Dave @ Review.casa

By Dave Carr @Review.Casa

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Introduction – What is Samcart?

Samcart is a major player in the eCommerce/Landing Page market and was founded in 2013 by the Moran brothers.

They are one of the pioneers in this space offering all the features you need to run an online business.

If you are looking for a rock-solid platform to sell via funnels and deliver your products then SamCart could be the solution you’re looking for.

SamCart The First (and Only) Direct-To-Consumer eCommerce Platform

Summary – Who is Samcart not for?

Samcart is not for you if you are a designer!

If you are looking for complete design freedom that you might get with a WordPress page builder like Divi the Samcart is not for you.

You will find the landing page builder to be frustrating.

Summary – Who is Samcart for?

Samcart is for anyone who wants to sell products (physical or digital) online without having to set up WordPress or do any coding.

It offers a simple drag and drop landing page builder and an LMS system if you are selling courses online.

Samcart offers a complete package of software and tutorials to get you started as quick as possible, so anyone can easily get set up and running.

The pros and cons of Samcart

The cons

  • Expensive monthly fees
  • A/B testing, cart abandonment and affiliate centre are only available on their top tier.
  • There is no way for you to change the template in the page builder once you choose one(no matter what I tried I couldn’t change the template I had to delete the product and start again).
  • If you don’t have any content created when you build a worksheet the dropdown goes off the bottom of the screen leaving you unable to access the form fields.

The pros

Improvements

  • Customer Hub (Feb 2022)
  • Course Cross-Sells (Oct 2021)
  • SamCart Courses (July 2021)
  • Gifting (July 2021)
  • SamCart API (July 2021)
  • Widget showcase your product (July 2021)
  • Updated version of our Add to Order feature (March 2021)
  • Scheduled Exports for Scale and Enterprise plans (March 2021)
  • Product Redirect Settings (Feb 2021)
  • Added embed header for Upsell pages (Feb 2021)
  • Order Bump Collections (Dec 2020)
  • Ability to edit the Payment Method Icons on your Product Page (Dec 2020)
  • Restrict shipping locations (Nov 2020)
  • Payment Options are now supported for A/B Testing (Nov 2020)
  • Save your favourite designs as templates to reuse on other Products and Upsells (Sept 2020)
  • Hide customer details from your Affiliates (Sept 2020)
  • Two-column layout to the Content Builder for shorter-form sales pages (Sept 2020)
  • New SEO tab to your product to give you more customization when you share your product. (Sept 2020)

Pricing

Samcart has three pricing tiers but all plans come with the following, Unlimited products and pages, Drag & drop page builder, Ready-to-use template library, Unlimited courses, Unlimited memberships, Student assessments and quizzes, 0% processing fees, and no additional fees: sell to whoever you want as much as you want.

The Launch plan costs $49 per month and you get flexible customer billing options, dashboard and sales reports, weekly webinars and a free preview of CreatorU.

The Grow plan costs $99 per month and you get order bump collections, post-purchase upsells, UTM tracking and marketing reports, a built-in SEO engine, multiple customer payment options, custom checkout fields, and on-demand executive reports.

The Scale plan costs $199 per month and you get cart abandonment conversion, subscription saver (dunning), affiliate centre, built-in A/B testing, and automated/scheduled executive insight reports.

* You save 20% by paying annually.

SamCart Pricing Plans

My experience with Samcart

I signed up for Samcart to see what it’s like compared to other shopping cart providers I’ve tried and to write this review.

The onboarding experience you get with Samcart is one of the best I’ve seen so far (credit where credit is due and all that).

But I quickly found the quirks (the page builder not letting you change templates and a sneaky dropdown that goes off the bottom of the page) hiding under the polished exterior (nothing major but still).

Now being an experienced tester of these types of software I understand that no software is perfect.

All in all, it’s a nice bit of software that you can use to run an information business.

I like the recent addition of the courses app but I feel they are just trying to keep up with the Jonses here as more and more people jump into this space.

The lovely onboarding experience

As I said earlier Samcart has the best onboarding experience I’ve seen to date so I thought I’d show you it.

Below are the steps of the onboarding sequence from Samcart.

SamCart Onboarding

The welcome to Samcart screen is shown in the image above.

