SamCart Review — Does it Deliver or Should You Look for Better Options?

Launch Your Online Business in Just 7 Days

You want your checkout process to be as efficient as possible because you know that it can and will increase your average customer value (AOV), right?


So you set out to find the best shopping carts software and you came across SamCart . . . could it be the right option for you?


This post will help you answer that question and go into everything you need to know about the platform, from features to cost, and more.


Let’s begin.

1. What is SamCart?

SamCart logo

SamCart logo

SamCart is an ecommerce solutions platform that focuses on achieving 2 goals for you:

  • Have a breeze checkout process for your customers
  • Get you more revenue

To fulfill that, SamCart offers a number of features in a subscription pricing model that has no transaction fees on anything you sell.


But does the value the platform provides make it worth the money it's asking for?


Well, let’s find out.

1.1. SamCart’s pros and cons

If you haven’t got the time to follow along as we explore everything SamCart has to offer . . .


Here’s a concise summary of their pros and cons:

Pros

  • Drag-and-drop page builder
  • Templates are available
  • Advanced analytics
  • Advanced features for the checkout process
  • Straightforward design

Cons

  • Pricey compared to alternative platforms
  • Limited technical design options
  • Doesn’t offer a lot of storage space for large inventories
  • The affiliate center lacks important tracking features for affiliates

Okay, that’s neat.


But what exactly do they offer?

2. SamCart’s features

As an ecommerce solution platform, SamCart's features focus on providing an ecosystem where all the parts work together to satisfy both your and your customer’s needs.

2.1. Checkout page and shopping cart software

Checkout pages in SamCart

Checkout pages in SamCart

These sit at the heart of SamCart’s offerings and are one of the key features that made the platform popular with online stores.


SamCart uses one-step-checkout pages because they’re so effective and make the buying process much smoother for everyone involved.


The setup process is simple, you can start by choosing one of the checkout templates the platform provides and customizing it to be your own.


The checkout page templates on their own are pretty basic.


So it’s recommended to edit sections with the drag-and-drop builder, swap out places of blocks, add simple text fields with custom fields, and remove any of SamCart’s branding.


This will help you create your own high-converting checkout templates.


What’s cool is that all templates are super responsive, so your customers will have no problem with their shopping experience no matter the device they’re using.


You can use PayPal or Stripe as payment processors and accept all payments those gateways can accept.


But why should you consider it as your next shopping cart software for your store?


SamCart makes it fairly easy for your customers to edit their carts and provides all the possible features to minimize cart abandonment.


For example, it lets you choose multiple payment methods for your products, like:

  • One-time payment for the products
  • Payment plans for the product — Customers have the ability to pay the full price of a product over a period of time
  • Tiered pricing for products
  • A free trial to use your product or service
  • Setup multiple currencies

And more.


You can also use upsells and coupons to create a unique payment structure for your products.


And don’t forget to always experiment and test payments through SamCart’s Sandbox Mode, which offers a risk-free testing environment.


This makes SamCart checkout pages very convenient to you and your customers.


As a shopping cart software, that’s what you should always strive to achieve.

2.2. Sales pages

SamCart’s drag-and-drop builder

SamCart’s drag-and-drop builder

Before you create your checkout page, you’ll need a good sales page, and SamCart delivers here as well.


You have a modern drag-and-drop builder to create product/landing pages where you can promote your products through paid ads.


You can even create a sales funnel with multiple pages as to just creating one sales page.


All you need to do is head to your SamCart account, create a new product through your dashboard and then configure your settings like the name, logo, and more.


This works for digital or physical products.


After that, select a template and start editing it to make it match your branding and style.

Customizing templates in SamCart

Customizing templates in SamCart

Then you just need to link your checkout pages to your product pages and you’re good to go.


PS. If you already have a website, you can embed the checkout page in your website or simply add your custom domain through SamCart’s marketplace.

2.3. A/B testing

For the uninitiated, A/B testing or split testing is when you compare two variants of the same thing with a difference in a known variable.


This usually happens in web pages and landing pages, in particular.


The idea is if you can pinpoint an aspect that’s tanking some of your key performance indicators (KPIs) like your opt-in rate, you can improve it.


For example, if you’re running two product pages that are identical in everything but the main title, and one performs well above the other, you’d know that it was the title keeping your performance down.


This is powerful to improve your overall conversion rates and is considered a digital marketing standard.


So naturally, SamCart provides their users with A/B testing, which you can find under the advanced settings section in the dashboard.


You can split test many different things like titles, descriptions, offers, different upsells with separate checkout pages, and more.

A/B testing in SamCart

A/B testing in SamCart

SamCart provides you with stats to monitor the performance between the two variants and to help you make educated decisions for improving your product pages and checkout pages.

