SamCart Review 2022, Is This Sales Funnel and Shopping Cart Tool Good?
Brain Rush is supported by readers. If you buy something using a link on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. This won’t cost anything to you.
There are a variety of sales funnels out there that lead to purchase points, but many of them seem geared to large operations or stores with a huge catalogue of items for sale. Not many are geared toward the entrepreneur who is selling individual items from a smaller catalogue. That is where SamCart comes in.
SamCart is a sales funnel and shopping cart tool that gets potential buyers to your product pages and works to drastically reduce shopping cart abandonment for a variety of people who make their own products, such as:
- Coaches
- Artists
- Teachers
- Musicians
SamCart works hard to make all sales final.
Not that SamCart cannot work for large businesses or businesses that have a storefront and storefront style website. These businesses can also benefit from what SamCart has to offer, especially as it relates to shopping cart abandonment. But SamCart represents a paradigm shift from driving customers to a store to driving them to a product.
SamCart Overview
SamCart is a shopping cart tool that integrates with most email marketing programs and other online tools to create a successful sales funnel that is big on bumping up orders and not losing customers to a sales process that is too long and super confusing. SamCart scratches an itch that has been plaguing e-commerce for some time.
The biggest challenge of online sales is to keep potential customers in the shopping cart. Recent statistics show that as of 2020 customers abandon their shopping carts at an average rate of about 70%. That is extremely high. Read on to see how SamCart can help your business with this.
Many business owners can make SamCart work to fit their needs, but SamCart does seem to excel with entrepreneurs who are starting out, or business owners who make and sell their products. With a shopping cart per product approach, SamCart can help:
- Entrepreneurs
- Small business owners
- Large business owners
- Developers of coaching, teaching, or artistic digital or [physical content
What SamCart Addresses
There are some holes in the e-commerce world that Sam Cart strives to cover so that startup businesses and entrepreneurs can get selling online without loosing a lot of customers due to a clumsy sales process, or devoting a lot of time to learning a program that can help them, when they just need a program to help them.
Samcart was started by Brian and Scott Moran in an effort to help small business people grow their business. Unlike other concepts of sales funnels on the internet, SamCart looks calm and sensible. There are no hysterical endorsements about how SamCart made them millions in two months.
Moran does claim that Samcart can help business owners increase their sales by as much as four times, when they make changes to one page on their website: the shopping cart.
SamCart has taken a long look at the challenges that the entrepreneur faces and seeks to address:
- The shopping cart problem
- The tech problem
- The implementation problem
When you unpack these problems, you discover the guts of e-commerce and the places where startups and small businesses succeed or fail. But what are these problems to begin with?
The Shopping Cart Problem
Shopping cart abandonment is a huge problem in online sales. The vast majority of online shoppers will put something in their shopping cart then wander off in the virtual world and leave it there. Thus, the sale that could have made you boat loads of money is lost and seemingly irretrievable.
The question is: why do shoppers abandon their carts? If they went to the trouble of adding it to their carts, then why leave. There are a variety of reasons. Here are a few of the biggest:
- 49% leave because extra costs like tax, shipping, and fees make the item or items too high
- 24% leave because they have to set up an account in order to buy something
- 18% leave because the check out process was too difficult to navigate
- 17% leave because they were not given a straight forward total at the start
Taken one at a time, these problems might seem insignificant, but taken all together as possibilities that could pile one on top of another until a customer has had it and leaves, then they become more understandable. Whether they pile up or not, the statistics tell a clear story. Customers want to buy and go, not deal with any additional nonsense.
The Tech Problem
A lot of entrepreneurs struggle with tech. If they knew about technology and coding and whatever, they would not be entrepreneurs. They would be tech gurus working for companies that could handsomely for their services.
But instead they are trying to sell valuable resources or items to the general public, and like most business owners in their position, they cannot afford to pay tech gurus handsomely for their services. They have to go it alone which means they either struggle to learn a program related to e-commerce or they do not do it.
Everything that claims to help you redesign your site to make money should be easy to use, because if you are an entrepreneur you do not have time for anything else.
The Implementation Problem
That brings us to the time problem. Entrepreneurs have to devote the bulk of their time to managing production and development of products, and as little time as possible on marketing and sales. That is simply the reality.
If you are an entrepreneur, you do not want to reinvent the marketing wheel. You just want to put it on your cart and go.
For this and the issues above, SamCart takes the idea of streamlined implementation and makes it work on behalf of the user, whether it is on the back end or the front end.
- With SamCart the online shopper is more likely to go to the cart and not leave until the item has been paid for, and possibly bumped
- The entrepreneur is not bogged down in long design or setup times due to an easy and efficient process
It is worth your time taking a look at SamCart to see how it can streamline your sales process. Read on to see how they implement solutions to the problems listed above.
How SamCart Solves the Shopping Cart Problem
SamCart takes a three pronged approach to solving the shopping cart:
- Changing the philosophy of your sales focus
- Changing the look of your sales page
- Adding strategies for grabbing shoppers who have abandoned their carts
Essentially SamCart provides a model that is a paradigm shift for how e-commerce has traditionally been done. But it does not stop there.
