TL;DR
- A friendly shopping cart designed to meet your every need, draw sales, and boost revenue – what’s not to love? 🥰
- With over 18 check-out templates, your store will be the talk of the town!
- An affiliate management system is essential to e-commerce, and SamCart does not let you down. 😎
- Facebook community of over 4,000 members! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Trusted by Business Wire, The Business Journals, and more!
SamCart is an all-you-need shopping cart software that allows you to sell both digital and physical goods and services online.
Its main goal is to maximize your sales – and who doesn’t want that? 😏 Scott and Brian Morgan originally founded SamCart in 2013.
Within just nine years, it has grown to be a market leader in the world of shopping carts.
Just FYI – a shopping cart is software that allows you to securely collect payment from customers, as well as give them access to what you’re selling.
If you’re selling goods online, a shopping cart is essential.
Today we’re looking into whether SamCart can hold up to its competitors and if it’s the right shopping cart for you.
Getting Your Money Through SamCart
When you start using SamCart software, one of the first things you need to do is set up your payment processor.
This is the processor that will handle all money until the goods have been exchanged and the money is released. 🤑
Surprisingly, SamCart only offers two payment processors to choose from – PayPal and Stripe.
Now, these are the two most commonly used payment processors out there, so this might not be too much of an issue for you.
However, other shopping carts are using more payment processors, such as Apple Pay and Bitcoin, which leave them much more inclusive compared to SamCart.
How much of an issue this is for you depends on your needs.
Not that many people will want to pay through Bitcoin, but Apple Pay is more convenient than PayPal! 😬
Are There More Options For Payment Models?
Luckily, while SamCart falls short in payment methods, it does make up for it in models.
There is so much flexibility offered to you here that you can alter your e-commerce platform however you’d like.
But what do these models allow you to do? 🤔 First of all, you can choose from eight different currencies. What!?
If you’re offering global shipping, this is a great feature that will include all of your potential customers.
If they feel included, they might be more inclined to spend money on your store. Yes, please! 🤑🤑🤑
You can also offer a single price or multiple price options through SamCart, enticing customers to spend more on your goods to unlock a discount.
Further play to customers’ needs by adding different payment plan options, such as split-pay, subscription, and one-time transactions.
Use SamCart to alter the billing frequency for these different payment plans.
Utilize SamCart to offer trial periods, whether these are free or paid for.
It can also help you to upsell certain products, as well as add product limitations on things you are short of in stock.
Impressive, right? 😏
These are just a few of the ways that SamCart can help you to enhance your payment modes for customers.
Of course, the more flexibility you have on payments, the more customers you’re going to attract.
So, these different settings can be used to your advantage.
Converting Prospects Into Buyers
What’s the use of shopping cart software if no one is going to purchase the goods that it is being used with?
Prospects are potential buyers, and they don’t turn into buyers until they have parted with their money.
Many people think that prospects are converted when they put the goods into their cart, but this is not the case.
They have to press the ‘buy’ button to turn into buyers!
So Many Templates
SamCart aims to help you convert as many prospects into buyers as possible. The first way they do this is with templates.
They offer an amazing number of check-out templates for you to use! 🤩
These templates offer a great range of design, layout, and even behavioral styles.
You can customize these templates to suit your style, but this aspect is a little limited.
There are only a few customization options and some limitations on each of these.
Still, SamCart has now created a drag-and-drop builder so that you can see the changes you’re making to it.
You can publish it and return to editing if you’re not happy, too!
What’s more, SamCart also allows you to embed a sales button into the page, offering customers a shortcut to make a sale directly from your website.
This cuts out the hassle of them traveling to different pages to buy things, hopefully increasing your sales on convenience alone! 😜
Get To Know A/B Testing
When setting a product up on your website through SamCart, the final section offers you the opportunity for A/B testing.
Always take the opportunity to split-test your pages wherever possible! 🤗
SamCart’s split testing shows you your different variations of the page side by side, with the comparative results below.
It gives you insight into how each could perform in terms of views and conversions, giving you a better idea of which will be more effective.
Sales Boosting With SamCart
So we know that SamCart can improve the number of sales through a stellar check-out page and A/B testing, but did you know that it can also improve the value of your sale?
SamCart claims to maximize its user’s profits, but how is this even possible?
There are several ways that it does this, so let’s take a look now.
Coupons And Discounts
When adding a new product onto your page through SamCart, you can also create coupons for it.
Adding a coupon requires you to create a coupon code, duration, whether it’s a flat rate or percentage off, and more.
There is plenty of customization when it comes to coupons, and you have free reign to do whatever you want with them. 😎
Another cool feature is bump offers, which highlight customers with a special deal on the price for a short period of time.
