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SamCart, an online shopping cart software, was created by Scott Moran and Brian Moran in 2013. Although it’s been around for some time, it has become more popular in recent years.
A lot of marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs are touting it as the best shopping cart software available today.
But, does it really live up to the hype?
This SamCart review will share my experiences with the software, including who it’s best for, its pros and cons and whether it’s worth it to your business.
Is SamCart Worth it?
SamCart demo available. Click Here for a free demo
In my opinion, SamCart is absolutely worth the investment because compared to the majority of other shopping cart platforms, it offers tons of useful features and is optimized to help you increase conversions which ultimately boosts your bottom line.
Marketers know how important it is to test your pages in order to maximize conversions. SamCart has taken care of all the details so you can make the most of every sale.
So for example, if you sell a $47 PDF on your website, and use a standard checkout form, you may not be able to add an upsell. But, with an upsell to the same offer (using SamCart, of course), you may be able to sell an additional $60 product to 30% of your customers.
What does mean for you?
This results in more revenue per sales and higher order sizes. In the end, more money in your pockets.
Sidenote: If you do purchase SamCart, I’d be grateful if you supported me by clicking on this link to purchase.
The countless reviews and testimonials from happy customers speak for themselves:
Who is SamCart Good For?
SamCart is ideal for anyone selling stuff online. From physical products to digital products like courses, events, books, and seminars. You can even use it to sell services, such as consulting services on your website.
But, like all other shopping cart software, it’s specifically designed for a certain kind of user, which means that it won’t be ideal for everyone.
Depending on whether you are selling information products, software, or memberships, you will find out the various features and functionality of SamCart to help you decide if it is the right shopping cart for your needs.
SamCart Pros & Cons
SamCart has its pros and cons, just like any other software. These are the pros and cons of SamCart. I’ve listed them below to help you understand what to expect from this shopping basket.
SamCart Pros
- User-Friendly Platform: SamCart is a user-friendly platform for selling both physical and digital products online.
- Integrations The software can be integrated with many marketing tools and services via Zapier.
- Flexible Payment Models: SamCart also has flexible payment models, including payment plans, subscriptions, and trials.
- Supports One-Click Upsells: You can use one-click upsells, downsells, and even “bumps” to boost your revenue.
- Granular Coupons & Discounts Control: You have complete control over the way you use coupons or discounts on your products.
- Affiliate Management: SamCart has an in-built affiliate marketing program management system that rivals other shopping carts. This will help you manage your affiliate program quickly and easily.
- Excellent Support:SamCart is equipped with a wide range of knowledge to assist you with any type of issue. You can also get support through email, Facebook group, and live chat.
- Analytics and Reporting: The platform offers an impressive reporting dashboard that gives you useful insights from your data.
SamCart demo available. Click Here to get a FREE demo
SamCart Cons
- Not Great for Services: SamCart isn’t well-suited for selling services. However, you can still do so by being creative with how you name your offer.
- Limited Design Options: SamCart’s checkout templates design options are not as extensive as other shopping cart software within the same price range.
- No Cryptocurrency Payments: When using SamCart, you need to find a different method for accepting cryptocurrency payments. It also doesn’t have Apple Pay.
- Few Payment Integrations: Although SamCart has a ton of payment models, it actually integrates with very few payment processors, like PayPal and Stripe.
- High Price: SamCart does offer an impressive range of features, but the pricing is still a bit high for small business owners and individual marketers. This is particularly true when compared to platforms like ThriveCart that offer their services for a one-time payment.
Top SamCart Functionality
SamCart’s functionality is what might convince you to choose it over other shopping cart software. This is where the real strength of SamCart lies.
Below, we take a look at each of SamCart’s functions, so you can get a better idea of why SamCart is different from the rest, and how it can be of benefit to your business.
One-Click Upsells
This is one of the main features that differentiate SamCart from the rest. The platform has one-click upsells that help you maximize your profits from each sale you make.
You’re wasting a lot of money if you don’t use upsells in your sales funnel. The world’s biggest retailer, Amazon, reports that over a third of its revenue comes from upselling efforts.
SamCart makes it easy to upsell. According to their website, it will increase customer value up to 68%.
Bump Offers
SamCart also offers you cross-selling order bumps. This strategy, also known as “bundling” is where you bundle the main product or service with complementary products to increase the profits from each sale.
