SamCart Review 2024: Pros, Cons, Pricing, Competitors & More!

SamCart Product Summary

SamCart is a web shopping cart for digital marketing professionals. Whether you’re looking to sell physical products or digital products, this software has all the tools & whistles to create checkout pages, online courses with their Samcart Courses App, and much more.

SamCart aims to be the ultimate checkout system for online marketers who sell digital products and services.

In this 2024 SamCart review, I’ll cover the pros, cons, alternatives, and SamCart’s many features, such as:

• Multiple Payment Options
• Templates For Your Physical or Digital Product
• Split Testing Capabilities
• Answering “how much does SamCart cost?”
• Overview of the SamCart Plans
• How it Compares to Its Main Competition
• Types of support the SaaS product offers.

SamCart has a LOT of benefits, but it’s not a fit for everyone. Let’s get started.

What Is SamCart?

In 2013, Brian Moran and Scott Moran founded SamCart, a web-based checkout platform that has stood the test of time (in online years). Designed to be one of the best online shopping carts and continuously improving, SamCart has an army of loyal users.

However, in 2024, SamCart is more than just a web-based checkout platform for selling services or for creators selling digital products. The SamCart platform has now entered the online course platform market as well by offering unlimited online courses via its Courses app. The app has impressive feats, like Wistia hosting, and works seamlessly with a modern checkout cart. More on this in our upcoming SamCart review.

Whether your goal is to sell digital products or physical products, this SaaS product lets users create a beautiful checkout page, sales pages, or a one-page checkout funnel in as little as an hour or less.

Watch our video below for a quick tutorial on SamCart’s basic and advanced features.

SamCart Features

SamCart has all the standard features you’d want in a shopping cart. In this section, I’ve fired up SamCart, and we’ll be covering the standard features found in the Launch and Grow plans (plans explained in the upcoming pricing section).

Along the way, I’ll share my experiences using SamCart, what I liked and disliked, and how some of the features compared to its main competitor, ThriveCart.

We’ll discuss Advanced SamCart features in the next section.

Editor’s Note: You can now create unlimited courses with SamCart on all plans. Check out our in-depth SamCart Courses review.

Payment Gateways

One of the first things this cart has you do when getting started is to set up your payment gateway(s) with Stripe (for credit card purchases) or PayPal.

Stripe and PayPal, granted, are two of the most popular payment processors used online.

Update – SamCart now supports:

• Google Pay and Apple Pay for easy desktop and mobile payments
• Braintree
• Authorize.net

Let’s shift gears to the types of payment options you can set up.

With SamCart, you can setup offers with the following payment methods and options:

• One-Time single price offers
• Payment Plans (aka Split-Pay)
• Subscriptions
• Payment Processing with No Processing Fee
• Payment structure: controllable billing frequency for payments plans and subscriptions (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and custom)
• Free Trials
• Choice of 8 currencies
• Quantity Limitations & Shipping Options
•  Free SSL Certificate
• Test payments: make sure to always use SamCart’s test payments feature (aka sandbox mode) on checkout pages before going live and launching a new product

SamCart differentiates itself from ThriveCart, and its competitors’ pricing with its detailed led payment structure product flexibility. They have granular billing frequency settings for payments as well.

Payment Gateway Summary:
SamCart now accepts Google & Apple Pay along with PayPal and Stripe! Their billing frequency options for payment plans, product delivery, and subscriptions are superb.

High Converting Checkout Templates

Your checkout process goal should be to reduce the bounce rate and improve its conversion rates.

SamCart offers multiple checkout templates tested for sales conversions in their template library. This includes their infamous one page funnel product page template (a marketing strategy made popular by Brian Moran). As well as their embeddable and popup checkout pages.

With this many one page funnel designs and checkout page template design options, it’s easy for SamCart customers to get started by filling in their product info.

Embed your checkout cart to your site!

Have a popup checkout form right on your sales page!

As for customizing the templates, you can customize as many elements of SamCart checkout pages as possible with a few limitations. These are the SamCart checkout design customizations you can make:

• Preset Colors
• Define Your Colors
• Logo Upload
• Fields (Billing Address, Shipping Address, Email address, Zip Code, Quantity)
• Custom Fields
• Button Text
• Guarantee Title & Text
• Bullet Points Title, Bullet Points & Image
• Testimonials Title
• Custom Content
• Terms & Conditions Checkbox
• Terms & Conditions URL

SamCart had a rather old-school way of customizing checkout carts where you didn’t get to visually see the changes you made to the checkout designs.

