SamCart is an online shopping cart software that was founded in 2013 by Scott and Brian Moran. It’s been around for years and has emerged as the main competitor for Thrivecart, which is another popular platform with similar functionality.
But, is Samcart right for your business?
After using the platform myself for years on one of my own websites because I was overwhelmed with the tedious and time-consuming task of processing payments, converting customers, and tracking sales, I decided it was time to sit down and write my own in-depth SamCart review based on my experience.
In this SamCart review, we’ll dive into SamCart’s features and benefits and I’ll help you understand both the positives and negatives of the platform.
Samcart Summary
Ron’s Thoughts
Samcart is a great solution when trying to sell anything online and they’ve got deep integrations with hundreds of other tools. I especially like their one-click upsell ability and analytics. In terms of online shopping carts, Samcart stands out as one of the best in the industry. Lastly, the support level of Samcart is unmatched by others.
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Biggest Pro:
One-Click Upsells
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Biggest Con:
Limited Design Options
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Annual Discount:
Yes - 20% Off
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Price:
Starts at $49/mo
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Promotion:
Is SamCart Worth it?
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.
As a marketer, you know the importance of testing your pages to optimize conversions, and SamCart has done all the work for you to make sure that you maximize the profit you make from each sale.
For example, if you sell a $47 downloadable pdf, and use a standard checkout form, you may be unable to add an upsell. But, with an upsell to something like a coaching call or a course (using SamCart, of course), you may be able to sell an additional $100 product to 30% of your customers.
What does this mean for you?
This means more revenue per sale, as well as a higher average order size, which ultimately leads to more money in your pocket.
How much more?
Well, every situation is different, but here’s a great story about how someone was able to make $400,000 without a website. You can bet she’d tell you that Samcart is worth it.
Sidenote: If you do purchase SamCart, I’d be grateful if you supported me by clicking on this link to purchase.
Who is SamCart Good For?
SamCart is perfect for anyone who sells 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, specifically when you compare the two industry leaders of Thrivecart vs Samcart, it’s specifically designed for a certain kind of user, which means that it won’t be ideal for everyone.
So, depending on whether you sell information products, software, memberships, or services, read on to discover the different features and functionality of SamCart so you can determine whether or not it’s the ideal shopping cart for you.
SamCart Pros and Cons
SamCart, like all other software, comes with its own set of pros and cons. I have listed them below so you know exactly what to expect from this shopping cart.
SamCart Pros
- User-Friendly Platform: SamCart is a user-friendly platform for selling both physical and digital products online.
- Integrations: The software integrates with a ton of marketing tools and services through 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 and Discounts Control: You have granular control over how you use coupons and discounts for 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.
- Great Support: SamCart has a vast knowledge base to help you with all types of issues. You can also get support through email, Facebook group, and live chat. They pride themselves on being very helpful.
- Reporting and Analytics: The platform has an impressive reporting dashboard that provides you with useful insights from your data.
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.
- Lack of Design Options: Compared to other shopping cart software in the same price category, SamCart’s design and customization options for its checkout templates are limited, especially if you have free products.
- 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.
SamCart Functionality
The one thing that might make you choose SamCart over other types of shopping cart software is its functionality. This is where its true strengths lie.
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.
The video below explains this further:
If you are not using upsells as part of your sales funnel, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. The world’s biggest retailer, Amazon, reports that over a third of its revenue comes from upselling efforts.
SamCart makes upselling easy and seamless, and according to their website, once you set it up, it will increase your customer value by up to 68.1%.
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.
This video illustrates the functionality:
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.
So, for instance, if you sell laptops using SamCart shopping cart software, you might also offer bump offers of laptop bags, antivirus packages (Avast could really use this) , etc. as a way to increase your 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
At the time of this writing, the checkout platform of Samcart has 18 professionally designed shopping cart templates – all of which are 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 different from other shopping cart software, where you actually have to publish your page and 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. You can simply take the word of the experts that came before you and leverage their hard work to start seeing immediate results in your marketing and sales 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.
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 is a unique feature that offers you the ability to add multiple payment options to a single 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 one-page checkout keeps visitors on the page as they decide on the best way to pay for your product.
As an online marketer, I’m sure you know the importance of being able to keep your visitors on-page, otherwise, you risk losing them altogether if they leave for any reason.
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.
Here’s a brief tutorial of how it works:
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.
As you well know, not everyone pays on time, every 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 helps to guard you against expired credit cards and declined payments by sending your customers an email on your behalf whenever a payment fails.
In the email, there will be a link where customers can update their payment information on file straight from their inbox. This saves you from having to waste valuable time chasing down customers who have failed to make their payments.
For those customers who fail to update their payment information after receiving several emails, SamCart automatically cancels their subscription and marks them as “delinquent” so you know exactly who they are and can choose to reach out to them if you want to.
