SamCart Review: In-depth
and Honest Review
If you are an internet entrepreneur, you must have heard of SamCart, seen its ads, or have even read some SamCart reviews. With the global rate of cart abandonment on average being 75.6%, who would not like to have a fully functional checkout page that can be created in less than thirty minutes with a cart that promises high conversion rates?
SamCart is a SaaS tool for business owners and digital marketers. The platform is created as a tool for businesses to help them move their clientele through funnels and close sales. The tool is recommended as an ideal option for small businesses, while its advanced packages are said to be great for large companies.
In eCommerce, you would want the visitors to close sales, and SamCart promises exactly that with checkout page templates have been tested to increase sales better than their competition.
But is SamCart really worth the hype? Is SamCart legit?
If you wonder what this eCommerce tool will cost, what are its features, its bright side, and its dark sides, and what are the alternatives to this tool, keep reading to find out in this honest and thorough SamCart Review.
What You'll Learn In This Article
SamCart Pricing
How much does SamCart cost is one of the top questioned asked. SamCart pricing starts from as little as 49 USD per month on a subscription basis, and it constitutes four monthly pricing plans.
The pricing plan for SamCart goes:
49 USD
per month for the Launch Plan
199 USD
per month for Scale Plan
99 USD
per month for Grow Plan
399 USD
per month for Enterprise Plan
Let’s check out the details for the SamCart program.
Starting with the SamCart Launch Plan, we recommend this for young entrepreneurs looking forward to launching their first product or service using digital marketing. It is not suitable for the subscription business owners, or people who are looking for one-click upsells and other payment plan features. For these features, you will need to upgrade your plan to the Grow or Scale Plans.
The Grow Plan for SamCart has additional characteristics to the Launch Plan and enables features like subscription charge reminders, customer management, advanced subscription cancellations, and others.
Now, we move on to the third package that is the SamCart Scale It involves characteristics for the SamCart on an advanced level. You can get different features in this plan, including the cart abandonment, built-in dunning tool, CRM integrations, built-in A and B Split Testing, priority email and chat support system, and different webhooks.
Last but not least, we have the SamCart Enterprise Plan, which is most appropriate for large companies. The plan comes with an additional integration setup, account management system, and other characteristics needed to start your work effectively.
SamCart Review
Now you know the price range of different SamCart packages, but to dive deeper into the details of what this program has to offer, here is the SamCart review.
What is SamCart?
SamCart is a web-based platform for helping people with their eCommerce businesses. It was launched back in 2013 by Brian Moran and Scott Moran, and today, it has become immensely popular among businesses of all sizes considering its user engagement and downloads. The software has powered 10,000 plus business to date, with 8.7 billion products sold.
The tool enables users to develop an attractive and professional checkout page in little time – so, using SamCart, you can easily sell your physical or digital products and also information products. Conversion-optimized checkout templates with one-click upsell, payment plan competencies subscription, and order bump are prominent features designed to maximize profits from every sale.
It integrates effortlessly with product email marketing, delivery, and tracking tools. SamCart pages, once designed, can ultimately become a part of your overall digital campaign through getting combined on the sales page.
Want to know more about the all-inclusive cart and checkout page making tool, here you can get to know more about SamCart and its pricing.
Features for SamCart
SamCart comes with all the characteristics you would anticipate in a shopping cart. Let’s see some of the features available in the Grow Plan and Launch Plan that are among the most popular packages downloaded.
01
Payment Gateway
Among the initial things you will find in this cart as you get started, is setting up the Payment Gateway using a payment method. Typically, there are two payment methods you can choose: PayPal or Stripe.
Stripe and PayPal are among the most common payment processors that we can use online, and SamCart supports these payment platforms. This makes it easier to get paid for your product into your account.
Using SamCart, you can set the offers using Split Pay, one-time single price offerings, subscription plans, payment processing, controllable bill frequency for payment plans, free trials, quantity limitations, SSL certificates, and test payments and currency choices.
However, SamCart will not be integrated with these options for payment:
02
Conversion for Checkout Templates
Cart abandonment affects conversions and can leave a significant gap as a 65% cart abandonment rate leaves a 97.9% gap in conversions. The ultimate goal for checkouts is to lighten the bounce rate and improve the conversion rates.
SamCart includes 18 different professionally made templates for checkout pages that are tested for sales conversions that you can find in the library. You will find the One Page Funnel product among the popular types of the product page template. What’s more, there are a lot of different popups and embeddable checkout pages.
With different funnel design and checkout pages, as your go-to templates, it is convenient for the users of SamCart to start through the process as they fill in their information. For customizing the templates, you will be given the option to customize as many checkout pages as you want only with a limited number of exceptions that might restrict you in the process.
