SamCart Review: Does It Live Up to the Hype?
This post may contain affiliate links.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been seeing SamCart everywhere. As an internet entrepreneur, I pay extra close attention to the shopping carts that people are using and I started noticing more people using SamCart. Then I started seeing ads from SamCart, so I signed up for their email list. I got a few emails from them hyping up their service, so I decided to give it a shot. So, did it live it up to the hype? Here’s my honest SamCart review. What Is SamCart?SamCart is a web-based checkout platform that features conversion-optimized checkout templates along with one-click upsell, order bump, subscription, and payment plan capabilities that are designed to maximize profits from every sale.
Why Most Checkout Pages SuckDepending on what study you read, 80% of people that “add to cart” on your website will abandon that cart. If you can get just a small amount of those people to convert, you will add a significant amount of money to your bottom line.
SamCart will help you boost conversions. SamCart’s whole value proposition is that their checkout page templates have been tested to the gills and they’ve been proven to convert better than their competition. If you sell things online, you want to make sure that you’re maximizing your conversions, and SamCart will help you do that. Plus, most checkout pages aren’t designed to maximize the amount of profit that you get from each sell. Things such as order bumps and upsells help you add more profit to every sale. For example, I sell a $97 PDF on my website. If I used a standard checkout form, I wouldn’t be able to add an upsell. However, because I offer an upsell, roughly one out of every three people take my upsell offer for $60. Because of this one simple feature, I’m adding an average of $20 to every single order of that product. That’s like giving myself over a 20% raise simply by having that feature. Which means that I can spend an additional $20 on advertising to acquire a customer and grow my business even faster. Before We Get Started...I know there are a lot of online "reviews" where people just talk about the product and pitch it without ever using it to get an affiliate commission. That's why I've included a photo of my actual receipt from SamCart when I first started using it in January 2018 to prove to you that I ACTUALLY bought it and ACTUALLY use it. I figure proof trumps everything else. :-)
My actual receipt from SamCart, proving I bought it and use it. :-)
SamCart FeaturesThe biggest reason that SamCart has been able to grow so quickly is because they offer so many features that help online retailers make more money. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store or selling information products, these features will help you to make more money and have SamCart pay for itself fairly quickly.
One-Click Upsells When I told my friends that I was writing a SamCart review, they told me that I should stress how awesome their one-click upsells are, and I agree. If you’re selling online and you aren’t offering upsells, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. In fact, back in 2006, Amazon reported that 35% of its revenues were from its upselling efforts. If Amazon is making that much money from it, don’t you think it deserves your consideration? An upsell is a strategy that helps you increase your average order value. You probably encounter upsells all the time and don’t even know it. You don’t HAVE to get the extended warranty for your car, but it’s there as an upsell for people who don’t want to worry about maintenance. You don’t HAVE to have dessert after dinner, but restaurants sure like to offer it. Continuing with the dessert example, those little $8 cakes aren’t a huge amount of money, but if you’re the restaurant selling dozens of them every night, the money adds up. SamCart makes this process seamless by offering upsells where all the customer has to do is click one single button and buy your offer. According to them, SamCart users who use one-click upsells typically increase their average customer value by a whopping 68.1%. Checkout Pages One of the coolest things about SamCart is that they have 18 professionally designed templates that are proven to convert. Honestly, I don’t think ALL of the templates are that great, but I do love most of them. My favorite is the classic template. The obvious big advantage here is that the templates have been used by other proven marketers, so you can avoid the countless hours of designing and testing your own pages. All of the templates have trust elements like testimonials, guarantees, and security reassurances that give your customers the peace of mind they need to boost your conversions. Once you choose your checkout page, you can easily customize it by changing the colors of the header, footer, buttons, etc. You can also choose the fields that you want to include and you can add custom bullet points to describe the product your customer is buying (I’ve found bullet points to be especially helpful, which is why you see them on all of my sales pages). All of the pages are mobile responsive, which is super important in our ever-increasingly mobile world. One of the reasons I switched over to SamCart was because my previous checkout page provider wasn’t as responsive as I wanted it to be. I do a lot of advertising on Google AdWords, where most of my traffic comes from mobile. I found that with my old shopping cart, people were abandoning at a higher rate, which meant I was flushing my ad spend down the toilet. SamCart helped me boost my conversions from mobile. Plus, they have a cool “sandbox” mode, which allows you make sure everything is working before going live with your product. With my old shopping cart, I actually had to publish everything and then test it. I hated doing that. With SamCart, I can test payments without going live and without charging your credit card (and messing up your stats). Cross Selling Bumps Cross-selling is a strategy to sell products that are related to the one the customer already owns. If a customer purchases a car from you, a cross-sell would be car insurance or gasoline. You might be familiar with this as bundling. When you bundle the main product and auxiliary products together, you can increase your profits on each sale. McDonald’s does this extremely well by selling fries and drinks with their burgers. One-Page Checkout This feature is unique because it offers you the ability to add several different payment options onto a single checkout page. For my $997 online course, I use Teachable, and even they don’t offer this feature. I have to have separate checkout pages if a customer wants the payment plan. I WISH I could use SamCart for that. The one-page checkout takes multiple payments to a whole new level because it keeps visitors on the page while they decide how to pay. If you’ve ever sold anything online, you realize how important it is to keep your visitors on the page. A/B Testing Isn’t it weird that people talk about split testing their sales pages, their opt-in pages, their email subject lines, and much more… but they don’t ever talk about testing their checkout page? It seems crazy, right? When you figure that most of your potential customers are abandoning your checkout