I feel like SamCart has been omnipresent over the past year.
As an online business owner, I keep a close eye on my competitors, and I’ve noticed that more and more of them are switching to SamCart as their primary shopping cart.
Then I began to see SamCart advertisements, so I joined their email list. In response to several promotional emails I received, I decided to give their service a try.
To what extent did it satisfy your expectations? Read on for my impartial analysis of SamCart.
What Is SamCart?
SamCart is an online checkout platform that offers conversion-optimized checkout templates and other features like one-click upsells, order bumps, subscriptions, and payment plans to help businesses increase their revenue per transaction.
Why Most Checkout Pages Suck
Studies show that roughly 80% of website visitors who click “add to cart” ultimately do not make a purchase. Even if only a fraction of them become paying customers, you will see a sizable increase in your bottom line.
Increase your sales with the aid of SamCart.
SamCart’s main selling point is that their checkout page templates consistently outperform the competition in terms of conversion rates. If you sell products online, you should use SamCart to ensure you’re getting the most out of every sale.
In addition, the checkout pages of most online stores aren’t created to maximize the amount of money you make from each sale. Use order bumps and upsells to increase your earnings from each transaction.
On my site, for instance, you can buy a PDF from me for $97. Including an upsell wouldn’t be possible with a regular checkout form. Because of my upsell, however, about $30 of every $100 I make goes to that.
I’m charging an extra $20 on every single purchase thanks to this one small improvement. Having that capability is like giving myself a bonus of over 20%. That’s twenty dollars more that I can put toward advertising in the hopes of bringing in a new client, speeding up the expansion of my business.
SamCart Features
SamCart’s explosive growth can be attributed to the many benefits it provides to e-commerce businesses. SamCart’s features, whether you’re running an online store or selling information products, will help you earn more money and cover your costs in short order.
One-Click Upsells
My friends advised me to highlight the greatness of SamCart’s one-click upsells when I told them I was writing a review of the service, and I couldn’t agree more.
If you’re selling something online and not including upsells, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. When asked about the percentage of sales attributable to upselling in 2006, Amazon reported that it was 35%. Don’t you think it’s important if it’s generating that much profit for Amazon?
The goal of an upsell is to raise the average purchase price of a customer’s order. A lot of the time, you’re subjected to upsells without even realizing it. The extended warranty is an upsell for those who don’t want to deal with car repairs, but it’s not required. In most restaurants, dessert is offered as a courtesy but is not required.
Using dessert as an example again, $8 for a small cake may not seem like much, but if a restaurant is selling dozens of them every night, the money adds up.
With SamCart’s one-click upsells, customers need only click a single button to buy your offer, streamlining the purchasing process for both of you. They found that businesses using SamCart’s one-click upsells saw an increase in ACV of 68.1%.
Checkout Pages
SamCart’s 18 expertly designed templates are among its best features. These templates have already been tested and shown to increase sales. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think ALL of the templates are fantastic, but the ones I like the most are the ones that are included. The traditional format has always been my favorite.
The most obvious benefit is that you can save countless hours of design and testing time by using templates that have already been used by successful marketers.
Each of the available layouts includes tried-and-true trust boosters like customer reviews, money-back guarantees, and safety guarantees.
If you want to make some changes to the checkout page after you’ve picked it, you can easily alter the colors of the header, footer, buttons, and more. You can tailor your sales page however you like, from the fields it contains to the bullet points it uses to describe the product (I find bullet points particularly useful, which is why they appear on all of my sales pages).
In today’s increasingly mobile society, it’s crucial that each page be optimized for viewing on a variety of different devices. My previous provider of checkout pages wasn’t as responsive as I’d hoped, so I made the switch to SamCart.
Most of my visitors come from mobile devices, and I attribute that to my extensive use of Google AdWords. In the past, I had a shopping cart that led to a higher rate of cart abandonment, effectively wasting my advertising budget. Using SamCart, I was able to increase my mobile conversions.
In addition, they feature a handy “sandbox” mode for testing purposes before releasing the product to the public. My previous shopping cart required me to publish changes before I could test them. It pained me to have to do that. SamCart allows me to simulate card transactions in a non-production environment before committing to them (and messing up your stats).
Cross Selling Bumps
In business, cross-selling refers to the practice of upselling additional products to existing customers. Cross-selling insurance or gas to a customer who just bought a car from you is a natural progression.
Perhaps the term “bundling” describes what we’re talking about here. Selling the main product and any necessary add-ons together can boost your earnings. McDonald’s achieves this goal brilliantly by upselling customers on fries and drinks along with their burgers.
One-Page Checkout
This is a one-of-a-kind function that allows you to include multiple different payment methods on a single checkout page. Even though I use Teachable for my $997 online course, they don’t provide this option. If I want to offer the installment plan, I need to create a separate checkout page. Ideally, I’d be able to do that with SamCart.
Multiple payment methods are taken to a whole new level by the one-page checkout, which keeps customers from leaving the page while they decide how to pay. If you’ve ever tried to make a sale online, you know how crucial it is to keep customers engaged.
A/B Testing
Isn’t it strange how many people discuss split testing everything from their sales pages to their opt-in pages to their email subject lines and beyond? yet they never mention trying out different versions of their shopping cart?
It’s completely absurd, right?
Don’t you think a passable split test could help you salvage at least one sale from visitors who are leaving your checkout page in droves?
Yes, so do I.