You can do this for any product by editing one that you have already added to your page.
The offer is then displayed clearly on the check-out page, ensuring the customers know they’re getting the best deal. 😋😋
Upselling Your Items
Similarly, there is also an option for upselling your products, although these are handled differently in the SamCart system.
Upselling includes a new page that you can design and customize to your exact preferences.
This includes features like button text, video URLs, and CSS advanced customization! 🤗
Once you have finished customizing your upsell page, you now have a place where you can store all of your highlighted products.
These will be seen at the check-out page, notifying your customers of the deals and hopefully boosting your sales.
Affiliate Center Functionality
Affiliate schemes are a great way to boost sales and drive traffic to your website.
Luckily, SamCart does offer an affiliate center that leads you right to a reporting dashboard.
This is where you’ll see how your affiliates are performing. One thing we love about SamCart is the reporting data it offers.
Everything is laid out well and is easy to read, making it simple to analyze and determine what’s working and what isn’t. 📈📈
You can also add affiliate emails and links to SamCart, and determine the commission that the affiliates earn from purchases.
Determine the payout period, affiliate approval, and cookie expiration, and you’re done!
Integrating SamCart Into Your Tech Stack
Shopping carts always need to integrate perfectly with your other pieces of software to work effectively.
If your shopping cart is going to start bugging the rest of your system, then it‘s not going to help your experience. 😒
Fortunately, SamCart works seamlessly with a lot of other software systems.
Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing is incredibly important for many businesses, so this is often the first piece of software you should integrate with your shopping cart.
SamCart supports a great number of email marketing software, including:
- Aweber
- GetResponse
- Mailchimp
- iContact
- Ontraport
- Infusionsoft
- Hubspot
- Constant Contact
- ActiveCampaign
- ConvertKit
- MaroPost
- Drip
We liked how SamCart included the most commonly used email marketing tools here with a few lesser-known options. 😍
No matter which one you’re currently using, SamCart should be able to work seamlessly alongside it.
Memberships
Memberships help manage your e-commerce store by supporting sales, managing members, protecting your content, and much more.
It’s a valuable piece of software to have in your stack, so SamCart should be able to work with it effectively.
SamCart does offer some integration options, although the list is much smaller than the email marketing tools:
- WishList Member
- Digital Access Pass
- MemberMouse
- OptimizeMember
While there are fewer options to choose from here, this seems to be a running theme throughout many shopping carts.
Most are offering only a few integrations with different membership programs. 🤷♀️
Digital Sales Tax
SamCart used to offer an integration for Taxamo, which is one of the leading platforms for calculating digital sales tax.
But Taxamo was super expensive, so they scrapped that idea.
Worry not, though – as SamCart now has a feature to calculate taxes on every sold product.
This is an incredibly important figure to get right with each sale, so this new feature is beneficial for anyone selling products online. 👌👌
What About Software That Isn’t Supported?
If your tech stack currently includes things that aren’t natively supported by SamCart, don’t worry.
They also use Zapier, which allows you to use SamCart alongside hundreds of other apps in their continually evolving library. 🙌
Zapier does offer a free option that includes a decent number of apps that you might be using in your tech stack.
SamCart Always Has Your Back
Anyone who has run an e-commerce site before knows just how important their shopping cart software is.
You need to be able to fully understand the software, what to do in times of technical challenge, and how to give it control when you’re unable to fulfill duties.
SamCart does all of this and more. The interface is friendly, helping you navigate your way through the platform intuitively. 🤗
Like an old friend showing you the ropes on how to use all of its features.
We loved this feature and it allowed us to learn more about SamCart quicker than if we had been left to our own devices.
An example of this is the three-step process of setting up your dashboard once you log in for the first time.
There are three boxes to accommodate the steps, with linked buttons taking you where you need to go to complete the step.
This added help from SamCart offers you a more seamless transition into the software, ensuring that everything is set up quickly.
Now you have more time to work on your business and get that revenue rolling in! 🤑
Customer Service
Software is amazing, but it is also notorious for breaking down now and then.
When this happens, you need to be able to talk to someone as soon as possible to get it fixed.
SamCart offers quick and effective customer support within a few clicks.
The knowledge base is thorough, with plenty of questions and answers to look through from other customers.
There is also a live chat option (our favorite!) that you can access from anywhere on the platform.
We liked this so that we didn’t have to write down lots of information to remember it when talking on the live chat – we could navigate around our dashboard looking for the relevant information as the expert asked for it. 👍👍
The live chat option also gives you a response estimated time based on the agent’s previous behavior, indicating how quickly your issue will be resolved.