They give you the tools for interacting in the new paradigm so that you are not trying to build something new with wrenches that are the wrong size and hammers that are too big. Finally you have access to strategies for retaining shoppers that abandon their carts.
SamCart and the New Paradigm for E-Commerce
The traditional approach to e-commerce has been to replicate your store front in the form of the internet. But SamCart puts the internet store front idea as second in priority to the product itself. So instead of driving customers to an internet storefront to search for a product, you drive your customers to a product.
For business owners who are selling digital products this is a no-brainer, but for business owners with a physical storefront selling physical products, this is something you have to wrap your brain around. By integrating with almost every tool and app out there, SamCart uses all the tools at hand (email campaigns, websites, and social media) to drive traffic to the page that sells just the product and only that product.
Once they are at the product page then all their attention is on what you are doing to sell it, including when they go to buy the product. This does not mean that you cannot do things like upsell or cross sell.
But it does mean that, instead of putting the customer into a dizzying website, you are focusing them on the thing that they already know they want. This works for physical or digital products and is based on the simple premise that customers know what they want. So, find the most direct way to give it to them.
The Look and Interaction of the Sales Page
SamCart makes the sales page as streamlined as possible so that the customer goes through all the info that you want them to see about the product:
- Descriptions
- Pictures
- Videos
- Specs
- Testimonials
Some of this will be tailored to the thing you are selling. If you are selling consulting, then you would want to put video up of you driving a point home to a group of interested people. If you are selling a product, then you could include pictures or samples, and so on.
At the bottom of the sales page is the option to buy which brings the shopper down to payment and shipping information (if appropriate). Again, this part of the page is also customizable. You can put whatever you want into the page, including bump sales and cross sales.
With an easy click, your customer can add other products that you can promote and link to. SamCart says that the dollar value of each customer increases by 43% if you add just one up-sale button to click on. That is a pretty staggering claim.
But if customers are leaving shopping carts because they have had enough of the extra things that they have to do, then something must have pushed them to that point. It is entirely possible that the website, with all its options, makes customers irritable. Whereas when they buy one product they know they want, they are willing to add more.
Strategies for Grabbing Shoppers Who Have Abandoned Their Carts
Because SamCart integrates with a host of other apps and services for businesses, you have the opportunity to focus all these things on the problems at hand. This biggest problem is shopper abandonment.
Using the other services that you have integrated in SamCart for collecting your customer’s information, you can do a few things to try and grab shoppers who have left their carts:
- Send a series of emails to let them know that you noticed they did not buy the things they were interested in, and would they like to now or with this free gift or coupon incentive, etc.
- Send them a text with a link to the sales page and your number if they have questions
- Do some good old fashion dialing for dollars and call them, starting up a conversation that might result in answering any questions they may have
How SamCart Solves the Tech Problem
The tech problem is common for entrepreneurs. You do not want to learn new tech to help your business when you are already busy enough solving other business problems and developing products or material.
SamCart has developed a way of designing the sales pages that is easy and intuitive and does not take a lot of time. One potential drawback is that you have to design a page for each product that you sell. But that is lessened by the ease with which you can design these pages.
Designing Pages Through SamCart
Designing pages through SamCart is pretty easy because you are not actually designing anything. It is more like you are modifying an existing page that best suits your product. This is how it works:
- Set up your settings
- Establish what payment methods that you accept
- Design a product plan and checkout page, finalize, and send it out
SamCart says it takes about 10 minutes to go through all these steps to get to the place where you can finalize your first sales page.
But what do these steps involve? Are they complicated? Do you have to be tech savvy or can you just go through, answer the questions and be done? Mostly you can just go through the process. Here is a closer look at some of the things that are involved.
Setting Up Your Settings
When you establish your settings in SamCart you start with some basic information. This is nothing to be squeamish about. You are providing information like:
- What your business name is
- What currency you operate with
- What timezone you operate in
- What email address customers can reach you at
- How you want the payment completion process to look
The only tech related thing in this part of the setup is if you have some HTML code you want to embed in the checkout process, but that is optional.
The payment process section is a bit more involved, if you want it to be. The big thing you have to decide is where to send the customers after they have purchased your product. You can send them:
- Back to the page they started with, or
- To a page that summarizes the purchase and has call-to-action links
The call-to-action links can be important because you can direct them to more products and purchases, etc. One thing you can also opt to do is send them to the place where they download what they bought (if it is digital) or look at their membership if it is a subscription and so on.
Additional Settings in the Purchase Completion Section
The purchase completion section comes with preset settings that you can go with. Or you can decide to change them. This allows a little flexibility and the chance to refine things as you continue making pages.
Lastly you can go to the integration tab to chose your email integration settings, including:
- What email autoresponder software you use
- Customizable emails
- Email footers
Connect to a Method of Payment
In the second step you connect to the method of payment that you want to accept on the pages that you create. You can connect with:
- Stripe
- Paypal
- Both
SamCart does not actually process the payments, but they send the customer to a third party processor.
