Shopify and SamCart are great shopping cart software to start your online selling business. Although relatively newer than Shopify, SamCart powers over 40,000 businesses.
On the other hand, Shopify is older than SamCart but has also earned its place as an excellent shopping cart platform as it powers millions of businesses worldwide.
Looking for the platform that best suits the needs of your business?
Check out this SamCart vs Shopify comparison to see which platform suits your business needs best.
Table of Contents
- SamCart vs Shopify – A General Review
- SamCart and Its Features
- Shopify and Its Features
- Differences in Design and Customization
- SamCart vs Shopify – Difference in the Product Listing
- SamCart vs Shopify – Affiliate Program Comparison
- SamCart vs Shopify Pricing
- The Difference in Reporting
- SamCart vs Shopify – Difference in Marketing Capabilities
- SamCart vs Shopify – Bottom Line
SamCart vs Shopify – A General Review
Check out these brief reviews of both platforms and how they compare.
SamCart and Its Features
Unlike Shopify, which has been around since 2006, SamCart is much newer as it was only created in 2014 to serve the e-commerce needs of online businesses.
SamCart has boosted sales and increased conversion rates for over 40,000 businesses because of its distinct features and single-page approach to online selling.
SamCart’s strategy for online selling is to reduce the chances of cart abandonment by showing the prospective client only the necessary information he needs to make an informed buying decision.
It also reduces distractions that could hinder the purchase and makes payment easy and fast with its simple checkout pages that come with numerous payment options.
SamCart is especially good for online vendors of digital products. But businesses that sell physical products can also make bank by taking advantage of the impressive eCommerce features SamCart offers.
Below are some of these features.
Drag and Drop Editor
SamCart aims to make digital marketing easy for a digital marketer, and it does this with its Drag-and-Drop feature.
This feature helps you build and customize your landing and checkout pages by simply dragging and dropping the designs in the provided templates or creating yours.
It saves you the cost of hiring a web designer. You can build your site and your checkout pages without prior coding experience.
Free Pre-designed Templates for your online store
SamCart offers a free template library for any plan you choose. These SamCart templates are professionally designed to give you a headstart with your online store.
SamCart has already prepared the templates and the templates code; you only have to add your products and start selling. You can check out the templates to find a template with a checkout page that aligns with the products you are offering.
The templates allow you to offer unlimited products to the public for sale.
Multiple Payment Options To Make Online Selling Easier
As a dedicated shopping cart software, one of SamCart’s key features is its provision of multiple payment gateways. You can add multiple payment systems to your checkout page to cater to the needs of different classes of customers.
Easy payment processing affects how many sales you can close and how many cart abandonment occurrences you can avoid. SamCart allows you to integrate multiple payment providers in addition to the credit card payment processors.
These include digital wallets such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, and a few others to cater to online vendors who do not wish to use their credit cards for payments. These one-touch payment processors make the checkout flow pretty easy.
SamCart Courses App Launch
SamCart Courses is perhaps one of the most significant benefits for marketers selling digital products online. You can set up your online course business in a matter of minutes.
You can create and sell unlimited digital products to your students online in 2 minutes!
You only need t pick a sales page template, add your videos and images, texts and audio, and any lecture material such as worksheets or video lessons (they provide Wistia video hosting).
Apart from the course cross-sells and other benefits of this SamCart product, the Auto-Enroll technology feature holds enormous benefits for course sellers.
It removes the stress and problem of complicated login processes, lost passwords, and responding to angry emails and calls because it drops your students in their course immediately after they conclude the purchase.
Every online course seller or beginner course creator ought to look into SamCart’s Courses app.
Shopify and Its Features
Shopify, on the other hand, was created in 2006. As a much older eCommerce platform, it is one of the largest and has impressive features.
Shopify, as an e-commerce platform, is the appropriate eCommerce platform for online vendors with numerous physical and digital products requiring an eCommerce storefront to advertise and sell online.
The benefit of the online store is that customers can scroll through the entire online store, add all the items they need to their shopping cart, and checkout at once.
Perhaps, one of the cool things about Shopify is that it has an app you can use to manage your business on the go. Shopify offers a mobile app for easy and speedy management of online stores. There is a Shopify app for android and IOS devices.
Check out some of Shopify’s features below.
Your Online Store Can Sell Everywhere
One of the most impressive things about Shopify is that it allows you to employ unlimited channels to sell online. Shopify allows you to integrate easily with other platforms to increase sales and conversion rates.