2.4. Upsells and order bumps

Upsells are products that you offer to customers after they purchase something using one of your checkout pages.


When using SamCart, you can redirect customers that are exiting the checkout page to a new upsell page, usually offering a higher-end product or service.


What’s neat is that customers don’t have to enter their card/PayPal information again and have the ability to buy with a couple of clicks.


One-step order bumps take this to a new level — you can add products right on your checkout page.

Order bumps in SamCart

Order bumps in SamCart

This helps with selling digital products like ebooks, manuals, software tools, digital art, and more.


They can also be physical products like T-shirts, additional complementary products to what customers buy, a gift wrap, etc.


SamCart claims that their users use this to generate up to 31% more revenue.


This feature paired with the right split testing would make a very powerful combo and would create high converting checkout pages.


Plus, the formula has already been proven to work by Apple and the likes of it — so we do actually believe them on that claim.

2.5. Affiliate center

SamCart's affiliate dashboard

SamCart's affiliate dashboard

You probably know what affiliate marketing is and how companies offer affiliate programs where affiliates get commissions based on the conversions they make.


So how about you kick-start a specialized army of affiliates that will actively sell your products online for you?


Sounds amazing? It is, and SamCart enables you to do exactly that.


With their affiliate center feature, you can create an affiliate program, with options like:

  • Manually or automatically accept affiliates with an affiliate signup page
  • Assign cookies to affiliates to track their sales — Similar to Amazon cookies
  • Create different links that affiliates can promote
  • Assign certain links to certain affiliates
  • Set custom commissions on different products
  • Recurring commissions
Source: SamCart.com

Source: SamCart.com

Although this is great, the affiliate center is lacking core affiliate ID tracking tools, and lots of advanced analytics are missing.


Yes, the cookies are there, but they’re not enough to build a powerful affiliate team based on live feedback — and the price doesn’t make it any sweeter either.


Because unfortunately, the feature is only available on the two highest-paid plans.


If you decide to give it a shot anyway, make sure to check out our affiliate marketing guide that to help you improve your efforts.

2.6. Subscription saver

We actually like this one a lot as it solves a very common issue in a very simple solution.


One of the main troubles for subscription-based products is the failure of the card or payment account that customers added when purchasing said subscription products.


The subscription saver feature automatically sends an email to a customer when their payment fails.

SamCart’s Subscription Saver

SamCart’s Subscription Saver

The email lets them know what went wrong and provides a link that users can go through to update their payment method.


This first email is called a dunning email, and you create multiple more for SamCart to send to a customer subsequently when they fail to make a payment.

Dunning emails in SamCart

Dunning emails in SamCart

You also have your “dunning reports” section where you can keep track of all of the dunning emails and how customers in the case are reacting.


If all the dunning emails fail, then SamCart automatically cancels the subscription for the customer and gives them “Delinquent” status.


This means their information will be saved for you to contact them directly or when they update their payment method, they’d automatically be charged the amount of money they own.

2.7. Integrations

SamCart takes pride in the number of integrations they offer to their customers and have it as a marketed feature all the time.

SamCart integrations

SamCart integrations

You can expect to integrate SamCart with platforms like these with relative ease:

  • ActiveCampaign
  • Thinkific
  • Klaviyo
  • WordPress
  • Kajabi
  • HubSpot
  • Mailchimp
  • Zapier

And a lot more.


You can use these integrations to continue your email marketing efforts. For example, run membership sites, or integrate your fulfillment services.


Speaking of fulfillment services for physical products, you only have two options:

1. Use ShipStation.

2. Connect to Zapier which will unlock a variety of other options.

Using such integrations to run your online business is good if you’re already accustomed to using them and want to maximize sales.


However, if you’re just starting out or you’re one of the small business owners looking for cleaner business operations and marketing then it’s a different story.

2.8. Course creator

SamCart’s course creator

SamCart’s course creator

If you’re looking to create and launch your online courses, SamCart is a decent option.


SamCart users can create and manage their online courses from their online course app.

Editing courses in SamCart

Editing courses in SamCart

For the courses themselves, you can configure course details to customize the view of your students, schedule lesson materials, create drafts for you to develop, and give students assessments and quizzes.


Of course, you can cross-sell courses and products on the checkout page of your online course, which is always neat to get more revenue.


It’s a relatively new feature so it might need some time to be well fleshed out because as of now it doesn’t allow native video hosting.

2.9. Other features

We’ve covered all the core features that SamCart advertises, but there are more that are worth mentioning:

  • Taxes and VAT
Collecting taxes and VAT on SamCart

Collecting taxes and VAT on SamCart

SamCart makes it easy to collect all kinds of taxes and VAT on products from customers.


This could save you a not-so-nice headache every once and a while.

  • GDPR, PCI, SCA compliant

SamCart has demonstrated a good track record of keeping up with marketing laws to make sure their users are protected and compliant.