Some of these customizations for SamCart include the following:
Preset colors
Color defining
Uploading of logo
Field filling such as your email address, billing address, zip code, shipping address, and quantity
Custom fields
Button text
Bullet points with title bullet points and image
Guarantee title and text
Testimonials text
Custom content creation
Terms and conditions URL and Checkbox
You can expect a principled way of getting the customized checkout carts. You will not visually get the design previews as when you are designing those checkout pages. A better option would be to configure the customization settings using the SamCart dashboard product interface by clicking on the preview option to check how your checkout page would look once it is finished.
Therefore, it can be a game changer as not a lot of carts come with this level of checkout page designs for your pages. You will also get to customize the landing pages across the sales funnels.
03
A and B Split Testing
You should expect a good software program to have an A and B split testing feature. As you know which sort of cart variation would work the best using the split testing, you will be watching the SamCart enhance the daily conversion rate.
The whole process for setting up to initiate the splitting tests for the software is quite easy;
Go to the advanced settings tab. From there, you will be given the option to create a new variation title.
Now that you have set this title, you should be clicking on the variation that you want to edit all the settings for – as you do it, you would see the type of variation that is undergoing the editing.
As the screen refreshes and brings you to the Product tab details, you will see a notable difference in the test variation URL. As mentioned before, the primary setup process takes only 30 minutes, but then you can use A/B testing to refine the page and develop upsell features to maximize sales
04
Order Bumps and Profit Boosts
Abandonment set e-marketers back around 2 to 4 trillion a year and I am sure, you would not want to be one of them.
The value proposition of the SamCart enables you to maximize your profits by increasing your client lifetime value. Firstly, there comes the setup process that adds bump offers to the page through the Upsells tab. You have to be aware as you might need to get an already existing product in the account.
As a bump offer is added to the account, it will get the price of any product that you add there. It is a bit of a disadvantage as it is an additional step you might need to take when adjusting the product price you want to use in the bump offer.
In any of the way, the bump offers look quite unique using the SamCart.
When it comes to one-click upsells, they can exponentially elevate the overall value encompassing your sales. To set up the SamCart upsells, you will need to look to different dashboard sections and behave in other similar patterns to other bump offers. You will be setting up for the one-click upsells on the dashboard.
It works like more of the upsell products where you will be able to customize the upsell pages as per your choice and assign them to the actual product you want to sell.
For the Coupon Code option, SamCart will let you configure the settings as:
Coupon description
Coupon duration
Discount amount
Coupon type
As these settings get configured, you will now be asked to apply them to a product you want to exhibit. You can easily set up the discount codes using the SamCart using multiple codes. You can also use an email marketing autoresponder to improve the online shopping cart. With every sale, the software would automatically add the client to your email subscription list.
Some of the integrations that come like this include:
ConvertKit
Maropost
Drip
AWeber
MailChimp
GetResponse
iContact
Constant Contact
Integration is just like pasting the API key. When you are not using any email marketing tools mentioned here, you will need to use Zapier integration for your email integrations to add people to the email list using the software.
SamCart has made a lot of improvements in its membership website integration. Before, the software was able to support only four membership sites. Now, they have added about three more sites to the list. It seems as though the membership platform integrations might be a little bit complicated for online shopping carts.
Following are some programs with which the SamCart can integrate with:
Thinkific
WishList Member
Kajabi
MemberPress
Post Affiliate Pro
Member Mouse
Digital Access Pass
If you use any platform such as the Teachable or some other platform for the sake of membership sites, Zapier integration can also be used.
05
Marketing Automation Integration
If you are using marketing automation software, sales processing, tracking tools, and other such tools, some of the native integrations for that matter would include the following:
06
Webinar Integrations
SamCart does not come with any webinar platform integrations that make it a little unlucky for some digital product owners who utilize webinars for selling their products on the digital platforms these days.
However, the Zapier integrations use SamCart with the WebinarJam and the GoToWebinar.
06
SamCart Customer Support
Having only software with you is not enough to help you find a good solution in some said situations. This is where you might need to take help from a customer support team that would help you have tactical solutions to your problems.
SamCart, in this regard, provide you with the following customer support features:
Live Chat Support
Email support
Help Center Documentation
Facebook group
Advanced Features of the SamCart
Now that you have seen some standard features of the SamCart, the next section is dedicated to highlighting some advanced features.
Dunning
The dunning feature is built into the SamCart; Dunning is actually for the users who use subscription products and desire to either sustain or increase their client value for the business.