page, don’t you think that a half-decent split test could help you get one more customer?? I do too. Fortunately, SamCart offers the ability to run live split tests. In the world of shopping carts, this is AMAZING. If you have a 90% abandonment rate and your split-testing snags you just ONE extra customer, you will effectively double your sales. Yes, DOUBLE YOUR SALES. Just like that. SamCart lets you change almost any setting you want, so you can test any variation that tickles your fancy. You can change the template, try out a different guarantee (I’ve found that the longer, the better), remove some fields (I’ve found the less, the better), and more. Once you have your variations created, SamCart automatically tests between your variations. You don’t have to do anything except watch the results roll in. You can head over to the “AB Test” section in the product’s settings to see how the variations are doing. Once you find a winner, SamCart allows you to easily disable the loser. The only thing you can’t split-test with SamCart is your product’s price. If you want to do that, you’ll have to create two different products and run a test between those two products. When it comes to A/B testing, experience tells me that you should test the big stuff first (like completely different templates) and then work your way down to the minute details. Oh, and always wait until you have a statistically significant sample size before you call it a day. Subscription Saver When I first started selling subscription products online, I was naive enough to think that everybody would pay on time, every time. I figured that if I was good enough to pay my bills and honor my obligations, so would everyone else. Boy, was I naive. Turns out that there are some real losers online. People who decline charges or cancel credit cards just to get out of making payments. Usually, once this happens, your subscription income is gone. Barring any legal action (such as sending a demand letter… if you have the customer’s address) you can’t get your money. Sad. But now with SamCart, your subscriptions are being guarded against declined payments and expired credit cards. Whenever a payment fails, SamCart sends your customer an email on your behalf - the email has a link where customers can update the payment they have on file, directly from their inbox. That means you don’t have to waste your valuable time hounding down your customers. If a customer fails to update the payment information after several tries, SamCart automatically cancels the subscription. SamCart marks them as “delinquent” in your account so you know who they are and so you have the opportunity to reach out to these customers. Affiliate Center One of the best things about selling products online is that you can enlist an entire army of affiliates to promote your stuff. You don’t have to spend time promoting your own products, nor do you have to spend a dime on ads. If you can get affiliates to spread the word, you only pay them when they produce a sale for you. SamCart allows you to create your own personal army of affiliates that will sell your products for you with the Affiliate Center. SamCart automatically generates an Affiliate Signup page for you - that’s where others can apply to promote your products. You’ll get a link to this page, so you can send it out to potential affiliates, post it on your website, or send it out to your email list. Whenever my email subscribers go several months without purchasing anything from me, I invite them to become affiliates. Hey, if they aren’t buying anything, it’s still a way for me to profit from them. When a potential affiliate fills out your application, they will be shown a message that their account is “pending approval”. When that happens, you’ll get a notification that they applied via email. It’ll also include buttons to approve or deny the person’s application. You can also set it up to automatically accept affiliates if you want. SamCart’s default affiliate commission is 50%. However, you can customize this payout to whatever you want. You can pay your affiliates a flat rate commission (a set dollar amount per sale) or a percentage. I’ve had a lot of success by raising the affiliate payout for top-performing affiliates to give them an incentive to sell even more. 
How SamCart WorksHere are the exact steps that SamCart walks you through to help you sell your products online:
If you’re someone that wants to set up a shopping cart quickly and easily, SamCart is for you. You can get up and running in under thirty minutes. I set all my stuff up in about twenty minutes, but that’s probably because I watched a few YouTube videos about it beforehand. SamCart IntegrationsI didn’t get a chance to integrate SamCart with a lot of tools, simply because I don’t use that many. I use mainly use OptinMonster, Drip, PayPal, and Stripe.
Interested in learning more about OptinMonster? Check out my review here. If you're interested in learning more about Drip, I wrote a review of that too. SamCart allows you to seamlessly sync with a bunch of tools, including email, marketing automation, membership, and payment processing. It was super easy for me to integrate my entire system with SamCart and I imagine that it would be the same for the majority of people out there. I’ve been reading on different forums how easy it was for people to integrate Kajabi, Infusionsoft, Hubspot, MailChimp, Aweber, and more. However, my toolbox is fairly simple, so I can’t discuss this in depth in my SamCart review. My Favorite SamCart FeatureMy favorite SamCart feature is hands-down the awesome training and customer support that they provide. They have tons of videos in what’s called their “Knowledge Base” that shows you how to use their software (even though it’s already pretty easy) and they provide a lot of education on how to make more money if you’re selling online.
They have a complete library of product info, tutorials, webinars, and more. The education alone is worth the price. I had to include this fact in my SamCart review. How Much Does SamCart Cost?SamCart has three different plans:
Even at the Premium level, SamCart is an absolute steal with all the features they give you. However, I’ve found that the Basic is good enough for many online entrepreneurs, but if you’re doing a lot of business online, you want to get the Pro plan. Also keep in mind that if you’re looking to save some money, they give you a discount if you pay annually. I suggest that you take advantage of their free trial (to make sure that it’s definitely right for you) and then paying annually to save money. If you pay annually, the Pro plan is $888 per year (which saves you $300) and the Premium plan is $1,788 per year (which saves you $600). SamCart Offers a 14-Day Free Trial (and Money-Back Guarantee)If you’re on the fence about trying SamCart, they offer a free 14-day trial.
This means that you can try them out absolutely free, and if they don’t make you more money than your old shopping cart (or you just hate it for some reason) then you can fire them. You can cancel and walk away. Plus, they have a 30-day 100% money-back guarantee anyway, further lowering the risk. According to SamCart, the average SamCart seller makes up to 5X more than the average seller on other platforms. What do you have to lose? Get started now. |