An example of this concept at work is when McDonald’s offers you fries and drinks with your burgers. Or, if you purchase sports equipment, you might also get an offer for half price gym membership or something like that.
For example, if you sell laptops with SamCart shopping cart software you might offer bump offers for laptop bags and antivirus packages ( Avast could really benefit from this) This is a great way to increase customer value.
SamCart makes this extremely easy to do with just a click of a button. All you have to do is set it up, and the platform will do the rest to get customers to make the purchase through its optimized checkout process.
Checkout Pages
Samcart’s checkout platform currently has 18 professionally-designed shopping cart templates. All of these have been proven to convert.
All the pages are mobile responsive and they have a unique “sandbox” mode that allows you to check that everything is working perfectly before going live. This is unlike other shopping cart software where you have to publish your page, then test it.
A lot of well-known marketers use SamCart which means that you will be able to avoid having to spend countless hours designing and testing checkout pages on your own. Take the advice of others and use their experience to see immediate results in your sales and marketing campaigns.
All the checkout page templates on SamCart also come with built-in testimonials, security reassurances, guarantees, and various other trust elements designed to boost conversion rates.
SamCart demo available. Click Here for a free demo
All you have to do is pick a template to use, and then customize it to match your brand colors and style.
One-Page Checkout
This unique feature allows you to add multiple payment options on one checkout page.
Here’s an example of what that looks like:
For instance, if you are selling an online course for $447, you can use SamCart to offer your customers a payment plan whereas, on other shopping cart pages, you might have to use separate checkout pages to achieve that.
SamCart’s single-page checkout keeps customers on the page while they choose the best payment method for their product.
You, as an online marketer, know how important it is to keep your visitors on your site. If they leave, you could lose them all together.
Affiliate Center
SamCart makes it easy for you to not only sell your products online but also to enlist a whole army of affiliates who will promote your stuff and increase your revenue.
In fact, the platform’s affiliate management feature is so robust that you don’t even have to spend any time promoting your products or services.
There is no need to pay for ads or any other type of marketing because with affiliates spreading the word on your product or service, it’s an easy way to generate sales since you only have to pay affiliates once they produce a sale for you.
Subscription Saver
If you sell subscription products online, this is one SamCart feature that you will find extremely appealing.
You know that not everyone pays their bills on time. Some missed payments might be due to credit cards that simply expired, or it might be unscrupulous people who decline charges or cancel their cards to avoid honoring their obligations.
Regardless of the reason why payments don’t go through, it’s bad news for the marketer because oftentimes you can’t get your money (barring taking legal action against the customer).
SamCart protects you from expired credit cards or declined payments. SamCart sends your customers an email whenever a payment is not received.
Customers will receive an email with a link to update their payment information. This will save you time and prevent you from spending valuable time trying to find customers who have not paid their bills.
SamCart will automatically cancel a customer’s subscription if they fail to update their payment information. After receiving multiple emails, SamCart marks them as “delinquent”. This allows you to identify the person and contact them if necessary.
You can keep tabs on what’s going on in Subscription Saver via SamCart’s simple and effective dunning report.
A/B Testing
Split testing is a common practice among marketers. Split testing is especially useful if your cart abandonment rate is high. A small increase can make a big difference in your revenue.
This goes for your blog post headlines, opt-in pages, email subject lines, sales pages, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
However, very few marketers bother to test their checkout pages. When you consider just how much money you stand to make by optimizing your pages, it makes no sense that someone would knowingly ignore such an important part of their sales funnel.
Luckily, SamCart makes this part easy, as well. You can even run live A/B tests on your pages, a feature that is unique as far as shopping cart pages go.
There are tons of different things you can test on SamCart, such as changing the template, trying out a different guarantee/testimonial, etc., removing fields (tests have shown that the fewer fields you have, the better), and much more.
Want to see a demo of SamCart in action? Click Here to get a FREE demo
SamCart Integrations
SamCart offers a wide range of integrations that will allow you to connect your shopping cart to the rest of your marketing stack.
These are the major integrations available on the platform:
Payment Providers: One of the first things you’re prompted to do once you log into SamCart is to set up your payment processor. So far, there are only two options available, but SamCart is working on adding new integrations to the shopping cart platform. It’s also important to note that there are no cryptocurrency payments, such as bitcoin, or mobile payments, such as Apple Pay on the platform.