Subscription-based businesses are actually dedicated to the customer churn, meaning that the clients can pay for the online subscription for some months and can decide to cancel the subscription whenever they want. In this matter, Dunning is actually aimed at saving these failed payment tries. The software comes with a complex process that is easy for setting up premium users.
Some of the reasons why some client credit cards fail at processing payment methods include:
Blocking of a card transaction by the bank
Replacement of the card
Shutdown of the card
Expiration or invalidity of the card
The Dunning actually works using different strategies like setting email reminders for clients when the card is on the verge of expiring. It is a complex and detailed procedure that demands automation to work with the client for updating their details relevant to the credit card after some payment attempts begin failing in their subscription payments.
The dunning tool will cost you more than 100 USD per month. Luckily, SamCart has the tool in its program.
Affiliate Center
SamCart has an affiliate center that gives it a competitive edge over its rivals. In this feature, you will have a dashboard for affiliate management that will be used for doing simple things like probing affiliate commissions, affiliate signups, configure payout periods, affiliate approvals, and last but not least, cookie expiry.
This is where the affiliate center comes to help. Regarded as among the initial affiliate systems that allow you to develop affiliate links, the affiliate center sends the visitors to the web page of choice and credits the affiliates whenever a potential client wants to buy a product from the site.
This would work for both small and large companies that want to publish content. You can set up the affiliate promotion links to be sent to people to a sales page like webinar registration page, YouTube URL, squeeze page, and other affiliates that will get the credit once the sale is made.
However, one disadvantage that you will get from using the affiliate dashboard will be that you don’t have any affiliate tracking IDs for the affiliates. Although it is not a compulsion to have them, getting such a point will be an additional benefit for you.
Pros of SamCart
Some of the advantages you get from using the SamCart software for boosting your eCommerce business are the following:
An easy to use and interactive platform for selling digital, information, and physical products online
An easy checkout facility
Checkout popups order bumps, one-click upsells for improving order value.
Advanced stats reports such as the Lifetime Value
Coupon codes that are easy to develop
Payment Models – subscriptions, payment plans, one-time trials, product payment frequency control
Knowledge base with SamCart resources for training
A checkout page with cart abandonment capability
Landing page with A and B Split Testing feature
Dunning system for helping you update the client’s payment info for renewing the products or services.
Drag and drop editor for the checkout pages, which include moving elements like the sales video to the desired position
Money-back guarantee
Cons of SamCart
Some of the advantages you get from using the SamCart software for boosting your eCommerce business are the following:
Only supporting PayPal and Stripe.
Monthly pricing that starts from 49 USD per month
No calculation facility for digital sales tax
The affiliate system does not come with the tracking ID that other affiliates utilize.
When to Use SamCart?
You might want to use the software specifically if you find problems such as described below:
You can’t figure out how to create a drag and drop shopping cart platform – this might be a problem for many people. You might be Googling about “How to create a drag & drop shopping cart?” and have no answers for yourself.
So, getting a SamCart with the upgraded version would help you get templates with the Drag and Drop feature. That means you can easily upgrade the platform using the software and get more user interactive landing pages.
You want a software that can handle your business based on subscriptions – if you are looking for a platform that works well at handling different subscriptions, the Scale Plan of the SamCart software is worth the shot.
This is because it comes with an existing dunning system. Instead of you having to separately buy a dunning tool for your business, the scale plan will be the need of the hour. If you actually want to check their dunning feature, don’t forget to check out the 14-day free trial option.
You need to give the affiliates working with you different tracking links for promoting your product – the SamCart software comes with an excellent affiliate feature for business owners that have already present content that leads to their products. These are all tracked.
When Not to Use?
You might be thinking using SamCart is the best way and an all-inclusive option for your eCommerce campaigns. More specifically, SamCart might tend to be ideal for those businesses that are based on subscriptions.
However, this is not the fact when it comes to adding multiple monthly subscription charges. This is because as we compare its price to other competitors in the field, the answers might make you think again before buying the product. Where in SamCart you will need to pay every month, you can get most of the features from the SamCart Grow and Scale Plan and pay only up to 495 USD one-time. This will help you stay safe from the monthly fee problem.
Another problem that might not be solvable using this program is that you want the affiliates to know better where the sales are directing from, and the program will not help you get any lead on this. You will not be able to get any tracking capability using the affiliate platform for SamCart.
Competitors
You can find many eCommerce and digital marketing tools on the web, each featuring a characteristic feature for giving you overall better control over your online business. While many features make SamCart interesting and convenient to use, some top competitors of the program in the market are known for certain reasons.
A SamCart review will not be complete with making a comparison with its competitors. Let’s have a quick look at comparing the SamCart, our main software for discussion with other programs – ThriveCart, ClickFunnels, and Kartra.