You can use social media sites, other websites, and even general online marketplaces. With Shopify, online stores can practically sell everywhere.
Impressive Marketing Features
You do not have to guess or sweat hard when marketing with Shopify. Shopify makes your work easy.
Shopify gives you access to incredible marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) tools to make online selling easier and more efficient for you.
It offers multiple marketing tools, such as social media, email marketing, and product reviews. With Shopify’s in-built eCommerce features, you can create excellent and functional landing pages for your google ads and Pay Per Click ads.
Also, with Shopify’s built-in tools, you can create automatic discount codes as coupons as part of your marketing strategy.
Easy Management of Your Online Store With the Shopify App Store
Shopify allows you to manage your Shopify store on the go. Whether you use an android or an IOS device, Shopify makes it easy to manage every aspect of your business from an app on your device.
With your Shopify app, you can sell more while working less as you easily track orders, fulfillment rates, payments, and even more.
If you do not wish to use the app, Shopify also offers incredible flexibility with its convenient dashboard from where you can keep track of all the aspects of your online business.
SamCart vs Shopify – Short Comparison of Overview
Perhaps, the first thing to understand about both eCommerce platforms is that they have different features tailored to meet some specific focus.
For instance, Shopify’s eCommerce store features do not include upsells, order bumps, and split testing. But SamCart offers these and even more eCommerce features to increase the shopping cart value of a customer.
This automatically means that although Shopify offers some cool features, users have to find some other means of increasing shoppers’ cart value and do split testing to access their site’s performance.
Another point of difference is customizing your own checkout page. SamCart focuses on closing sales easily and faster with simple single-page checkout pages. You can choose from the template library or design one that matches the needs of your physical or digital products.
This is not the same with Shopify. Customizing your checkout page on Shopify is not as straightforward as with SamCart.
Differences in Design and Customization
How much customization an eCommerce platform allows and the quality of its designs and template is crucial to the success of an online business.
Usually, you would have to employ an expert in web development to design your checkout and landing pages. But these eCommerce platforms make this easy for business owners without any technical web development skills.
Check out how the difference in design and customization below.
SamCart’s Drag and Drop Feature With Its Template Library
SamCart’s checkout templates are built with conversion in mind. There are about 18 conversion-focused single checkout templates from which to choose.
In addition, you have numerous double-column layout pages from which you can also choose, depending on the needs of the digital or physical products you want to sell online.
These templates are professionally designed to convert more and are responsive to mobile devices. The SamCart one-page template allows you to create a single-page website to sell your digital or physical products.
Apart from the template library, you can design your own checkout pages or any of the templates to suit the needs of your products, especially if you want a unique design to make your brand stand out.
You can also use the drag-and-drop editor to modify the templates, especially if you want to reduce or increase the number of payment processors for your business.
Shopify With Its Online Store Themes
Shopify equally offers templates. Shopify templates are beautiful and professionally designed for a higher conversion rate. They are numerous. But the downside of Shopify is that there is no single pre-designed checkout template library from which to choose.
Instead of offering a checkout template library, Shopify offers online store themes. but not all these themes are free. Some are premium e-commerce themes, costing around $150 – $350.
SamCart vs Shopify – Comparing the Designs and Customization
The main difference between SamCart and Shopify is that while SamCart offers free templates for landing and checkout pages, Shopify does not offer templates for checkout pages.
Also, SamCart’s templates are free, and you can create as many templates as you need with the SamCart Drag-and-Drop Editor feature. You can do this with almost no technical knowledge of how to design a web page.
But this is not the same with Shopify. To modify templates on Shopify, you need at least some basic understanding of CSS and HTML.
Another point of difference is the knowledge base that SamcCart provides for its users. There is a lot of information to help beginners get acquainted with creating new templates to advertise their products on online marketplaces.
Shopify pales in comparison to SamCart in this regard.
SamCart vs Shopify – Difference in the Product Listing
SamCart and Shopify list products for sale online, but both platforms have different approaches to listing products.
See how they compare below:
SamCart Product Listing
SamCart is pretty straightforward with its product listing. SamCart’s product listing makes it easy for a beginner to list products like a professional in the shortest time possible.
A user only has to access his dashboard, click on the “New Product” tab, and fill in the product name, payment price, and other necessary information. After that, you want to choose the type of payment, payment gateway, payment processing options, and whether the payment will be one-off or recurring.
