SamCart vs ClickFunnels: Which is better?
Last updated: August 2020
This Samcart vs ClickFunnels review article covers their important features, the pros and cons of each, and why one or the other might be a better fit for your business.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching, testing and sometimes becoming a paid customer of the top ecommerce platforms and “online shopping carts” to find out what works the best. As an online business owner, you need e-commerce platform that meets your needs, includes the features you want, grows with your business, and gives you the best value overall.
Two digital marketing companies seem to be on every top list out there and made my cut for this ecommerce platform comparison article — SamCart and ClickFunnels. But which one is a better fit for your business? If you’ve been struggling to answer this question, keep reading - you’ll have the answer by the end of this article.
Note: Although I periodically update this article (recently in August 2020), as with any tech tool, these online sales and marketing platforms often come out with new features, update pricing tiers or add in special bonuses, so please visit the links below for the latest.
With that out of the way, let’s see what makes these two ecommerce platforms worth checking out and how they stack up against each other.
SamCart Review
SamCart Overview: The powerful yet affordable online shopping cart and funnel builder for newbies to mega-sellers.
Ever since 2013, SamCart has been a stable checkout platform and one of the best online shopping carts still active today. The great thing about SamCart, especially for those who consider themselves “non-techy” (like me), is that they’ve made it really easy to get your account up and running quickly.
Their platform is simple to use and has a full library of tutorials and helpful instructions. Because of its simple interface, comprehensive support features and stellar customer service, SamCart is one of the top platforms for beginners and technophobes. With their easy to use drag-and-drop builder, you can create a high-converting and fully functional checkout page in about 30 minutes; that’s just how efficient it is.
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But even though SamCart is easy enough for complete online selling newbies to use, it still offers a full suite of options that seasoned professionals doing millions of dollars in sales every year may need… all without becoming overly complicated.
For example, you probably know by now that if you’re selling online, one of the fastest ways to grow your sales and business is with an affiliate program, but maybe you’ve shied away from complicated and cumbersome stand-alone affiliate tracking tools so far. SamCart makes things easy for you with its fully integrated affiliate platform that gives you control over who joins. Your affiliates can promote all or only some of your products and you can customize the commission pay-out for each. And, you can even set up special “VIP affiliate” commission structures.
SamCart’s full suite of features, ease of use and reasonable price tag even at the Premium level is a big reason so many well-known online marketers switched over to them.
Not bad for a platform that began as an alternative to PayPal’s checkout page.
Three features worth mentioning up-front are:
#1 - Mobile payment optimization is key nowadays, and SamCart supports Apple Pay, Google Pay and Microsoft Wallet (more on that below).
#2 - SamCart supports the sale and delivery of both digital and physical products, which is one of their stand-out features (watch out, Shopify!)
#3 - Their robust knowledge base and training library is full of extensive training on how to maximize your online sales, reduce shopping cart abandonment, how to design high-converting checkout pages and more. As an online entrepreneur, even a 10% difference in your sales conversion rate can mean thousands more in sales for you, so these trainings are a valuable “bonus” they include for their customers.
Overall, SamCart is a fully-integrated, elegant and dependable online shopping cart solution for most online businesses, service providers and now even physical product sellers.
Want a visual walk-though? You can view the SamCart demo here.
SamCart Pricing
There are plenty of features to cover when it comes to this online shopping cart. Like most ecommerce platforms, the features you get will depend on which of their plans you choose.
SamCart pricing is now more competitive and affordable for the average entrepreneur, and they currently offer three different monthly plans - called “Launch”, “Grow” and “Scale” - ranging from $39 to $159 per month with annual billing (and a bit more if you choose monthly billing).
Here’s the breakdown of their current plans:
“Launch” plan (works well for most new and established businesses, but may be too limited for more sophisticated sellers), currently $39 per month
“Grow” plan (provides everything that Launch plus more customization, upsell/downsell capabilities, and management options), currently $79 per month
“Scale” plan (includes advanced features suitable for companies with multiple products and delivery methods), currently $159 per month
Most of the elements I list in this article are available in the Grow plan. The advanced features will be covered in their own, separate paragraph below, in case you’re looking for more robust features like the Scale plan has.
