Today in this post I am going to review SamCart in depth. I will explore all the features it offers and also compare them with its competitors like ThriveCart, PayKickstart, Kartra, ClickFunnels, and much more.

SamCart is costly starting at $49/month compared to some cost-effective solutions like ThriveCart and SendOwl. But, are the advanced features that SamCart comes with justify the price?

Let us see.

Type	Shopping cart platform
Starting price	$39/mo
Transaction fee	0%
Trial available?	Yes, 14 days free trial
Features	Free SSL Certificates Smart Pixel Tracking Coupons and Discounts Custom Domains Sales & VAT Tax Support
Competitors	ThriveCart PayKickStart SendOwl

What do I like about SamCart?

• SamCart offers free SSL certificates and PCI compliance for secure transactions.
• No transaction fees associated with the sale unlike some other shopping cart solutions like Gumroad for example.
• Comes with in-built VAT and sales tax calculation system for easier and accurate calculations
• It has a wide range of checkout templates and superior customization abilities compared to ThriveCart for example.
• Flexible payment plan options
• SamCart’s cart abandonment recovery feature is excellent and is a conversion booster
• It has one-click upsells, downsells, and order bumps that ClickFunnels is well known for.

What I don’t like about SamCart?

• It doesn’t come with a membership builder for you to create the membership sites.
• Its pricing is not affordable. Its lowest plan lacks most of the important features like A/B testing and affiliate center making it quite not worth it.
• Unlike say ThriveCart, it lacks one-time pricing. You need to pay the recurring charges.

SamCart features

Products

With SamCart, you can create either digital or physical products. The product creation process is very simple and straightforward just like ThriveCart’s product creation.

To create a new product, just click on “new product”, fill in all the essentials like product name, price, description, payment frequency, etc.

The best thing here is SamCart’s payment frequency is very flexible and you can set as:

1. One time
2. Recurring weekly
3. Recurring monthly
4. Recurring quarterly
5. Recurring yearly
6. Recurring custom days

This type of flexibility is lacking with its competitors like ThriveCart(review), Kartra, or ClickFunnels.

If you have dozens of products to sell on the platform, SamCart provides you some important features like:

1. It comes with a search bar to search the products easily
2. You can add the tags to the products. For example, if you have created any of the products solely to promote during any special events or days like Black Friday you can tag it under “promotion”.
3. You can filter the products based on the tag added and product type(one-time or digital).
4. You can order the products based on the name, date created, price, and recently uploaded, thus making your categorization very simple.

With SamCart you can upload the digital files with formats including PDF, RAR, ZIP, and any image/audio/video format.

Also, you can customize the time for which those digital file download links remain active like say 1 days, 2 days, 5 days, or no expiration. This is really useful when you are running time-sensitive offers like limited-time Christmas sales.

Coupons

You can create coupons for the products. For this, just click on “Add coupon” and then complete the coupon details.

You can set the coupon type as either a percentage or a flat rate and you can offer these coupons as one time or on the recurring charge.

And you can apply the coupon either on all the products or on individual products. This you can select from the drop-down.

Checkouts

SamCart comes with a drag and drop builder for you to create the checkout pages.

Unlike ThriveCart, SamCart provides plenty of professional-looking templates like full width, pop up, multi-step, and much more. You can customize these as per your needs.

SamCart comes with a fewer number of elements and widgets compared to ClickFunnels or Kartra. But being a checkout software, the modules it comes with are quite close to some dedicated landing page builders.

Similar to Kartra, SamCart provides block templates for the header area, feature area, call to action, and guarantee.

Under the settings tab, you will find the customization options like page style, font, and checkout form options.

The pages are customizable to both mobile and desktop devices.

Funnels

Although you can’t create complete funnels like that of ClickFunnels, it comes with really good marketing features like upsells, downsells, and order bumps.

If you want to build highly customizable and advanced sales funnels, then I suggest going with platforms like ClickFunnels.

You will find the funnels option under upsells. There click on “New funnel”, enter the funnel name and description.

When creating any funnel, you can add up to 5 upsells or 5 downsells.

A/B split testing

With SamCart, you can split test the funnel pages and also the checkout pages.

You can create the multiple variations of the page and split test the elements like testimonials, or bullet points. You can even split test the various payment forms to know which works best for your audience.

Whenever you set up the variations and start the test, Samcart will drive equal traffic to the variations and help you decide the winner.

You can set the winner with just a click of a button.

Unlike some other softwares, it doesn’t come with automatic winner selection based on statistical significance and will not display you the metric “chances of being a winner” next to variations.

Remember that the split testing feature is only available in the higher plans of SamCart that costs $159/mo. This is a big downside of SamCart.

But needless to say, A/B split testing is one of the most crucial features to have that other shopping cart products like PayKickstart and SendOwl don’t even come with.

If you badly need split testing functionality without the premium fee of SamCart, you may need to go with ThriveCart.

Marketing features

SamCart provides various marketing features like upsells, downsells, 1-click transactions, bump offers, coupons, etc.

It also comes with post-purchase upsells, multiple payment options, subscription charge reminders, cart abandonment, and much more.

Among these marketing features, I really liked their:

• Multiple payment options which help you boost conversions on your checkout page. According to SamCart’s claim, this feature boosts your conversions by 17.8%.
• Cart abandonment recovery feature wherein it allows you to get in touch with the prospect over email, phone, text, live chat, etc.

But unlike Kartra, it lacks the most powerful marketing features like behavioral adaptive marketing and dynamic OTOs (which lets you customize the offers based on previous behaviors of people on your site). If you want to know more about these features then go through my Kartra review.