Email Marketing Providers: For most marketers, email marketing is among the most important integrations to consider before choosing a shopping cart solution. SamCart supports many email marketing solutions including iContact and HubSpot, Ontraport. Active Campaign, MailChimp and Drip.
Membership platforms:SamCart supports many membership platforms including Thinkific and Post Affiliate Pro as well as WishList Member, Digital Access Pass and Optimize Member.
Webinar platforms: SamCart’s check-out software can be used to help you sell your products and services if you host webinars . Although there currently aren’t any native integrations for webinar platforms on SamCart, the software easily integrates with Zapier which allows you to connect to a wide range of webinar platforms, including GoToWebinar and WebinarJam.
Fulfillment Services: If you sell physical products using SamCart shopping cart software, you only have one option available to you for fulfillment: ShipStation. However, with Zapier, you can link out to a variety of other fulfillment systems to suit your business needs.
SamCart Alternatives
There are many shopping cart options available today, as we have already mentioned.
SamCart is only one platform, but it’s not the only one.
Listed below are four SamCart alternatives, and depending on the specific features you need for your business, these may prove to be a better (or worse) option. This post has more alternatives.
SamCart vs. ThriveCart
Note: You can read my full SamCart vs ThriveCart Review here.
ThriveCart, an online shopping cart software for e-commerce websites, is available. It offers many of the same features as SamCart, such as one-click upsells and affiliate management center.
But, SamCart does have significantly more features than ThriveCart. SamCart’s only advantage over ThriveCart is in price.
SamCart can be purchased at a monthly cost, but you can also get ThriveCart by paying a $495 one-time fee.
This is just one reason why many digital marketers prefer SamCart over the other.
It is also worth mentioning that ThriveCart integrates seamlessly with all major payment processing platforms, while SamCart can only be integrated with Stripe and PayPal.
SamCart vs. PayKickStart
PayKickStart allows you to easily manage your online business with a flexible shopping cart.
The software has features such as a sales funnel page builder, a powerful page editor, and checkout form pop-ups, among others. PayKickstart can be integrated with Braintree and Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net.
This is the one main difference between PayKickStart and SamCart. Everything else is pretty much the same.
Both platforms support multiple languages and currencies. They offer deep actionable insights through a robust reporting dashboard, and both shopping cart solutions are easy to set up. They each come with a smart dashboard, conversion tools, affiliate center, and robust apps integration.
PayKickStart offers four subscription plans when it comes to pricing: Basic $99/month; Growth $199/month; Scale $299/month and a custom plan which will be customized to your business.
Compared to SamCart’s price, which starts at just $49/month, it’s easy to see why most marketers are drawn to SamCart over PayKickStart.
SamCart vs. Shift4Shop, formerly 3D Cart
Shift4Shop is a renowned e-commerce platform that was established over two decades ago. It has many features that allow you to easily create optimized checkout pages for better conversions.
This makes it a good alternative to SamCart, particularly for anyone who wants a wider variety of checkout page templates to choose from. Shift4Shop offers over 50 templates free of charge, which include all the elements and features you need to increase your conversions.
When you choose a higher-level plan, you will have access to even more templates. Premium templates are responsive to mobile devices, which will ensure excellent viewing experience for your customers on mobile.
Shift4Shop also allows you to promote your products on social media, and all the plans come with $50 ad credits to get you started reaching a wider audience on different social media platforms.
Shift4Shop prices range from $19/month in “Startup” shops to $229/month in “Pro” shops.
SamCart vs. Clickfunnels
You can find my SamCart and Clickfunnels comparison here.
Clickfunnels is yet another great shopping cart software you can use to create attractive checkout pages.
It comes with support for a variety of payment processors, including PayPal and Stripe among many others. It supports many email marketing and automation tools such as Ontraport, Infusionsoft, and NMI.
Clickfunnels offers more functionality than other shopping cart software. You can create landing pages and shopping cart pages.
It’s more than a shopping cart. It’s an A-Z sales funnel that removes the need for a ton of other marketing tools for anyone who wants to sell services or products online.
I’ve also written this SamCart vs. Shopify Comparison.