  • Cart abandonment

With a recent study showing the average shopping cart abandonment rate being at 74.52%, you can only hope to have the best of the best marketing efforts to combat such a scary number.


One way to do this is with cart abandonment emails that simply try to keep the customer's interest alive in their shopping cart.

Mailchimp integration with SamCart

Mailchimp integration with SamCart

SamCart customers would need to integrate with an email marketing software like AWeber or Mailchimp, and set up a follow-up email campaign to do that.

  • Customer portal

SamCart lets your customers have the option to manage their own subscriptions and payments through a dedicated customer portal.

  • 0% transaction fee

Aside from the normal payment gateways processing fees, you get to keep everything you make to maximize profits.

3. SamCart’s pricing

So how much does SamCart cost exactly?

SamCart’s pricing page

SamCart’s pricing page

SamCart has 4 paid plans:

  • Launch — $49/month
  • Grow — $99/month
  • Scale — $199/month
  • Enterprise — You’ll need to contact sales to figure out a price

There’s a 14-day free trial that you can use to try SamCart out as well as a 20% discount on all annual billing.


When looking at all of the plans, we couldn’t help but notice that the first 2 are pretty limited.


With the Launch and Grow plans, you can’t access the SamCart affiliate center, A/B testing or subscription saver.


CRM integrations and a customer portal for your clients to cancel their subscriptions on their own are also not available on these plans — which is quite surprising.


We think that SamCart has powerful features but their pricing makes them nearly unreachable for people and businesses on a budget.

4. SamCart alternatives

Although SamCart is a great web-based checkout platform, if you’re someone who is looking for:

  • Cheaper pricing without compromising on advanced features
  • Larger payment gateway options
  • More feature-rich shopping cart software for affiliate marketing

Then consider these next 3 alternatives:

4.1. Systeme.io: The best alternative for any online business

systeme.io logo

systeme.io logo

Systeme.io is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that’s designed from the ground up to build, launch, and scale your online business effortlessly.


Similar to SamCart, systeme.io has:

  • A drag-and-drop builder that you can use to build all kinds of pages — With a larger specialized template library
  • Online course creator
  • A/B testing
  • Affiliate management features
  • Upsells and downsells

Unlike SamCart, you have advanced email marketing features and the ability to build full websites and stores, business automation, and more.


And all of them are built right in — no integrations required!


You also have a world-class support team to help you at every step. It’s easy to see why customers love systeme.io.


The best part? You don’t have to pay anything to get started, despite having all of these features.

4.1.1. Systeme.io’s pricing

systeme.io’s pricing options

systeme.io’s pricing options

Here are our plans:

  • Free — $0/month
  • Startup — $27/month
  • Webinar — $47/month
  • Unlimited — $97/month

We don’t cut important features like split testing from our Free plan; you can create your online course, and launch your affiliate program.


In fact, your free account has all the features you need to fully build, and launch your online business — and it’s free forever.

4.2. ThriveCart

ThriveCart’s logo

ThriveCart’s logo

ThriveCart is a shopping cart software that integrates well with so many other brands and services, kind of like SamCart integrations.


For example, it works with Apple pay, Sendy, GetResponse, and more.


It has similar features to SamCart and a few more like video carts, retargeting, tracking for customers, payment models, and more.

4.2.1. ThriveCart’s pricing

ThriveCart lets you grab a special deal for a lifetime account — you pay them once, and they should keep serving you better and better.


At least, that’s the promise they make on their landing page.

ThriveCart’s pricing

ThriveCart’s pricing

The current special deal is at $495 with a “pay-it-self guarantee” which is a 30-day-money-back guarantee if you don’t like the platform.

4.3. SendOwl

SendOwl logo

SendOwl logo

SendOwl is a well-respected online shopping cart software that lets users sell digital products and subscriptions.


It has all the features that SamCart offers with the only notable difference being that there’s no real A/B testing feature.


SendOwl’s pricing is so competitive that its most expensive plan is cheaper than the starting plan of SamCart.

4.3.1. SendOwl’s pricing

SendOwl’s pricing

SendOwl’s pricing

SendOwl pricing is simple with 4 paid plans:

  • Just the basics — $9/month
  • Standard — $15/month
  • Premium — $24/month
  • Business — $39/month

Of course, you get more features and access to resources the higher you go with the plans.

5. Conclusion

SamCart offers a complete package of ecommerce features but it comes at a steep price.


Their shopping cart software and additional features offers exactly what you need to start selling online.


However, if you want to achieve even more, turn your attention to systeme.io.


Not only do we offer a Free plan that SamCart doesn’t, but our features are set up to help you build your online business from the start.


Would you like to see what we offer? Sign up today to experience it all for absolutely free!

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