Email marketing and automation

Unlike Kartra or ClickFunnels, SamCart lacks an in-built autoresponder and automation tool.

So you need to make use of 3-rd party services to achieve this thus costing additional money.

You can integrate with tools like Drip (review), ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, ConstantContact, AWeber, ConvertKit (review), InfusionSoft, Klaviyo, Ontraport, and much more.

Affiliate management

With SamCart’s easy to use affiliate dashboard you can easily set up your affiliate network and get your affiliates to promote your product.

You can either auto approve the affiliate signups or accept each manually.

A 30 days cookie period is set by default. You are free to extend this cookie period and set a maximum limit of 999 days maximum.

SamCart has defaultly set the affiliate commission as 50%. You can change and customize that as per your wish.

Also, you can set the commission type as one-time or the recurring commission.

In the affiliate dashboard, you will get all the necessary stats regarding the Earnings Per Click, your top-selling affiliates, the history of your past-payouts, and much more.

If you don’t want a certain product to be available for all the affiliates to promote you can make that affiliate link private.

You need to remember that the affiliate center feature is only present in their Scale plan that costs $159/month.

Other notable features

• SamCart comes with free SSL certificates and PCI compliance for secure transactions.
• It doesn’t charge any additional transaction fees on the products you sell
• It assures 99.98% uptime guarantee so you will not lose any of the sales
• It comes with a customer portal to easily manage your customers. With this feature, customers can manage their subscriptions.
• It comes with advanced subscriptions for you to offer free trials, dollar trials, payment plans, and any other subscriptions your customers wish.
• SamCart has a built-in subscription saver that manages and protects all the subscriptions under a centralized dashboard.
• It also offers custom domain features so you can publish the product pages under your own domain name thus empowering your brand.

Integrations

SamCart integrates well with most of the popular online platforms like payment gateways, email marketing softwares, page builders, and much more.

When it comes to payment processor integrations, SamCart integrates with various payment platforms like Braintree, PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net.

It doesn’t come with other payment modes like Apple Pay and Google Pay that ThriveCart comes with.

Both of these platforms are quite rigid when it comes to integrating with non-mainstream payment processors.

However, if you are looking to integrate with custom solutions you don’t need to worry as you can make use of Zapier and Webhooks integrations.

Reporting and analytics

SamCart comes with very easy to understandable in-depth reports. You can

get the sales report sorted with date, products, subscriptions, traffic, and much more.

It also gives you the upsell funnels report. This feature is really helpful to know what type of upsell offers are working for the customers.

Also, SamCart’s affiliate reports give you the analytics like the Payable Commissions, Pending Commissions, revenue generated, Earnings Per Click, and much more. But this applies if you are only on their highest plan with affiliate center features.

Customer support

SamCart provides chat support, email, and in-depth knowledge base articles to assist its customers.

But remember, the quick support is only available for the higher plan holders.

Nevertheless, all premium customers get regular email support.

Pricing

SamCart’s pricing starts at $49/mo with features including unlimited products, pages, and templates.

This plan lacks pre-purchase add-ons, post-purchase upsells, multiple payment options, customer management, subscription charge reminder, advanced subscription cancellations, and much more.

If you want access to these features you need to go with higher pricing plans that cost $99/mo.

Cart abandonment, built-in A/B testing, affiliate center, and subscription saver (gunning) features are available only with SamCart’s highest plan that costs $199/mo.

If you want to save money you can go with an annual billing that provides a 20% discount on all the plans.

To be honest, compared to its competitors like ClickFunnels or ThriveCart, SamCart costs more. SamCart’s lowest plan is really not worth it as it lacks most of the important features.

How does SamCart compare with its competitors?

ThriveCart vs SamCart

ThriveCart offers more features compared to SamCart. The best thing with ThriveCart is it comes with a one-time payment [lifetime deal] whereas with SamCart you need to pay the recurring fee.

Also, ThriveCart offers more integrations than SamCart and feels more versatile.

For people on a budget, ThriveCart is the best value for money. Because it comes with A/B split testing and affiliate marketing features in their lifetime plan.

It also comes with upsell, downsells, and order bumps similar to SamCart without the premium price

SamCart vs PayKickstart

PayKickstart is really a good affordable alternative to SamCart.

Although it’s a good alternative, it doesn’t come with the A/B split testing feature (as of writing this review).

But PayKickstart comes with really advanced features like split pay, JV contracts, invoice automation, affiliate contest features, and also mobile apps for both Android and iOS.

Except for the split testing functionality, PayKickstart is really a good product comparable to SamCart.

I think SamCart is quite a good value for money than PayKickstart as the plans start from $99 per month in case of PayKickstart

SamCart vs ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels comes with powerful customization options than SamCart. It also has a built-in autoresponder which is lacking in SamCart.

This is due to the fact that ClickFunnels’ main focus is on funnel building. If you want to create advanced funnels to promote your products, ClickFunnels is the way to go.

Compared to SamCart, ClickFunnels is quite affordable because of the features it offers. You can also create membership sites with ClickFunnels. But you need to integrate with external membership site platforms like MemberMouse or MemberPress in case of SamCart.

FAQs on SamCart

Conclusion

To be honest, SamCart costs high and is not for all. If you sell more products, SamCart’s unlimited products and pages feature would be really helpful.

But its lower plan lacks most of the marketing features. If you are ready to spend more, you can go with SamCart.

But if you are on a budget, there are many good SamCart alternatives available like ClickFunnels, ThriveCart, Podia (review), Kartra, and much more.

If you have a long term goal of selling your products, ThriveCart’s lifetime deal is the best deal to grab.