Samcart isn’t the only one with checkout functionality. Kajabi, Convertkit and Aweber are just a few of the many systems that offer checkout functionality. These platforms are great for their intended purpose but not as focused as Samcart.
Pricing
SamCart has four different plans:
- Launch: $49.
- Grow $99/month
- Scale: $199/month
- Enterprise: $399/month
Pricing is straightforward, and each plan has the same features as the one before.
You get the Launch plan and the Grow plan.
The same goes if you opt for the Scale plan. All the features of the Grow plan are available, along with additional features such as the dunning tool and affiliate center, CRM integrations and A/B testing.
Every plan includes a 14-day trial and a 30-day guarantee. Additional discounts are available if you pay annually.
Support for Product
SamCart provides support via email, chat and Facebook groups. The site also has detailed documentation. It also features an intuitive interface that makes it easy to navigate.
SamCart demo available. Click Here to get a FREE demo
Here is a more detailed look at the support offered by SamCart.
Intuitive Interface From the moment you log in to the platform, you’ll be guided through the steps necessary to get you set up as quickly and easily as possible.
Help Center: SamCart has a thorough knowledge base with written posts and video tutorials to help you solve any type of potential issues you might come up against.
Live Chat: If you come up against a problem that requires urgent assistance, you can get support via SamCart’s live chat. Although the reply time can vary, for the most part, SamCart support is very responsive to requests for help.
Facebook Group:SamCart boasts a large Facebook community with over 24,000 members. It also has a support team who will gladly answer any questions you may have on Facebook.
Email Support: Although SamCart doesn’t offer direct contact to the support team, they do offer email support during business hours (that is, 9 AM to 5 PM ET weekdays).
FAQ
What’s Samcart?
Samcart allows you to sell digital products and online services. It can also be used to sell physical items. It allows you to create sales pages, marketing funnels, run an affiliate program, ecommerce, and more. Through excellent marketing and widespread adoption from business owners everwhere, Samcart is the leading online shopping cart on the market.
What is Samcart used for?
Samcart can be used in a number of different ways across a number of different industries. Samcart is a tool that can be used to help individuals sell products or services online. They have solutions for course creators, authors, coaches/consultants, agencies, side hustlers, amazon and Etsy sellers, Physical product sellers, entrepreneurs, and even non-profits.
Can You Integrate SamCart with Zapier?
Zapier allows you to integrate SamCart. This will allow you to instantly connect to over 3,000 marketing automation apps and tools to automate your work, increase productivity, and improve your bottom line.
Can SamCart Handle VAT?
SamCart helps keep your online tax simple. All you have to do is add your marketplace address and VAT ID wherever applicable, and SamCart will automatically find the right tax rates for each of your customers, and then charge them sales tax accordingly.
SamCart allows coupon codes
SamCart not only allows coupons, but the platform also has one of the most granular control features (compared to other shopping cart software) over the way you use coupons for your products and services.
Instead of one coupon being applied to all your products, you can apply a coupon to a specific product and a differentcoupon for other products within the same sales funnel.
Can You A/B Test Checkout Pages in SamCart?
SamCart offers a powerful A/B testing tool that will help you increase your conversions. To find the best version for your customers, you can test all aspects of your checkout page. The platform also has in-depth tutorials for those who are new to split testing and provides a step-by-step process to help you hit the ground testing.
Does SamCart have a Money Back Guarantee?
SamCart provides a 30-day money back guarantee if the software is not right for you. Just make sure you cancel your subscription a few days before the payment is due to go off in order to avoid having to needlessly pay for an additional month. You can also try the platform for free for 14 days before you decide to purchase any premium plans.
How Does SamCart Pay You?
With regards to affiliate commissions, SamCart doesn’t pay you. Instead, the vendor or your platform manager will pay you. All supported payment methods are accepted, including Stripe and PayPal.
Is SamCart Legit?
SamCart is definitely legit for digital marketers who want to sell services or products (both physical and digital) online.
It’s an affordable shopping cart software that makes it easy to optimize each of your sales through the use of various payment models, discounts, coupons, and bump offers so you can increase your revenue.
SamCart is a valuable tool that is easy to set up and makes a great addition to any online business.
If you do decide to try SamCart, I’d be greatly appreciative if you use this link to suppo