Samcart Review: Is This the Best eCommerce Platform

A lot of people nowadays are inclined towards E-Commerce or selling products online. Having a business online is of great advantage as:

1. You need not worry about having a physical shop. All you need is a digital footprint and you are good to go.
2. The cost of keeping an inventory is also eliminated
3. Marketing and reaching out to people become much easier

But it is quite a pain initially while you are trying to figure out how to set up your store. Specifically, for that purpose, a lot of software is available to make it more convenient for you.

Some of the necessary software that you might need are:

1. Website – you need a digital footprint first, a page where your customer can finally land to view your products
2. Research tools – you need software that would analyze the competition you are going to face, your rivals, and identify various opportunities to use them effectively.
3. Business tool – you need a tool that would oversee your day-to-day operations, handle accounts and finances as well as transportation and logistics
4. Marketing tool – after your internal pages and system are all in place, you must promote your product in a way that it attracts traffic to your site. You can use digital marketing tools like email marketing, google ads, social media marketing, etc.
5. Analytics tool – the final tool that is needed is analytics. It will help you track your business, sales funnels, crashes, and report you any problems for you to inspect and rectify.

Each category is extremely vital for the proper functioning of your site. Having a proper functioning site with payment gateways is much more important. One such software is SamCart which is we are going to discuss.

What Is SamCart?

Those who are into digital marketing or E-commerce business, SamCart would be a great helping tool. It a shopping cart tool that comes with a variety of smart features to run your business online. It does not matter what type of product you are selling; every selling site needs a cart or checkout page.

It comes with a variety of templates for you to customize. various features such as setting up payment plans, A/B testing, add on products, etc, are offered by SamCart to boost your sales.

Being a fairly new tool in the market, SamCart has done remarkable progress and has gathered a wide user base.

The founders created SamCart with the aim of providing a fully functional and integrated checkout option for their customers. It integrates with various payment gateways to make the transition between checking out and payment to order recording easier.

Samcart Basic features:

1. Order bumping – let your customers add another product to your cart. The add on feature shows various tabs with products that a customer might like based on their shopping choice or any particular algorithm set by the user.

Showing off relevant product ensures that a customer stays at your website exploring for more. And the more they explore, there is a high chance they might add more products to their cart.

2. High conversion rates – SamCart claims that it can convert 17.8 times more customers than any other platform
3. Follow-up integration – SamCart integrates with various tools and software such as MailChimp or convertkit to send follow-up notifications and emails. Many users add products to their cart and leave them be. The follow-up feature ensures that a customer is reminded of what he/she has left behind and subsequently, this increases sales rates.
4. Email integration – SamCart integrates with a variety of other tools mentioned above. Email marketing and analytics are some of such tools that SamCart integrates to provide you with added benefits of online business. Mailchimp, convertkit, Aweber are some of such tools.
5. Payment processing – it instantly connects with stripe and accepts all major credit cards for payment processing. It also supports Paypal as its major mode of payment acceptance.
6. Easy setup – you can create your own product check out page that would suit your business in under 3 minutes and you do not need to know special java or coding skills to do that.

Samcart Pros:

1. Drag and drop platform for shopping cart – the new features include drag and drop features that would help you create your customized pages under 3 minutes only by dragging and dropping various options.
2. User-friendly interface and dashboard – navigating through various tabs become easier.
3. Video tutorials and training resources for beginners – those who are a complete beginner to this platform, SamCart has some amazing resources on board that can help you understand how it works. It eliminated the need for professionals in order to set up your website and check out the system.
4. A/B Splitting – although this feature is a premium feature which is available for people with higher membership, it allows user to create prototypes of the page and test it on two different user group. You can analyze which one performs better.
5. Free trial – In case you are unsure about whether SamCart would suit your venture better, it offers a 14 days free trial. During this period, you would get all the benefits of the plan you have selected for free. And if you choose to opt-out of SamCart, simply unsubscribe before the trial ends.
6. Order bumps – features like order bumps helps in increasing your sales by showcasing other relevant products to your customer for them to choose.

Samcart Cons:

1. Payment gateways – The greatest factor to consider when investing in the e-commerce management system is how well it integrates payment system. No e-commerce is a success unless it provides flexibility in the mode of payment to customers. Unfortunately, SamCart only supports payment Gateways as on date namely: PayPal and Stipe.

While most of the transactions on the internet occur over these two media, it was a bit of shocker that it does not support some of the latest platforms like Authorize.net, Braintree, and Skrill to name a few.