You can view the full list of features and how the plans compare on the SamCart pricing page.
SamCart Features
Payment Options and Gateways
SamCart's integrated checkout works with four payment gateways currently - Braintree, Stripe, Authorize.net and PayPal. Importantly, they also offer Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Microsoft Wallet to make purchasing your products via mobile phone even easier for your customers (making it even easier for you to sell more, too!).
Of course, it’s not about the number of gateways that your platform connects to that leads to a successful online store and extra sales. What counts more is the quality of your customer's checkout experience and how easy you make it for them to buy your goods and services.
And when it comes to that, this software excels. Its wide variety of payment options includes:
Subscriptions
Split-Pay
One-Time single price offers
Free trials
Pay what you want option
Controllable payment structure based on a time frame (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, custom)
Quality limitations
Shipping options
Test payments
A choice of eight separate currencies
SamCart’s “pay what you want” option for your checkout pages
Features that Lead to Higher Conversion Rates and more sales
What’s one of the easiest ways to increase your sales? Increase your sales conversion rate, i.e., make more sales from the same amount of visitors to your checkout page. SamCart provides a comprehensive template library with more than 18 ready-to-go, high-converting checkout templates to choose from.
They also make customizing them a breeze with their easy-to-use drag-and-drop page builder added in 2019. All of the SamCart templates are specifically designed to optimize your customers' checkout experience. The SamCart has tested their templates have to improve sales conversion rates - sometimes by more than double - and, by extension, grow your sales revenue.
SamCart also developed a simple, profit-boosting checkout page called the 1-Page Funnel that eliminates the need for developing complicated sales funnels involving a lot of different pages. The number one reason people don’t put sales funnels in place is because it usually takes a lot of work… but the 1-Page Website funnel model eliminates all of that.
And, with the bonus trainings that SamCart gives you to help you create your own high-converting one-page website funnel in record time and drive sales of your product or service, it’s hard to see why you’d ever need a complicated sales funnel ever again.
But perhaps most importantly, SamCart’s Smart Conversion Tracking helps you to track every transaction back to your marketing campaigns on Google, Facebook, or anyplace else. Knowing if your marketing efforts are paying off is critical, and SamCart makes it easy.
Easy Order Bumps, Coupons, and Up sellING TO Increase Sales
With SamCart, both bump offers (featured on the main product’s checkout page) and one-click up selling (featured on the checkout page after purchasing the main product) behave similarly.
A bump offer will inherit the pricing of the main product it's added to.
On the other hand, an up sell will inherit the price you give it via your dashboard.
Featuring a bump offer or up sell to your main product significantly increases the final sale total and your average sale amount by up to 68.1%, according to SamCart’s statistics.
Create simple yet highly effective upsell funnels with Samcart
If you’re not sure why adding a bump or up sell offer would benefit you, think back to the last time you bought a car. If you bought the car new or certified pre-owned, I’m sure the dealership offered you an extended warranty on the car, and if you bought it, you probably paid an extra $1000 - $2000 or more for it. That extended warranty is the auto dealership’s up sell offer and without much extra effort, they got to put some extra cash in their pocket.
That’s what you can do with bump offers and one-click up sells. And, if you buy much online, you’ve certainly been on the receiving end of bump offers, up selling and even cross-selling (think Amazon’s “You’ll also like this” suggestions).
SamCart also makes it easy to entice more people to buy your stuff with coupons and discounts. What I love about this service is that adding a coupon is simple. You use the same product dashboard as bump offers and upsells. All you need to do is enable the coupon adding feature, set up what type you need, and you’re good to go.
