth and the file as a working copy.

What happens next

You have 1 file scoped to 1 tab, with a column set you now know rather than assume. A marketplace export always needs mapping before a label run: match the recipient, address lines, city, state, postal code and country to the fields a label needs, and expect to supply weight yourself, because an order export does not know how you packed the box.