Those are not the only options for payments that you have when setting up what method of payments you allow. You can also choose to allow credit card payments and/or digital wallet payments.
Create a Checkout Page
Finally, for your third step, you design a checkout page for your product. This incorporates the things that this article discussed earlier, but read on to see it in more of a step by step format.
The first thing that you will be asked to fill in is information about what you are selling. This information includes but is not limited to:
- The name of your service or product (whatever it is you are selling)
- How much it costs
- How the person must pay, whether it is, for example, a one time payment or a subscription (this will depend on what you are selling)
- Whether or not the product is digital or physical
Once you have finished entering this and other basic information about the product, you can then move on to designing the checkout page.
This is where you have access to a library of 18 templates that you can choose from to design your checkout page. Once you choose the template that works for you, you can customize it by changing the color, the header and footer, customize fields and add information that you want the customer to know.
This is also the part of the design where you can edit your upsells and choose what integrations you want to work with. Finally you can test your page before you make it final. That way you can work the bugs out.
Tech Wrap Up
While this is a lot of information, it sounds more complicated than it is. As with anything there is a learning curve, so it is possible that the 10 minute start to finish time is optimistic for some users.
If that is you, do not despair there is customer support from SamCart available to all subscription levels. Ideally they get back to you in 24 hours, but the basic and intermediate levels have a longer guaranteed wait time.
The Implementation Problem: Sign Up
What about the sign up process for SamCart. Remember that entrepreneurs have very little time to spare and do not want to go through frustrating wait times, on hold calls, and website forms that will not load and disappear on you.
The sign up process for SamCart is pretty easy. You can start a 14 day free trial and you also have the safety of SamCart’s thirty day conversion guarantee. If SamCart does not pay for itself in thirty days, you will get a free return of your money. Their support team will help you get started.
Then you will need to enter:
- Your contact information
- Your payment information
After that you choose what plan you want, and that is about it. From there it takes you to the product page creation that was described above in the article.
Subscription Plans
To get started with SamCart, you have to choose one of three subscription plans:
- Launch for about $50 a month
- Grow for about $100 a month
- Scale for about $200 a month
So basically you get a small, medium, or large plan with features that roughly correspond to those sizes. It is up to you to decide if the features are worth the added expense. The features of each plan are separated out into different categories:
- Checkout
- Upsells and add-ons
- Integrations
- Apps
- Manage your business
- Service and support
All the plans have similar basic features, most of which you can find in the checkout category. Some are available in the other categories as well. In the checkout category the biggest number of shared features (too many to list here) include:
- Full template library
- No additional processing fees
- Drag and drop template builder
- Smart Pixel tracking
- Pay what you want
But in the other categories, the features that you receive start to break down a little differently according to each plan.
Upsells and Add-ons
In this category the Grow and Scale plans (medium and large) both include the following features:
- Multiple payment options
- Order bump collections
- Free and Paid trials
- Upsells after purchase
However, the Launch plan only has the feature that includes both free and paid trials. None of the others are included in that plan.
Manage your Business
There are even more differences between the plans under this category. For example, when it comes to admin users:
- The Launch plan allows for 1
- The Grow plan allows for 3
- The Scale plan allows for 10
The Grow and Scale plans both allow for features like UTM marketing and tracking, advanced subscription cancellations, customer management, and advanced reporting while the Launch plan just gives you a dashboard and a sales report.
But the Scale plan tops the list of features adding the ability for admin to take on different user roles, self-cancellations from the customer, and scheduled reports.
Apps
The apps that you get to use are where the Scale plan really pulls ahead from the others. The features in this section are unbeatable.
If you get the Scale plan you have the ability to:
- Manage your affiliates
- Offer a subscription saver
- Use the page testing that this article discussed earlier
- Utilize cart abandonment strategies
Unfortunately the other plans do not have anything like these features. This whole category is for the Scale plan only.
Other Categories
The other categories have good representation across the different plans. For example, all the plans receive customer support. The only difference is that the response time guarantee varies according to what plan you have:
- Launch plans are guaranteed a response within 2 days
- Grow plans are guaranteed a response within 1 day
- Scale plans are guaranteed what is called a priority response
You can assume that, since Grow planners get a response within a day, Scale planners must hear back within hours, but the time is not specific.
Also, all the plans have comparable integrations, including Zapier which is very helpful for integrating a variety of tools.
SamCart Review, Conclusion
So here the long and the short of it. SamCart is a great tool for simplifying your sales cart. The idea is simple, but revolutionary. Sell your product, not your store. This is a no brainer for those selling digital products, but for those selling physical products it might take some getting used to. Once you do, you will realize you cannot go wrong with this.
SamCart strips away all the unfocused and confusing menus and options of a website and directs the customer’s attention to a single product. After all, the customer knows what the customer wants. You have to give it to them. With SamCart you have the ability to integrate this simplified sales page and check out process with your other web tools.
Once you accomplish that through a simple sign up process backed by a pretty awesome guarantee and quick page creation, you are on your way to conversions.
Alternatives to SamCart are ThriveCart and ClickFunnels.