Samcart Review: Is Samcart Legit?

Last Updated on April 22, 2023 by Ewen Finser

If you’re trying to find the best eCommerce platform, you may have stumbled upon SamCart – our in-depth review can give you all the info you need to know about this shopping cart software.

SamCart has a lot of great features – a secure shopping cart, flexible subscription payment plans for customers, and built-in upselling tools to name a few.

But is it worth using?

My Bottom Line Up Front: I really like SamCart and we think it’s a solid shopping cart software for selling physical products online, but we did stumble upon a few downsides. However, the customer support team was really helpful, which is a definite plus point, and it has some great features, particularly if you want to sell subscription-based products.

Keep reading to find out more details. We’ve tested it ourselves, so you can see our honest thoughts on the pros and cons of SamCart!

What is SamCart?

SamCart is an online shopping cart platform. Launched in 2014, it allows users to create product pages, offer subscription plans to customers, and more. Customers can pay with credit or debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.

It has some built-in features, like the Subscription Saver or upsells, to help you to gain more sales and maximize conversion rates.

The Pros and Cons of SamCart

If you’re in a hurry, here’s what you need to know about the best and worst features of SamCart:

Pros

• Offers a safe, secure shopping cart
• Easy to create products and product pages
• Lots of subscription payment configurations possible
• Easy to add upsells or downsells
• The subscription Saver feature is useful
• Good customer support

Cons

• Doesn’t work smoothly 100% of the time
• A little pricey compared to other platforms (like Shopify or 3Dcart, for example)

The Main Features of SamCart

Let’s take a look at SamCart in more detail.

Samcart User Experience

Signing up for SamCart was a little more difficult than it needed to be. It looks easy on the surface, but when testing the platform, I ran into problems during the password creation stage.

A small thing, but a little annoying. There were also a couple of moments when I tried to click on something in the dashboard area only to find it didn’t load. The customer support team responded to this helpfully, but it was inconvenient at the time (more on this in the ‘Support’ section a little later).

Generally, it should be a pretty easy platform to use – the toolbar at the top points to everything you need to find.

Samcart Product Pages

It’s pretty easy to set up a new product page with SamCart. You can input basic information, including product name, product URL, images, and product tags. If you’re selling digital products, you can upload them at this stage.

You can design a checkout page for each product, using their premade templates.

The checkout design page allows you to choose from a variety of premade templates:

The templates are pretty basic. They can be customized – you can play around with colors, logos, and fonts, as well as adding testimonials, bullet-point lists, and custom sections. SamCart uses a basic text editor for the custom sections, and you can add links and images if you want to. At any point, you can preview how your page looks using the live view mode.

SamCart uses Stripe and PayPal, which opens up a lot of options for customers to pay by credit or debit card, as well as Apple Pay or Google Pay. You can offer payment installments, too.

You can set Upsells for each product, which is a good way to increase sales. Once you’ve set up a few products, you can attach them (for example, if you’re selling one eBook, you could add another eBook as an upsell). This is designed to be easy for customers.

You can also add an upsell funnel to your products, which allows you to design the steps your customer will take through to the checkout process. You can add more upsells or even a ‘downsell’, a similar but lower-priced product if someone is backing out of the checkout process in the hope of recovering a lost sale.

SamCart enables split testing, which allows you to design two slightly different versions of the same product page and run them at the same time to see which one performs better. This is easy to do, and worth investing a bit of time in to boost conversion rates by finding the best page design for customers.

You can set subscriptions for your customers, including:

• Unlimited recurring plans
• Limited recurring plans
• Paid trials
• Free trials

There is a built-in subscription saver tool, which could save you a lot of money and hassle if you offer subscription-based products. If a subscription payment fails – say if a customer’s card expires – SamCart automatically sends emails to your customer, including a secure link to fill in their new payment information. Again, this is designed to be easy for your customer, making it more likely that they will quickly respond with their new payment information.

In fact, if you’re selling subscription-based products or you have slightly more complex subscription services you’d like to provide for your customers, SamCart could be a good choice. It’s worth investing a bit more in a platform that will help you to save money from failed payments. However, it’s also worth noting that the Subscription Saver (along with some other features) is locked behind the more expensive price plans, but that does tend to be the case with a lot of eCommerce platforms.

You can even set up ‘Pay What You Want’ donations. Customers can choose what they would like to pay (you can suggest a minimum amount if you like).

Activity

The ‘Activity’ tab shows you what’s happening with your store at any time. You can view orders and subscriptions, and access your customer list here. It gives you a basic overview of everything that is happening right now in your store.

This is the place to go if you need to issue a refund, too, or if you need to get in contact with a customer for any reason.