Thankfully, live split testing is possible with SamCart. This is SHOCKING in the realm of retail carts. If your website has a 90% abandonment rate and you can snag just one more customer through split testing, your revenue will double. Indeed, you should increase sales by 100%. Like that.
Since nearly every setting is customizable in SamCart, you can try out whichever permutation best suits your needs. You have the option of modifying the existing template, experimenting with a new guarantee (in my experience, the longer the guarantee, the better), eliminating some fields (in my experience, the fewer the fields, the better), and more.
Once you’ve created your variants, SamCart will immediately begin comparing them. Don’t worry about anything except sitting back and enjoying the results. The “AB Test” tab in the product’s preferences will show you how each variant is performing. SamCart makes it easy to disable the losing shopping cart once you’ve determined a winner.
If you want to run a split test, SamCart has you covered for everything except the price of your product. If you’re set on doing so, you’ll need to develop not one but two distinct goods before comparing and contrasting them.
From my past encounters with A/B testing, I have learned that it is best to start with the big picture (such as completely different templates) and work your way down to the finer points. Furthermore, you should never call it a day before you have collected enough data to draw any firm conclusions.
Subscription Saver
As a newcomer to the world of online subscription sales, I was naive enough to believe that all customers would always pay on time. If I was responsible enough to pay my bills and keep my word, then surely everyone else would be, too.
Ah, the naivete of youth. As it turns out, the internet is full of jerks. Avoiding financial obligations by denying charges or canceling credit cards. After this happens, subscription fees are typically no longer collected. You can’t get your money unless you take legal action (like sending a demand letter… if you have the customer’s address). Sad.
SamCart protects your subscriptions from credit card expiration and declined payments. If a customer’s payment fails, SamCart will notify them via email, including a link they can use to change the payment information you have on file without leaving their inbox. That means you can stop wasting time chasing after your clients.
SamCart will terminate a customer’s subscription without asking for payment details if they repeatedly fail to update their billing information. Those customers will be flagged as “delinquent” in SamCart so you can identify them and reach out to them.
Affiliate Center
The ability to recruit a vast network of affiliates to market your products is a major perk of selling online. You need not market your own wares, nor spend money on commercials. Affiliate marketers help spread the word about your business in exchange for a cut of the revenue they help generate.
Thanks to SamCart’s Affiliate Center, you can recruit a team of dedicated individuals to market your wares on your behalf. To make it easy for others to sign up to promote your products, SamCart creates an Affiliate Signup page on your behalf.
You can then share this page’s URL with prospective affiliates, add it to your website, or include it in an email to your mailing list. When I notice that a subscriber has not made a purchase in a while, I send them an invitation to become affiliates. Even if they aren’t making any purchases, I can still make money off of them.
Affiliate applicants will see a “pending approval” message once their application has been submitted. Whenever this occurs, you will be notified via email that they have applied. The application’s status will be displayed alongside buttons to accept or decline the user’s request. If you prefer, you can even configure it to accept affiliates mechanically.
By default, the affiliate commission in SamCart is 50%. However, the amount of this payout is flexible. Affiliates can be paid a percentage of sales or a flat rate commission. I found a lot of success by offering higher commissions to the best affiliates so they would sell even more.
How SamCart Works
Following these simple instructions, you can start selling your products online with SamCart in no time.
- Add a new product (digital or physical)
- Determine the method of payment that best suits your needs (either a one-time payment, payment plan, or subscription)
- You can pick a checkout page template (SamCart’s templates are amazing, and they’ve been shown to convert) that best fits your needs.
- Modify the check out pages so that they look and feel like they belong on your site.
- Promote additional purchases, make coupons, run A/B tests, etc.
SamCart is perfect for you if you need a shopping cart that can be set up rapidly and without much hassle. In less than 30 minutes, you can have it running. It took me about twenty minutes to get everything set up, but that was probably because I watched some tutorial videos on YouTube first.
SamCart Integrations
Integrating SamCart with your existing email marketing, marketing automation, membership management, and financial processing systems is a breeze. It was a breeze for me to set up SamCart to work with the rest of my system, and I have no doubt that the vast majority of people will find the same to be true.
Which SamCart Function Do I Enjoy the Most?
The best part about SamCart is the excellent training and support they offer. Their “Knowledge Base” is stocked with instructional videos for using the software (even though it’s intuitive to begin with), and they offer a wealth of information about improving your online sales.
Everything from product descriptions to how-to videos to webinars is available in their extensive knowledge base. Getting an education is priceless. In my SamCart review, I felt compelled to mention this.
How Much Does SamCart Cost?
SamCart has three different plans:
- Basic ($19 per month)
- Pro ($99 per month)
- Premium ($199 per month)
When you consider everything you get at the Premium level, SamCart is a steal. Although the Pro plan is worth it, the Basic plan is sufficient for many online business owners, in my experience.
If you’re looking to save money, remember that they offer a discount for paying in advance each year. If you want to save money, you should sign up for an annual plan after taking advantage of their free trial (to make sure it’s right for you). If you pay for a year in advance, the Pro plan costs $888 (a $300 savings) and the Premium plan costs $1,788 (a $600 savings).
14-Day Free Trial (and Money-Back Guarantee)
Those who are on the fence about trying SamCart can do so for free for 14 days.
Because of this, you have nothing to lose by giving them a shot, and everything to gain if they outperform your current shopping cart in terms of revenue. It is possible to decline and leave.
Furthermore, they offer a full refund within the first 30 days.
SamCart claims its average seller can earn up to $5 more per transaction than those using other platforms. In this case, you really don’t have much to lose. It is time to begin.