New Feature Added in July 2020
With the announcement that SamCart users can now edit the automated individual communications sent to your customers (think: receipts, emails, payment reminders, etc.), they’ve taken one more step toward becoming an all-in-one ecommerce platform. Depending on how you structure your business, you may not even need a separate email service provider with this new SamCart feature addition. And it certainly makes them even stronger in the comparison battle between SamCart and ClickFunnels (more on that below).
SamCart Integrations
There are quite a few integration capabilities that SamCart offers for both new and existing entrepreneurs. They include direct integrations with the most popular autoresponders, marketing automation, and membership platforms. If you use another tool in your business, you can integrate it using Zapier. Simply navigate to the “Integrations” page from your SamCart dashboard.
SamCart integrations are easy to do
Marketing Automation Integrations
Samcart provides integration with just about any email and marketing service you could want, either directly or via Zapier. Direct integrations include:
ConvertKit
Drip
Kajabi
Leadpages
Constant Contact
iContact
AWeber
GetResponse
ConvertKit
MailChimp
Maropost
Be sure to check their Features page for the current list of integrations.
Membership Integrations
Membership-based services are becoming ever more popular in the online space, as entrepreneurs seek to create recurring revenue streams. SamCart makes on-boarding new customers into your membership easy with direct integrations with:
Kajabi
MemberMouse
WishList Member
Thinkific
OptimizePress
MemberPress
Digital Access Pass
Extra Training & Customer Support
Any company worth its salt needs excellent customer support, and it needs to cover as much “ground” as possible. For example, I use Facebook a lot as a businesswoman. So I was quite happy to discover that the SamCart has an active Facebook group to provide even deeper customer service above and beyond the typical chat and email support features of most companies.
On top of that, SamCart provides its customers with a robust online support center and free bonus trainings – even including in-depth training on sales conversions and more - to help you grow your business. Even if you never sign up for SamCart, you can still learn what over $1 billion in processed sales has taught SamCart’s founders from free trainings they offer, like the latest from SamCart’s founder on his 10-step system for building an online business from scratch.
Sign up for SamCart’s free training on how to build a 6-figure online business from scratch
Get Advanced SamCart Features with the “Scale” Plan
All of the features I’ve talked about up to this point are a part of SamCart’s Grow (middle tier) plan. But if you opt for the Scale plan, you’ll get access to a few more really powerful sales growing tools, plus a host of other features. Here are the highlights of the extras:
Split Testing for Best Results
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is an essential part of optimizing the results from your ecommerce platform. It allows you to consistently improve your conversion rate and figure out what leads to the best results for your business. Remember, higher conversions equal more money in the bank from the same amount of marketing effort and traffic. Luckily, SamCart has an whole section dedicated to this feature in the “Advanced Settings” tab.
Affiliate Management Made Easy
Having affiliates promote for you is one of the easiest ways to grow sales, but managing affiliates can be a lot of work. SamCart has a beautiful affiliate management system included with their Scale plan that makes it easy for you to keep your affiliates promoting your products and referring you sales. Or, you can integrate SamCart with some of the most common stand-alone affiliate management tools. But even if you’re not quite ready to have your own affiliates, it’s nice to know you won’t have to add yet another online platform into your toolbox to manage them when you are.
Dunning for Saving Failed Payments (aka, Subscription Saver)
Dunning is a must-have feature if you sell subscription-based products, memberships or products with payment plans because it saves failed payment attempts. SamCart states that as of July 2020, their Subscription Saver feature has saved more than $76 million in otherwise lost sales for their customers. If that doesn’t drive home the importance of built-in dunning, I’m not sure what would!
There’s a wide variety of reasons a customer’s credit card might fail to fulfill a payment, but they all result in one thing: lost sales for you. The good news is that by using an online payment platform with built-in dunning, you can recover a lot of those otherwise lost sales and customers. More importantly, SamCart does this automatically and in a timely manner, saving you precious time and customer service headaches.