You can keep tabs on what’s going on in Subscription Saver via SamCart’s simple and effective dunning report.
A/B Testing
All marketers have a good idea of how important it is to split-test everything. Split testing can be especially helpful if you have a high cart abandonment rate. Even a small improvement can result in a huge increase 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.
But, few marketers ever really bother testing 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.
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.
Here are some of the main integrations 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. The good news is, SamCart supports a lot of email marketing solutions, including iContact, HubSpot, Ontraport, Active Campaign, MailChimp, and Drip.
Membership Platforms: SamCart supports a wide range of membership platforms, including Thinkific, Post Affiliate Pro, WishList Member, Digital Access Pass, Optimize Member, and Membermouse.
Webinar Platforms: If you host webinars as part of your marketing strategy, you can use SamCart’s checking-out software to sell your products and services. 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
As previously mentioned, there are tons of shopping cart solutions available on the market today.
SamCart is just one of many, and although it has amazing features and functionality, there are a few others that can give this platform a run for its money.
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. If you’re looking for more options, check out this post which has more alternatives.
SamCart vs. ThriveCart
Note: You can read my full SamCart vs ThriveCart Review here.
ThriveCart is an online shopping cart software designed for e-commerce sites. It has many of the same features that SamCart has, including one-click upsells, affiliate management center, etc.
But, SamCart does have significantly more features than ThriveCart. The one place where ThriveCart outshines SamCart is on price.
While SamCart is offered at a monthly price, you can get ThriveCart for a one-time fee of $495.
This is one of the many reasons why a lot of digital marketers prefer this SamCart alternative over all the rest.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that ThriveCart integrates with most of the major payment processing systems available right now, whereas SamCart only integrates with PayPal and Stripe.
SamCart vs. Clickfunnels
You can read my in-depth SamCart vs. 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 also has support for many email marketing and marketing automation tools, including Infusionsoft, Ontraport, and NMI.
Compared to other shopping cart software, Clickfunnels is a more complete system as it allows you to build landing pages as well as shopping cart pages.
This means, in essence, that it’s a lot more than just 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.
SamCart vs. PayKickStart
PayKickStart is a flexible shopping cart that will help you power your online business in an affordable way.
The software has features such as a sales funnel page builder, a powerful page editor, and checkout form pop-ups, among others. You can integrate PayKickstart with Braintree, Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and Easy Pay Direct.
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.
When it comes to pricing, PayKickStart offers four different subscription plans: Basic $99/month, Growth $199/month, Scale $299/month, and a custom plan that will be tailored to suit 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. The software comes with a lot of features that make it easy to create optimized checkout pages for higher 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 has over 50 free templates, each of which contains all the features and elements required to boost your conversions.
When you choose a higher-level plan, you will have access to even more templates. The premium templates are mobile responsive, ensuring excellent viewing experiences for your mobile customers.
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.
Prices for Shift4Shop range from $19/month for “Startup” stores to $229/month for “Pro” stores.
I’ve also written this SamCart vs. Shopify Comparison.
Truth be told, Samcart has a lot of competitors because many systems add checkout functionality. Systems like Aweber, Convertkit, Kajabi, and more. As good as these platforms can be for their intending purpose, they aren’t nearly as focused as Samcart is.
Samcart CreatorU
While not technically part of the Samcart platform, the folks at Samcart have also launched CreatorU, which I think is worth mentioning in this Samcart review.
This is an online learning platform that’s filled with quality digital marketers like Rocky Ullah (YouTube Creator), Brian Moran (Founder of Samcart), Kimberly Jimenez (Organic Traffic Expert), Pay Flynn (Online Business Expert), Nicholas Kusmich (Facebook Ad Expert), and more.
The platform itself has many experts who are able to teach you tried and true tactics that they’ve used to scale their own businesses to very large and profitable endeavors. One of the best things about the learning platform is that it really caters to all kinds of businesses.
Whether you’re a SaaS company trying to acquire customers, or a content marketer trying to develop Superfans, CreatorU offers many courses at a very reasonable price for the value they provide. With CreatorU, you’ll get access to the following:
- New Training Sessions Each Month: CreatorU offers members four new training sessions each month from entrepreneurs in the trenches, just like you and I.
- Business Blueprints: Currently there are 50+ data-driven blueprints (and growing) that give you exact steps to replicate in your own business for growth.
- Reports/Scripts/Templates: Instructors in the courses offer students various resources to better understand the material and templates to follow for themselves.
- Exclusive Training: Students get access to exclusive training from the highest-performing SamCart users to help them have more success, more quickly.
- Community: Perhaps the most valuable part of CreatorU is that they allow students to join a community of like-minded entrepreneurs to help each other.