Pick the product type, add the images you want to add, and any coupons you’d like to add and publish. It’s so intuitive that a beginner can do all these without a marketing experience.
Shopify Product Listing
The process is much more complex with Shopify. You must first click the “Add Product” tab on your Shopify admin. Add the product name and other relevant details such as the price, any related such as transaction fees to be charged, variants, etc.
If you are cross-selling, Shopify allows you to duplicate images, barcodes, and discount codes for inventory management, especially if you sell similar products.
After filling in all the details and setting everything in order, pick the Shopify payment options you want to receive payments with on your checkout page. You can find productive Shopify templates for this.
If you are a beginner and want to get started quickly, Samcart’s easy-to-use product listing interface makes SamCart a better choice.
SamCart vs Shopify – Affiliate Program Comparison
Strategic affiliate programs are one of the excellent e-commerce features that can help you increase the volume of your sales at a faster pace. But to make the best use of this feature, you must choose an e-commerce platform with all the right affiliate management tools to ensure your business’s success.
SamCart Affiliate Program
SamCart does not only provide an affiliate center to help users increase the volume of their sales but also an inbuilt affiliate center from where the user can manage his team of affiliates.
SamCart users do not have to integrate any third-party websites to manage the affiliate part of their businesses. SamCart takes care of this.
It provides tools for users to create and set commission rates, but you can also place restrictions on who can be your affiliate with private affiliate links.
From the affiliate center, you can communicate with your team and supply them with all the marketing resources they need.
This is great news for SamCart users because they do not have to spend an extra $50-%2000 on any third-party websites for affiliate programs.
Shopify Affiliate Program
Shopify does not offer any e-commerce functionalities relating to affiliate programs. There are no VIP affiliate programs on Shopify to help you monitor your affiliate team, set commission rates, and supply marketing resources to them.
What Shopify users do is check the Shopify app store for one of the numerous apps they can integrate into their Shopify to run their affiliate programs.
A few of the most significant affiliate program apps are listed below:
- GoAffPro
- LeadDyno
- Shoutout
- Affersion
- Secomapp
Shopify pales in comparison to SamCart in this regard. This is one of the many e-commerce features that SamCart uses to save time and money for their users, especially advanced online businesses.
SamCart vs Shopify Pricing
A SamCart vs Shopify comparison in terms of pricing can help you decide which e-commerce platform you should use for your business.
SamCart offers three pricing plans: the Launch, Grow and Scale plans. SamCart offers the Launch plan at $59 for a monthly subscription and $39 per month if you opt for the annual plan. The Grow plan goes for $119 if you choose the monthly plan, but you will pay only $79 per month if you opt for the annual plan.
The last SamCart plan is offered at $299 for a monthly subscription, but you can save some money if you opt for the annual plan, which is billed at a monthly $159 per annum.
On the other hand, Shopify also has 3 plans; the Basic, Shopify, and Advanced plans are also offered annually at a lower per-month rate and monthly at a fixed flat rate.
The Basic Shopify plan costs $29 monthly, but you will be charged $14.44 monthly if you opt for the yearly plan, which is $173.28.
The mid plan, which is the Shopify plan, costs $79 monthly, but you will be charged $39.44 only per month if you choose the yearly plan, thereby paying only $473.28.
The last plan, Advanced, costs $299 per month. If you opt for the yearly plan, you will only be paying $147.78 per month, which will be $1773.36 annually.
Pricing and Payment Plans Comparison
SamCart is more expensive than Shopify. Even with the discounts, you get only 33% off SamCart’s first two plans and 47% off its Scale plan if you choose to be billed annually.
But with Shopify, you get a flat 50% off any plan you choose if you opt for the annual billing.
However, the difference in pricing, of course, is related to the different features offered.
The Difference in Reporting
Reporting is another place where SamCart differs in performance from Shopify.
Reporting essentially entails how your e-commerce store or platform helps bonafide online shops keep track of sales, inventory management for online stores dealing in physical products, conversion rates, traffic, and revenue.
These statistics help you understand the performance of your business.
SamCart’s Reporting
SamCart allows you to monitor and keep track of numerous metrics and statistics. Whether you choose the Launch, Grow or Scale plan, you will have access to reporting features that help you understand the performance of your business.