That was until their page builder was introduced.

NEW: SamCart Now Has a Drag & Drop Editor!

 SamCart now has a beautiful drag & drop editor (most SamCart reviews don’t mention this) you can use to customize all your checkout pages and templates.

Thus far, this is a game-changer, as not many carts offer this level of checkout page design for checkout pages. You’ll be able to fully customize your landing pages across your Samcart sales funnel.

Split Testing

An excellent online shopping cart needs to have the ability to do A/B testing. Once you know which cart variation works best through testing, you can start to increase conversions over time.

The setup process to create SamCart split tests is straightforward in the advanced settings tab. You’ll be asked for the new variation name. Once set, you can click on which variation you want to edit settings.

You’ll notice which variation you’re editing when the screen quickly refreshes and brings you to the Product Details tab (you’ll see a difference in your test variation URL).

Checkout Page Templates Summary:
Excellent variety of checkout page templates. When it comes to customizing template design, SamCart now offers a full drag-n-drop builder for their templates! Check out some real SamCart examples. You can also run A/B testing on them (their A/B split tests could be more user-friendly).

Order Bumps, Upsells & Coupons

SamCart’s value proposition is that their cart software allows you to easily maximize profits and increase customer lifetime value.

This section is about how their features help people make the most out of every sale using SamCart (without being a web developer).

Let’s start with bump offers (usable for either digital or physical products). In my experience, the conversion rate for these quick offers is high!

The setup process for adding a bump offering to your checkout page is in the Upsells tab. Be aware to add an offer; you need to have a pre-existing product in your account.

When a bump offer is added, it inherits the price of the added product. I see this as a small con because there’s an extra step if you need to adjust the price of the product you want to use as a bump offer.

Either way, SamCart makes their bumps look unique!

Let’s cover one-click upsells. Upsells can undoubtedly increase the overall value of your sale.

The setup process for SamCart upsells is handled in a different section of the dashboard (sigh) but behaves similarly to bump offerings. You’ll be setting up one-click upsells in the Upsells dashboard.

Think of the Upsell dashboard as a section of Upsell products. Here you’ll be able to customize your upsell pages to your liking and assign them to the main product.

Customization includes upsell copy, video insertion, and what you’d expect a standard upsell page to have.

Similar to bump offers, upsells inherit the pricing of the original product.

This could be slightly frustrating if you’re running a promotion throughout your funnel.

Because you’d have to duplicate the original upsell page(s) and configure a different funnel (#firstworldproblems).

Last but not least are SamCart coupons and discounts! Coupons are created within the same Product dashboard (yay). All you have to do is switch the Allow Coupons toggle on and click the +Add Coupon button.

This will bring up a plethora of coupon options.

Once you’ve decided on your coupon code, you can also configure the following settings:

• Coupon Duration (Applied Once or Recurring)
• Coupon Description
• Coupon Type (Percentage or Flat Rate)
• Coupon Discount Amount

Once those settings are configured, it’ll ask you to apply them to a product. Setting up discount codes with SamCart is easy, and you can set up multiple codes!

Order Bumps, Upsells, & Coupons Features Summary:
SamCart does an excellent job of allowing customers to create beautiful checkout pages plus tools that enhance the sales process, such as bumps, upsells, and coupons (commonly used in sales funnels). However, setting up individual products for bump offers and an upsell funnel brought down my user experience just a tad.

Autoresponder Integrations

One of the first things you’ll want to integrate any online shopping cart with is your email marketing autoresponder. For every sale, SamCart will automatically add the customer to your email list!

SamCart integrations for email providers are:

• ConvertKit
• AWeber
• Drip
• GetResponse
• Constant Contact
• MailChimp
• iContact
• Maropost

Integrating is as easy as copy-pasting your API key. If you don’t use one of the email marketing tools above, you might have to use Zapier to integrate SamCart for your third-party tool of choice.

Membership Integrations

SamCart has stepped its game up with membership site integrations. Previously, they only supported four membership sites. They’ve recently added three more. From the looks of it, membership platform integrations are tough for online shopping carts.

SamCart integrates with the following:

• Kajabi
• WishList Member
• Post Affiliate Pro
• MemberPress
• Thinkific
• Member Mouse
• Digital Access Pass

If you’re using a platform like Teachable (or another platform for membership sites), you can use a Zapier integration.