Additional Features You Get with the SamCart “Scale” Plan
Customer Self-Cancellations
Cart Abandonment
Admin User Roles
CRM Integrations
Custom Integrations (webhooks)
Why SamCart Users Love Them
SamCart users benefit from the platform’s high-converting checkout page designs, ease of use, and automated payment saving features and see increased overall sales and profit per customer. Because each customer’s buying experience vastly improves when you have a highly-effective sales process in place that also supports the value of your brand, you can sell more to each customer that lands on your page. Whether you’re selling online courses, services or a mix of digital or physical products, SamCart is a powerful, proven ecommerce platform with which to sell your products and grow your business.
And now with the new SamCart pricing that’s more affordable than ever, it’s easy for any entrepreneur to start selling online, close more sales and make more money at the end of every month. You can check out if this online platform is the right fit for you and your business by starting a SamCart free trial.
ClickFunnels Review
ClickFunnels Overview: The all-in-one tool for marketing funnel fanatics
Often counted as one of the SamCart alternatives, ClickFunnels launched just a year earlier than SamCart. ClickFunnels founder, Russell Brunson, has since gone on to share his funnel and traffic expertise in his best-selling books, Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets. As a result, ClickFunnels has developed into one of the biggest competitors for digital marketers’ business.
Click image to get Russell’s book free
So what does the ClickFunnels software have to offer to digital marketers and other online businesses?
As its name suggests, this ecommerce platform helps its users create a lot of sales funnels with ease and aims to be an “all-in-one” platform for those funnels, from opt-in to sale to even course delivery. ClickFunnels calls itself “a website and sales funnel builder for entrepreneurs.” The platform offers its users a wide array of pre-made funnels and templates for landing pages. And with a huge online following of raving fans, the good people at ClickFunnels are obviously doing something right.
One quick note… “all-in-one” can have its drawbacks. I’ve personally purchased a few courses from well-known brands that were housed on ClickFunnels' built-in membership platform, and I found the experience of navigating through the course to be clunky and the user interface hard to use. And, I’ve also been on the receiving end of ClickFunnels payment processing hiccups, like multiple charges for the same item (I incurred 37 back-to-back charges for one item I purchased!).
As with any platform, app or tool you may choose to use, be sure to do your own thorough research ahead of time so you know what you’re getting. No ecommerce platform is perfect, but sometimes trying to be everything to everybody results in subpar performance of certain features. Still, ClickFunnels offers a lot of features for the price, and if having a one-stop shop for your digital products business is what you’re after, it’s the top contender.
ClickFunnels Pricing
One of the slightly annoying things about ClickFunnels is that they make it difficult to find pricing information. You won’t find a “Pricing” link in their navigation bar on their website, like you normally do with other products. But I’ve made it easy for you to understand ClickFunnels pricing by including it here for you (you’re welcome, *wink*).
At the time of this writing, ClickFunnels pricing includes three different levels:
$97 per month (basic)
$297 per month (Platinum)
$2,497 per month for their Two Comma Club level
There are some significant differences between the plan levels, including the number of payment gateways, pages included, number of funnels you can build, and support options.
For example, you only get access to their affiliate platform, Backpack, at the Platinum level and above (which means that if having an integrated affiliate program is important to you, it will cost you about $140 per month more than SamCart’s top plan). The top two options (Platinum and Two Comma Club) also come with additional bonus trainings, as well, much like SamCart’s extra training library that’s included with all their plan levels.
ClickFunnels Features
eCommerce Support and Payment Gateways
In the past few years, purchases made via mobile phone have skyrocketed, and any ecommerce platform you choose really should include ApplePay and GooglePay. If it doesn’t, you’re making it a lot harder for your customers to buy from you. ClickFunnels also offers these two payment gateways, as well as the old standbys, like Authorize.net, Stripe, Paypal and a few more.
Clickfunnels Templates
When you enter ClickFunnels, you’ll see a large selection of landing page templates, both free and premium. ClickFunnels experts built them to drive more sales and know what we users like, as well as what people tend not to click on. Using one of these templates will give a business owner an attractive, interactive landing page.
You also get a vast selection of preset funnels to use. Each of these is grouped based on the industry they serve and the goal they need to achieve. More importantly, each of them comes with an easy-to-understand instructional video.