Once you sign up to Samcart you land on the welcome screen which is the very beginning of the onboarding sequence.

SamCart Onboarding 2

The create your account screen is shown in the image above.

On the create your account screen all you have to do is insert your password and confirm your password and you’re on to the next step.

SamCart Onboarding 3

The verify your email screen is shown on the image above.

On the verify your email screen all you need to do is look in your emails for the verification code that’s been sent to you insert it and you’re onto the next step.

SamCart Onboarding 4

The set up your store screen is shown in the image above.

On the set up your store screen, you will personalise your SamCart store by filling out the fields.

  • Store name
  • Samcart store URL
  • upload store logo
  • select your country
  • select your currency
  • your timezone
  • and your contact email
SamCart Onboarding 5

The Business categorization screen is shown in the image above.

From the business categorization screen, you will tell some QA a little bit about your business such as how much money your business is earning, whether or not you have a product to sell, what type of product you are selling and what is your current monthly sales volume.

SamCart Onboarding 6

The accept payments screen is shown in the image above.

From the accept payment screen, you can create a new payment processor which basically means to connect Stripe and Samcart together, you can use other providers or you can delay this to later on.

SamCart Onboarding 7

The Account successfully created screen is shown on the image above.

That’s it once you connect Stripe or another payment processor, you’ll be notified that your account is successfully created and you can move on to your dashboard. That is
your onboarding sequence is complete.

Lovely, isn’t it?

The courses app

The courses app is a relatively new feature of Samcart being added in July 2021.

It is a fully functioning learning management system and is comparable to most LMS systems on the market today you can use to deliver your courses online.

The courses app comes with every plan in Samcart and allows you to create unlimited courses.

SamCart courses

The courses app can be seen in the image above.

If you haven’t created any courses yet you can click the Create your first course button to start.

SamCart course details

The Course Details tab is shown in the image above.

From the Course Details tab, you will enter the details of your course. Upload a featured image or video and make it a featured course or not.

SamCart course lessons

The units and lessons tab is shown in the image above.

From the units and lessons tab, you can add units and lessons and then edit them.

Editing a lesson

Editing lessons is very easy in Samcart.

You can add text, images, videos, audio, quizzes, worksheets, and downloads all from within the Edit Lessons area.

SamCart courses edit lesson

In the Edit lesson details, as shown in the image above.

From the Edit lesson details, you can add content. Configure your downloads, quizzes, and worksheets.

SamCart courses edit lesson add content

The types of content you can add to your lesson is shown in the image above.

I did have an issue with the video because it asks for a URL, and you can’t paste in any sort of embed code. To get around this, you need to add a text module, enter the HTML edit mode and then paste in your embed code.

Dripping your course

Just like comparable learning management systems you have the ability to “drip” your course through Samcart meaning you can delay the delivery of your material so people can’t view it all in one go.

it’s a feature you would expect to see in any modern LMS today and I’m glad to see that Samcart offers it.

You can drip based on the day of the week or when the last piece of content was made available.

What will your course look like on Samcart

SamCart course design

What your course will look like is shown in the image above.

Samcart provides a nice modern look to your online course, but you can change the colours to match your brand, as shown in the image below.

SamCart course design

Conclusion

Would I recommend Samcart?

Yes and no!

If you want to create simple landing pages (without any coding or the ballache of setting up WordPress) and get them out there into the world quick then Samcart is definitely an option you should consider.

Although Samcart is a great system I feel that unless you are on their top tier subscription then the software is limited (Cart abandonment conversion, dunning, Affiliate centre and Built-in A/B testing are only available on top subscription which is $199 a month).

Again like I said before if you want design freedom then Samcart is not for you as you will find the page builder a bit limiting and quirky, but then again Samcart is not built for you it’s built for business owners who just want to get their stuff out there quickly.

Simple landing pages convert and the guys behind Samcart have been selling online for over a decade so they know what works.

If you are looking for a shopping cart and product delivery platform then Samcart could be the perfect solution for you.

Alternatives

ThriveCart

ThriveCart is a SAAS based shopping cart with comparable features to SamCart.

Full Thrivecart review

Kartra

Kartra is all in one marketing platform that allows eCommerce, Membership sites and so much more it could replace SamCart.

Full Kartra review