Marketing Automation Integrations

For those of you using marketing automation software, tracking tools, and other sales processing, these are native integrations:

• HubSpot
• Intercom
• Infusionsoft
• ActiveCampaign
• OntraPort

Webinar Integrations

SamCart doesn’t offer webinar platform integrations, which is unfortunate as many digital product owners use webinars to sell their products online these days. However, Zapier can integrate it with GoToWebinar and WebinarJam.

Integrations Summary: 
SamCart integrates with most major players in the email marketing autoresponder and membership markets. If your marketing tools aren’t on the native integrations lists, you can always use Zapier to connect your tool(s). For monthly pricing, I was expecting more native integrations.

Customer Support

With software, things are not always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes you’ll have a technical issue that you need help with. Having an excellent support team in your corner is crucial.

SamCart support offers the following types of support:

• Help Center Documentation
• Chat Support
• Email Support
• Facebook Group

Their support articles are thorough (as they should be) and include easy-to-understand how-to videos and/or helpful GIF images.

Here’s an example of a thorough Conversion Pixel Tracking support article.

As thorough as their articles are, sometimes you need a bit more immediate help.

For that, there’s their chat or email option.

Typically they reply within a few hours, if not within minutes, for live chat.

Expect anywhere from a few hours up to 24 hours. Their support hours are weekdays, 9 am – 5 pm ET.

And the last support option they offer is their Facebook group, which has over 14,000+ members as of 2024.

SamCart, like most online cart companies, does not offer a direct support phone number line.

Customer Support Summary:
Support is limited to email support, live chat option, the Facebook group, and helpful articles (many of which have great tutorial videos). The most expensive plan gets priority support.

SamCart Advanced Features

In this section, we’ll cover SamCart’s advanced features: Dunning (nicknamed “The Subscription Saver”) and The Affiliate Center.

Dunning

Dunning is built into SamCart. As the nickname implies, dunning is mainly for users who have subscription products and want to maintain and/or increase customer value.

Subscription-based businesses worry about customer churn. Customers can pay for an online subscription for a few months, decide to cancel, or for some reason, their credit cards fail.

Dunning is concerned with saving failed payment attempts. SamCart makes a complex process easy to set up for its premium users.

Here are a few reasons why customer’s credit cards could fail:

• Card expiration
• Card has been replaced
• Card has been shutdown
• Banks have blocked a transaction

Dunning software works by using different tactics, such as sending email reminders to customers that their card is about to expire.

It’s a sophisticated process that requires automation to work with the customer to update credit card details after payment attempts start to fail in their subscription payments.

A dunning tool can cost you $100+ every month. SamCart has dunning built-in.

Dunning Summary:
If you’re looking to set up dunning, SamCart has a detailed support article that includes a video tutorial to help you get started. Their Premium plan also gets dedicated support, so setting up dunning won’t be a problem.

The SamCart Affiliate Center

This center used to put SamCart miles ahead of other affiliate platforms. However, its main competitor (ThriveCart) is catching on these days.

In the affiliate management dashboard, you’ll be able to do the basics, like setting up affiliate commissions, configuring payout periods, affiliate sign ups, affiliate approvals, and cookie expiration.

Here’s where SamCart’s affiliate center shines through. It was one of the first affiliate systems to let you create affiliate links that send visitors to any web page of your choice and credit affiliates if a potential customer decides to make a purchase.

This works well for big or small business owners who publish content. You can set up your affiliate promotion links to send people to a sales page (this is standard), webinar registration page, squeeze page, or even a YouTube URL, and your affiliates will still get credited if a sale is made!

The downside to their affiliate dashboard is there is no affiliate tracking IDs for affiliates (it’s not a must-have, but a nice-to-have).

When compared to ThriveCart’s affiliate program feature, SamCart loses. ThriveCart now has the ability to credit affiliates with commissions based on any URLs as well, and they let affiliates add custom affiliate tracking IDs to their links so they know exactly where their sales are coming from. I talk more about this in my ThriveCart review article.

The Affiliate Center Summary:
If you have content on the web that funnels people to your sales page and you’re planning on having affiliates promote your product, consider the SamCart affiliate center. It’ll generate an affiliate signup page you can share with affiliates. Its unique affiliate system lets you leverage content URLs for your affiliates. For their Premium pricing, I was expecting affiliates’ ability to add tracking IDs to their links.