The pricing for CreatorU for live sessions is $1,997/yr, but that’s been closed for some time. As of now, the only option available is to purchase a CreatorU membership for $144/yr.
SamCart Pricing
Launch ($49/month or $468/year with 20% Discount): Standard integrations, email support, onboarding webinars, flexible customer billing options, dashboard and sales reports, weekly webinars, preview of CreatorU.
Grow ($99/month or $948/year with 20% Discount): Launch features plus enhanced integrations, 1-day email support, 1:1 launch support call with SamCart expert, order bump collections, post-purchase upsells, UTM tracking, and custom checkout fields.
Scale ($199/month or $1,908/year with 20% Discount): Grow features plus custom CRM and API integrations, cart abandonment conversion, subscription saver, affiliate center, A/B testing, automated reporting.
Each plan comes with a 7-day free trial, as well as a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Product Support
SamCart offers support in a variety of ways, including email, live chat, and a Facebook group. They also have detailed documentation on the site, as well as an intuitive, user-friendly interface that is designed to remove potential roadblocks and help beginners navigate the platform easily.
Here is a more detailed look at the support offered by SamCart.
Intuitive Interface: From the time you log on to the platform, you will be guided on the steps to take to help you get set up as quickly 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 has a huge Facebook community of over 24,000 members and includes a support team that will happily answer all your questions 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).
Frequently Asked Questions
Samcart is an online shopping cart that allows you to sell both digital products, and online services, and can even be used to sell physical products. 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 everywhere, Samcart is the leading online shopping cart on the market.
Samcart can be used in a number of different ways across a number of different industries. If an individual is trying to sell a product or service online, Samcart can help. They have solutions for course creators, authors, coaches/consultants, agencies, side hustlers, amazon and Etsy sellers, Physical product sellers, entrepreneurs, and even non-profits.
You can integrate SamCart with Zapier, which will then allow you to instantly connect with over 3,000 marketing automation tools and apps to help you automate your work, supercharge your productivity, and boost your bottom line.
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 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. 
For instance, instead of having any one coupon applied automatically to all your products, you have the option of applying one coupon to specific products, and a different coupon to other products in the same sales funnel.
SamCart has a robust A/B testing feature designed to help you boost your conversions. You can test every aspect of your checkout page to find out which versions work best with your audience. 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.
SamCart offers a 30-day money-back guarantee if you decide that the software is not 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. The platform also offers a free 7-day trial, which will make it less likely that you will need a refund since you’ll have the chance to get to know the platform in-depth before opting for any of the premium plans.
While you can’t build a fully functional website with blog posts and custom coding, SamCart does allow you to build landing pages that can be used as a website for sales purposes. A good example of someone who could use this is if you have consulting to sell and speak at a conference. Instead of handing people a business card at the end of your speech, you could tell them to visit your website. This would be a one-page SamCart page asking people to take whatever call to action that you see fit.
Yes, SamCart does give you the ability to connect a custom domain to the pages you create on the platform. SamCart allows users to use a custom domain for one page, many pages, or all pages, depending on your preferences. In addition, SamCart allows users to connect multiple custom domains to their accounts if needed.
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. And with that, this SamCart review has concluded. I hope it helped you understand the capabilities of this tool.
If you do decide to try SamCart, I’d be greatly appreciative if you use this link to support me.
excellent information compiled and presented in an easy to understand way. Thanks a lot. God bless you.
Can Samcart be used by Indian online marketers too?
Hey Ravi – thanks for the appreciation! And yes, this platform works in India as well.
Thank you for your very thorough and detailed review of Samcart. I signed up with them yesterday just from the video I watched it sounded perfect for me. I do have more questions, just because I don’t know the meaning of some terms, but you have made me feel confident and secure with my purchase.
They may have added some things that you don’t know about yet that made Samcart best for me. They have a whole program where I can set up my course offering right on the Samcart website and then launch the course from there. The integration of a helping me create a sales page, create a course and handling my customers payment is what sold me with Samcart.
I still need to look into more integrations. I don’t know yet if when I integrate some service, like marketing automation with Samcart if I also have to pay a fee to that marketing automation. Sounds like I need it.
Yea, they keep expanding their product offering. It’s very good!
So if I wanted to use Samcart to sell ‘seats’ in my Membership website, this would not be the ‘best’ solution? I think you mentioned that in your article…would Leadpages be better for that?
I watched the webinar/Brian, spoke to Jill on the phone from SamCart, it appears great for a coaching-mentor business. I am stuck with the process of marketing/ads on social media, no clue where to begin. I do not think the software alone would provide sales, is my understanding. Thanks much..
Hey Jazmeen,
I’d agree. I don’t think just having your business on Samcart that you’ll make sales. You’ll need to create a brand and drive your own sales undoubtedly.