Samcart Reports

SamCart’s reporting is pretty good. They offer detailed breakdowns of sales, refunded products, subscriptions, and upsell funnels. If you use the Subscription Saver feature, you can view any activity relating to that.

You can also check out the ‘Prospects’ section. This allows you to see customers who didn’t complete the checkout process, including their contact details, the product they were going to buy, and the date. This allows you to potentially follow up with this customer, perhaps offering them the same product with a discount coupon.

All reports can be exported as a . CSV file if needed.

Samcart Affiliates

If you have the Premium plan, you’ll be able to use the Affiliate Program. SamCart generates a sign-up page for new affiliates, allowing you to approve or deny their applications (you can choose to automatically accept affiliates if you’d prefer). Affiliates will receive a unique link on their dashboard for them to share with others. The cookie length is 30 days by default, although you can adjust this if you want to. It’s really easy to adjust settings, including the number of affiliate commissions your affiliate will receive from their affiliate links…

The affiliate dashboard allows you to see, at a glance, how well your army of affiliates is performing. You can view how much each person has made in sales, making it easy to see whether it’s worth keeping an affiliate on or not.

Samcart Integrations

There are many integrations available, including:

• ShipStation
• Klaviyo
• WordPress
• Zapier
• Stripe
• PayPal
• Thinkific
• MailChimp
• Drip
• Constant Contact
• ActiveCampaign

Support

There is a knowledge base available for basic information about settings, product creation, checkout pages, and integrations.

If you need support, you can use the chatbot on the bottom right-hand corner to leave a query. I had to do this because of the issues I was having navigating the platform.

They got back to me on the same working day, which was great considering I didn’t qualify for priority support. The customer support team is friendly and helpful, and they were keen to help (even though the issue didn’t resolve itself straight away).

Samcart Pricing Plan Options

There are three payment plans available:

Samcart Launch Plan – $59/month

This includes:

• Unlimited pages and products
• Unlimited templates
• Drag and drop template builder
• Full template library
• Advanced subscriptions
• Email customizations
• Custom domains
• Digital product delivery
• Smart pixel tracking
• ‘Pay What You Want’
• Sales and VAT Tax Support
• Free SSL Certificate
• Apple and Google Pay
• Custom Thank You Pages
• SamCart Branding
• Free and Paid Trials
• 1 Admin User
• Dashboard and Sales Report
• Email Support (2-Day Response Time)

Samcart Grow Plan – $119/month

This includes everything in the Launch plan, plus:

• Custom Checkout Fields
• Order Bump Collections
• Post-Purchase Upsells
• Multiple Payment Methods
• 3 Admin Users
• UTM Tracking and Marketing Reporting
• Advanced Reporting
• Customer Management
• Subscription Charge Reminder
• Advanced Subscription Cancellations
• SamCart Onboarding
• Email Support (1 Day Response)

Samcart Scale Plan – $299/month

This includes everything in the Grow plan, plus:

• 10 Admin Users
• Admin User Roles
• Cart Abandonment
• Built-in AB Testing
• Affiliate Center
• Subscription Saver
• CRM Integrations
• Custom Integrations
• Email Support (Priority Response)

They offer a 14-day free trial. You can find out more on their pricing page. It has to be said that SamCart is a bit more pricey than some other platforms.

Shopify’s basic plan, for example, is roughly $20 cheaper, as is 3Dcart’s basic plan. You may decide you like the look/feel of SamCart anyway, but this may be a factor if you’re a small or new business trying to keep costs down.

FAQs

Our Final Thoughts on this SamCart Review

Would I recommend SamCart? Yes, absolutely.

While we did have a technical hiccup at the beginning, the customer support team was keen to help, and the platform itself is easy to navigate.

It has some great tools, including upsells, split testing, and the Subscription Saver. Plus, the reporting is great, and it has some good product page templates. If you run a subscription-based business, it’s definitely tempting to check out.

The only downside is that it is a bit pricey in comparison to other platforms on the lower price plan, and some of the key Samcart features (like the aforementioned Subscription Saver) are locked behind the more expensive plan. There are more affordable options out there, but we still think it’s worth looking into. You can check out their free trial if you want to see how it works for yourself!

If you’ve used SamCart for your own shopping cart software needs, share your thoughts in the comments below – we’d like to know what you think.

Samcart Alternative Options Compared

If you are still not quite decided on the right cart solution, our team has compared Samcart vs a variety of other competitors. 

• Samcart vs Shopify Compared
• Samcart vs Clickfunnels Compared
• Samcart vs Karta Compared
• Samcart vs Ultracart Compared
• Samcart vs ThriveCart Compared
• Samcart vs Leadpages Compared