SamCart Pros and Cons

Pros

• User-friendly platform to sell digital or physical products online.
• An amazing checkout experience.
• Sales funnel capabilities: checkout popups, order bumps, & one-click upsells to increase order value.
• Advanced stats reporting like Lifetime Value.
• Coupon codes are easy to create (% or $ off).
• Payment Models: one-time, subscriptions (product payment frequency control), payment plans, trials.
• Landing page A/B split testing.
• The knowledge base is good, and there are training resources.
• Checkout page cart abandonment capabilities.
• Built-in Dunning System will attempt to update your customer’s payment information upon product/service renewals.
• Drag and Drop Editor for checkout pages (move elements such as a sales video anywhere you want).
• Money-back guarantee.
• NEW:

Cons

• Only supports Stripe and PayPal.
• Best features start off on the Grow plan.
• No digital sales tax calculation built-in.
• Affiliate system doesn’t have tracking IDs affiliates can use.

So, how much does SamCart cost?

SamCart Pricing

SamCart offers four monthly pricing plans.

• $19/month (no longer offered)
• $79/month for the Launch Plan
• $159/month for the Grow Plan
• $319/month for the Scale Plan

The SamCart Launch Plan is suited for online entrepreneurs launching their first digital product or physical product. It’s not suited for subscription business owners or those who want the one-click upsell or payment plan features. These features are unlocked in the Grow and Scale plans.

The SamCart Grow Plan includes what the Launch Plan lacks. It includes features like customer management, subscription charge reminders, advanced subscription cancellations, upsell features, and more.

The SamCart Scale Plan includes Advanced SamCart’s features. It includes all the features available in the Launch and Grow plan along with their built-in dunning tool, Affiliate Center, cart abandonment, built-in A B testing, CRM integrations, webhooks, and priority email & chat support.

Note: SamCart has updated its pricing page and changed its plans’ names (originally known as the Basic Plan, Pro Plan, & Premium Plan).

Each SamCart pricing plan has a free trial option and a money-back guarantee.

Is SamCart the Right Choice for You?

Let’s figure out if SamCart is the right shopping cart solution for you before you start a 7-day free trial.

Recommended IF:

You want a drag & drop shopping cart platform

In late 2019, SamCart upgraded its platform to be able to configure page templates with its brand-new drag & drop editor. If you’re looking for a WYSIWYG, you can’t go wrong here!

You have a subscription-based business

The Scale Plan is worth it if you have a subscription product because of their dunning system. Take advantage of their 7-day free trial if you need this.

You want to provide your affiliates with multiple types of tracking links to promote your product(s)

SamCart has a great affiliate feature for product owners who have existing content that funnels leads to their products (all tracked)

Not Recommended IF:

You want to add another monthly subscription charge

SamCart’s pricing options are good, but when compared to ThriveCart, which does most of what SamCart’s Grow and Scale plan can do, I’d recommend paying $495 one-time (review link) for ThriveCart if you want to avoid the monthly fee.

You want to your affiliates to know where their sales are coming from

Like I previously said, if you want affiliates to help promote your product(s), SamCart works, but you won’t be able to provide them tracking capabilities going with SamCart’s affiliate platform.

Review Conclusion

Although a SamCart account is a monthly price, no one can deny that it’s a powerful platform for any internet marketer.

Aside from its advanced features, its easy-to-use interface will let you build beautiful checkout pages and sell courses with the new SamCart Courses app (details here).

So, is SamCart worth it?

Bottom line: SamCart is more than just a shopping cart software. The best way to decide on SamCart for your business is to get on a trial period. Free trials last a while for our readers (up to 30-90-day Samcart trials are available).

Thanks for reading my SamCart review out of all the SamCart reviews out there!

Frequently Asked Questions:

• Does SamCart Come with an App for Its Users?
• Can You Cancel SamCart If You Don’t Like it?
• Can You Connect SamCart to Your WordPress Website?

SamCart Alternatives

For more shopping cart alternatives, read our recent 7 Best SamCart Alternatives for 2024 article. Samcart’s closest competitor these days is ThriveCart; however, they’re by no means equal.

If you’re interested in a SamCart vs ThriveCart comparison check this out.

Are there other shopping carts you’re wondering about? We cover checkout platforms often! We wrote our Clickfunnels review after getting a few requests for a SamCart vs Clickfunnels post. Enjoy!