SamCart vs ThriveCart
ThriveCart is the top competitor for SamCart. Some of the significant points that differentiate the two are as follows:
- Purchase – you will only have to purchase ThriveCart once compared to SamCart, where you will have to pay for monthly subscriptions.
- Two-Step Carts – ThriveCart comes with two-step carts, a feature not available in SamCart.
- Template Options – ThriveCart lacks diversity when it comes to giving templates; you can have more options with SamCart.
- Payment Options – ThriveCart comes with options like Apple Pay and Google Pay, payment options that are not available in SamCart
5. Tax Collection – ThriveCart gives you the option of collecting sales tax from the customers, whereby SamCart does not.
6. Integrations – You can have multiple autoresponder integrations using ThriveCart.
7. Upgrades – ThriveCart frequently updates its software, which fixes bugs and errors from time to time.
8. User Friendliness – ThriveCart is a bit complex to use, while SamCart is easier to use.
Samcart vs Clickfunnels
Upsells – using ClickFunnels, it becomes convenient for you to create one-click upsells without the need to ask the client for resubmission of their billing info. In SamCart, you can develop these one-click upsells that aid in increasing your client’s value without asking them to resubmit their billing info.
Affiliate Management – ClickFunnels has a system for affiliate management termed as the Backup. But you can get this feature only in its platinum plan. The SamCart has this management system already included in the premium plan that costs 199 USD.
Email Marketing – The ClickFunnels offers a platform for email marketing as you upgrade to the platinum plan. When you are using the standard plan, you can integrate it using your chosen email marketing platform. The latter doesn’t come with an email marketing feature; anyhow, you can still integrate the software to most other autoresponders.
Templates – the ClickFunnels program comes with already built funnels for guiding you even when you are an amateur at the development and design of funnels. The SamCart program comes with a template for creating conversion-focused landing and checkout pages.
Page Builder – The ClickFunnels come with a user interactive drag and drop page builder. On the other hand, SamCart comes with a drag and drop checkout page building tool.
Checkout Page – ClickFunnels has a minimalistic approach to its checkout page. On the other hand, you can customize the checkout page as per your choice using the SamCart
Pricing – ClickFunnels Pricing starts from 97 USD per month while the SamCart pricing starts from 49 USD per month
Kartra vs. SamCart
Kartra is a funnel and a digital marketing campaign builder tool. It differs from the SamCart in the following ways:
Kartra comes with an all-inclusive option for businesses, whereas SamCart is designed for building checkout pages specifically.
Checkout Pages – You can build more customized and well-crafted checkout pages using SamCart than you might build using the Kartra software.
Blog and websites – Kartra covers building and designing blogs and website pages for small and large business owners. This feature is not available for SamCart users.
Mail Responders – Kartra, just like ClickFunnels, come with email autoresponders, while this option is not available for SamCart users in the same way.
Some of the other features that differ in Kartra include video hosting, calendars, forms, and a customer helpdesk for your subscribers and clientele.
The features that SamCart involves include subscription recovery through Dunning, already present order bumps, auto cart abandonment capability, instant product deliverance, and pixel tracking with analytics, among many others.
The Best Takeaways
Some of the best points that make SamCart worth buying include;
Subscription saving through Dunning – this comes as a plus point for many looking forward to saving their subscriptions as SamCart with Dunning’s process makes it easy for you to save subscriptions.
Affiliate center management system – with the help of a well-designed affiliate center management system, you are better able to dive into the technicalities behind the business and procure better results.
Detailed client dashboard – through the help of a detailed client dashboard, you can better analyze certain aspects for your clientele without having to use additional analytical tools.
Marketing automation for clients – marketing automation jumpstarts your business in a healthy manner, providing you with all the tactical strategies you need to amplify your business reach without having to waste much time.
Flexible payment processing – with the help of flexible payment processing, the financial structure for payment becomes easy for the checkout pages, ultimately increasing conversion rates of the clients ending in your narrow funnels.
SamCart Review: Final Words
So, now you know all about Samcart, its features, pros and cons and SamCart pricing. We think that SamCart is typically great for small and medium businesses that want to optimize their sales efficiency. Details like checkout pages are crucial to businesses, and for that, SamCart provides a tactical solution.
However, if you are looking for an all-inclusive option that also covers the whole process of developing funnels, you can also opt for the SamCart alternatives.
Affiliate Disclosure: Please note that the review or the Samcart Reviews contains affiliate links. I am an independent affiliate of Samcart Reviews products and not an employee. The review and opinion highlighted in this article are my own and they are in no way official statements by Etison LLC or Samcart Reviews.