SamCart does not offer a phone line to talk to someone, which is slightly strange compared to other shopping carts’ customer service.
This means that you can only use the live chat option for help from an agent. 📵📵📵
SamCart’s Community
Communities are another excellent place to get help with any issues you might be having with your software.
SamCart has a Facebook community with over 40,000 members! Here you can chat, share experiences, and ask for help from other users.
We found the Facebook community to be really helpful and friendly when we were just getting started with SamCart. #WinWin 👯
Pricing
SamCart is one of the more expensive shopping cart software on the market, with there being three plans to choose from.
The first, Launch, is $59 a month and comes with a limited number of features, such as standard integrations, virtual onboarding webinars, and standard email support.
The Grow plan comes with more features at $119, including most of the things we have looked at today, such as the check-out templates, payment models, A/B testing, and more.
The more expensive plan, Scale, is $299 a month and comes with additional features such as the affiliate center and dedicated training and support. 😲
There is also no free plan to choose from, although it does offer a free 7-day trial.
With all of the high-end features you get with SamCart, we do think that the price is justified.
However, there are cheaper (less effective) shopping carts out there if you’re on a budget.
What We Loved About SamCart
Now let’s take a look at what we liked about this shopping cart software. 😍😍😍
Extensive Reporting
We love any software that is going to give us in-depth information regarding how our elements are working.
If you’re going to enhance your website to be the most effective as possible, you need to know which bits are driving sales and which aren’t.
We also liked the use of A/B testing and how quickly it told us which of our variations would work best as a check-out page. ✔️
Affiliate Management
The affiliate management system is easily one of the best features of SamCart.
You have free reign over your affiliate program, and it could not be easier to use.
Considering how important a good affiliate program is for driving sales, this feature is an invaluable tool from SamCart. 🤩
Friendly Software
SamCart ensures that it is as easy to use as possible, making it excellent for beginners and advanced users alike.
However, even if something were to go wrong, you still have so much help around you from the live chat option and Facebook group!
Range Of Integrations
The number of integrations that you can use with SamCart makes for the best user experience possible.
Your tech stack needs to work seamlessly together, and that is exactly what SamCart sets out to do.
With plenty of tools and services able to be integrated into SamCart, you should be able to get everything working together in no time.
Even if you are using software that isn’t supported by SamCart, you can use Zapier support to work around it.
What We Didn’t Like About SamCart
Now, onto what we didn’t like so much – was there anything? 🤨😋
Lack Of Payment Processors
Aside from PayPal and Stripe, SamCart does not support any other payment processors.
Considering ApplePay and Google Pay are some of the most popular payment methods right now, we would have liked to see these integrated into SamCart.
Hopefully, they can be added in the future! 🤞
Cryptocurrency is also not supported through SamCart, which could be an issue if this is what you want your business to be based on.
High Price Point
The price point has to be talked about here.
Considering the fact that SamCart is designed for beginners in the world of e-commerce, a price of $199 is very steep.
Even without the affiliate center (which we highly recommend you get), the price is still high compared to other shopping cart software on the market! 🤔
Comparison: SamCart Vs ThriveCart
ThriveCart and SamCart are two well-known shopping cart software that enhance e-commerce sites – but which comes out on top? 🤔
Let’s begin with the templates for check-outs.
Arguably the most important part of any shopping experience, the check-out page needs to be easy to use and welcoming to your customers.
SamCart offers 18 templates for check-out pages while ThriveCart only has 10.
SamCart’s templates are better looking as well, easier to customize, and the best at making your website as attractive as possible. 😍
SamCart is also great for beginners due to how friendly the interface is, and it is very easy to use.
While ThriveCart does not offer any free trials, SamCart offers a 14-day free trial.
However, you will find the latter to be more expensive, with a price between $99-199 a month.
ThriveCart asks for a flat rate of $595 for lifetime access to the software, making it the best value shopping cart software on the entire market. 🤑
ThriveCart also offers additional features such as ApplePay support, an embedded digital tax calculator, and two-step authentication.
Overall, SamCart is excellent for people just beginning their e-commerce journey.
However, ThriveCart might be better for more advanced sellers wanting to scale their businesses online.
Our Verdict
SamCart is an excellent shopping cart software that holds its own against its competitors.
This software allows you to sell digital and physical goods and services online, with simple payment models and processors.
Although, turning prospects into customers is just half the battle, and it is one that SamCart does well. ⚔️
SamCart also helps to boost sales in terms of affiliates, upselling, coupons, and more.
While the price point is rather high for SamCart, we found that the features were worth it.
Even if you don’t use it forever, the knowledge that you’ll learn from SamCart is unmatched. 🤩