However, these reporting features and many other advanced e-commerce features are not offered on the Launch plan. To access this reporting feature, you must upgrade to the Grow or Scale plan.
But you can still access the dashboard for sales reports on your SamCart dashboard if you use the Launch plan.
Some important metrics you will have access to include page views, sales data, returns, customer conversion rates, inventory management, and many more.
Suppose you run a bigger business and desire a more stacked report. In that case, SamCart allows you to connect your store to Google Analytics for a deeper insight into the performance of your business.
This will help you make decisions that can improve your business performance.
Shopify’s Reporting
SamCart provides reporting features on all its plans, but Shopify only offers reporting features on its Advanced plan, which costs $299 per month.
SamCart provides advanced reporting, which gives deeper insight into your business performance; Shopify’s analytic tools only help you track emails from where you manage your digital marketing campaigns.
You also obtain useful reports on your dashboard. These include sales rates which help you understand how effective your sales funnels are, email rates, conversion rates, and more.
But you can also connect your Shopify to Google analytics for more insightful reports. Apart from Google Analytics, you can explore the Shopify app store for apps that can help you get more advanced reports about your business, from inventory management to traffic data.
These apps include Better Reports, Glew, Lifetime, Conversific, Trackify X, etc.
However, this extra integration stress to access advanced reporting is unnecessary if you use SamCart. SamCart’s advanced plans come with advanced reporting, making any extra integration unnecessary. These include UTM tracking, marketing reporting, and many more.
So SamCart surpasses Shopify in this regard.
SamCart vs Shopify – Difference in Marketing Capabilities
Check out the comparison below to understand how they compare to each other.
SamCart
One of SamCart’s strongholds on the e-commerce scene is its impressive marketing strategy which it accomplishes with its sales funnel capabilities.
Its single-page sales funnels ideology reduces the chances of abandoned shopping carts since customers find all the necessary information they need on the page.
After buying what they need, they find the checkout page at the bottom, where they complete the purchase with little to no distractions.
These checkout pages are also simplified to be easily accessible on mobile devices, even though SamCart does not have an app.
Also, SamCart has many e-commerce features that make it a great platform for selling digital products on a recurring basis. These features include adding more than one payment gateway to accept payments, monthly membership, and subscription saver features.
The subscription saver feature is an excellent tool for preventing recurring income to your business from disappearing.
Apart from that, SamCart allows you to create payment plans for your products and add multiple payment processors to make payment processing easier for your customers.
SamCart allows you to implement cross-selling and upselling strategies to increase the value of your customer’s shopping carts while adding value to them simultaneously. You can set up a cross-selling bump in your sales funnel.
Samcart helps ease your customer management tasks with its cart abandonment feature, which lets you get in touch with customers who abandoned their shopping cart via texts and calls.
SamCart also provides numerous marketing tools, unlimited products, webinars other resources to help you boost your sales and increase conversion rates.
Shopify (and the Shopify App Store)
Shopify is a user-friendly platform that offers various marketing tools you can use to reach your full marketing potential. These include solid integration capabilities, great shipping discounts, an organized shipping process, and more.
With Shopify’s point-of-sale system, customers can buy your product online and pick it up in-store with digital business processes, browse your store to make a purchase later, and many more.
Shopify offers numerous SEO tools for marketing efforts. You will also have access to Shopify Compass and many other tools from Shopify’s app store to increase your visibility on Instagram and run and manage your Facebook ad campaigns.
Shopify also allows you to promote your products on Google Shopping with Google Shopping App. There are tons of tools on Shopify’s app store to help you with tasks like collecting email addresses, running promotions, adding a countdown timer for a special offer on your page,
SamCart vs Shopify – Bottom Line
Their unique differences help a user to make an informed decision about which platform to use for his business.
SamCart, for instance, is a great platform for beginner sellers of digital products, but you can also sell physical goods on SamCart.
But if you run a large store online with multiple storefronts, Shopify has all the features to make your business successful and your work easier.
Also, if you are new to online marketing and desire a user-friendly platform for your products, SamCart is the way to go. Read more about SamCart’s e-commerce capabilities in our in-depth review of SamCart.
But if you run a large business selling numerous products and need a storefront to show your products at a very cheap rate, Shopify is the shopping cart platform to choose.
You can also get the best of both worlds by connecting your SamCart to your Shopify with Zapier. Many Shopify users use both platforms. Shopify users sometimes use SamCart to test a new product with ads.
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