Other than that, it does not currently neither support cryptocurrency payment like

• Bitcoin
• Etherium

nor does it support mobile payment like Apple pay. It is a surprise, that ThriveCart which is currently new to this field integrates all these features very neatly.

2. Conversion rate – While there are many strategies and operand moduli for keeping people engaged in the website and pursuing them to click on the product, the actual still does not happen until the customer has gone through many pages to confirm the payment.
3. Interface – Here SamCart offers a lot of pre-set templates (up to eight to be precise). While ThriveCart has only four templates to offer. Yet, the main distinction is that ThriveCart offers a better interface and it has a distinction among its different templates which can be used depending upon the device the customer is using.
4. template customization – When the whole world is moving towards the drag-drop method of customization and assisted editing to help beginners to make professional-level content, SamCart decides to keep things old school way.

For example, if you must edit the checkout payment, you will need to open another tab in the setting to edit the view and come back to the checkout template to see whether you got the desired visual.

5. A/B testing – A/B testing stands for Alpha and Beta version testing. This allows the developer to try different versions and verify which set of parameters will give the best result.

While switching between different versions of testing, the SamCart interface does not give any prompt or feedback if the screen has changed or on which version of testing you are working. It may be a technical glitch that can be corrected in the next version.

6. Need a bit more muscles in boosting sales – SamCart provides a lot of options to customize the price of the product at the product placement section. While it is a standard feature, it lacks in providing custom price rates for the same product. Now, why will you need to give a different sale price for the same product?
7. Lack of sales tax calculation integration – although, SamCart offers a lot of features, the lack of a built-in sales tax calculator is a major setback. With the auto calculation, the prices can be likewise modified, and a unified price can be set. Lack of this feature makes the user calculate sales tax on their own.
8. Coupon code – it does not provide coupon code with affiliate attribute which ThriveCart easily does. It ensures that you do not need to use the link to use the coupon code. Nevertheless, it can be handled with well-managed marketing.
9. Separate affiliate center – Unlike ThriveCart, it handles all the affiliate marketing stuff in a separate affiliate center module which costs an additional $100/month.
10. Expensive – no doubt, SamCart is one of the premium software found on the market, we cannot classify it as a cost-effective tool. Its subscription starts with $49 which lacks a lot of features like A/B splitting – which is only available for scale plan users.

Bottom-line:

In nutshell, SamCart is a professional e-commerce management platform that helps you to create your e-commerce webpage in no time. Starting from hosting product to payment and even handling the marketing side like email marketing. SamCart fairs well.

But in terms of application, thrivecart performs much better than SamCart. To make a final decision whether it is a tool to go with, you will need to consider many attributes and prioritize them in order to come to any conclusion. If your priority is cost-effectiveness, then SamCart I not for you.

Since the biggest drawback of SamCart is the lack of integration of other various payment modes, many users do not prefer SamCart.

What kind of things can I sell using SamCart?

SamCart integrates many features that make it seamlessly goof to sell both physical and digital goods. You can even sell services if that is what you want.

The major drawbacks to consider

while it integrates the add-on costs and other costs for customer ends, unlike ThriveCart, it fails to display a sales tax on the total item sold. It only keeps the tab of all the sales and costs related to the item.

As of now it only provides two payment gateways, if your target customer is not able to pay via either of them then it might be a cause of concern

Samcart Plans and pricing:

With great features, SamCart does not seems to come unbelievably cheap. Being a subscription-based platform, SamCart hosts 3 different plans viz:

1. The launch plan – priced at $49/month, the basic plan which helps you launch your business with a single page website that would showcase your products.
2. The grow plan – this is a higher plan which is priced at $99/month. Other than including all the benefits of the launch plan, the growth plan has additional features such as up to 3 admin users, supporting, customer management, subscription charge reminder, etc.
3. The scale plan – it is the most premium plan of all which one can opt for a monthly subscription charge of $199. It includes other advanced features such as admin users up to 10, cart-abandonment notification, A/B Testing, CRM integration, etc.

It depends on whether you are a beginner, in the growing phase or scaling up your business, you can choose your plan accordingly. If you are just starting out, it would be waste to spend $199 for your shop that is not yet properly established.

Conclusion:

No doubt, SamCart stands up as a premium service provider and software, its lacking in the area of payment integration and sales tax inclusion makes it not so useful for many users. With the price range in the market, it is always better to consider some other software which can give better services than what SamCart offers. Payment is highly vital for a user, if multiple and variety of payment modes are not supported then you are missing out on huge group clients altogether. Nevertheless, if you have a growing business that needs good support, then SamCart can be best, provided that, you can afford the premium plan.