Naturally, you can create our own custom funnels using the tools that this service provides. These can cater to any of your needs, whether you want to sell a product, generate leads, or create events. Unfortunately, you are only limited to creating 20 sales funnels with the basic subscription level. In order to build an unlimited number of funnels, you have to upgrade to Platinum, which costs almost three times as much.
ClickFunnels page templates and editor
The ClickFunnels Editor
As I mentioned in the SamCart review section above, having a drag & drop editor is undoubtedly a plus. These editors help users add or move objects without actually entering any code. It’s a little like moving items around in an image editor — all you really need is a functioning mouse and some creativity. ClickFunnels also has a drag-and-drop page builder included so you can customize any of the templates they include or build your own from scratch. At this point in time, you really shouldn’t consider any ecommerce platform that doesn’t have a drag-and drop editor.
Replete with lots of useful tools, the native editor gives you everything you need to make your landing page look great. Some of the tools include:
Font editing
Insert media
Content blocks
Embed forms
Edit the background
Create pop-ups
SEO
Custom CSS option
ClickFunnels Backpack Affiliate Marketing Platform
Backpack is the affiliate management platform native to ClickFunnels. With it, you can sell your products or services with the help of affiliates you recruit. Serious affiliate marketers can use Backpack to create and manage different affiliate types, draft custom affiliate plans, and create a two-tiered program that lets affiliates recruit other affiliates.
As mentioned in the above ClickFunnels Pricing section, you only get Backpack with subscriptions to the top two pricing plans.
ClickFunnels Backpack affiliate management center comes with the top two pricing plans
Actionetics, the ClickFunnels Email Marketing Platform
Interestingly, ClickFunnels comes with its own email service, Actionetics, but it’s only available on the top tier plans. Or, if you already use an email marketing platform you love, it may be able to integrate with ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels Integrations
When researching for this article, I once again found the lack of ClickFunnels transparency making it difficult to get a full list of ClickFunnels integrations. There is no “Integrations” link or tab on their official website. To find out which services ClickFunnels integrates with, you’ll have to wade through a lot of third party blog posts or hunt through the ClickFunnels support pages.
To help you out, I’ve listed the email integrations I found listed inside their support pages, as you may very well decide to use a third-party email provider.
Active Campaign
Aweber
Constant Contact
ConvertKit
Drip
GetResponse
Hubspot
Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)
MadMimi
MailChimp
Market Hero
Ontraport
Sendlane
Training & Customer Support
ClickFunnels offers dozens of videos, articles, and instructions on how to deal with some common funnel-building problems, an online support center, and customer support during standard weekday business hours. Your level of customer support (email only vs. chat support) will depend on your subscription level. You can also find extra tips by following their Facebook page.
Sign up for ClickFunnels in-depth training on how to create high-converting funnels as a blogger, influencer, coach or creative. (And the video for this is darn funny, too!)
Samcart vs ClickFunnels - Which one is better?
The number one difference between SamCart and ClickFunnels is that they focus on different parts of the sales process. Deciding which of these two ecommerce platforms is likely the right fit for you is going to depend on a few factors, including:
Which part of the sales process you need the most help with
What your main business needs are and what stage of businesses you are in
What other online tools or platforms you already have set up
How tech savvy or tech averse you are, or if you have a team to help you (SamCart is simpler, ClickFunnels requires more “tech ability”)
Which features and capabilities are most important to you
Both platforms have their strong points. In general, when choosing which ecommerce platform is right for you, you want to also consider what other tools you already have in place.
For example, if you’ve already set up dozens of landing pages with LeadPages and have email automations already established, simply adding on an easy-to-use ecommerce platform like SamCart might be the smarter way to go, especially given ClickFunnels’ higher starting prices for similar features.
The best way to pick the right service is to know what kind of business you want to run, what needs you have now, and what your anticipated business needs will be in the future. Ultimately, you want to choose an ecommerce platform that is the right fit now, but one that can also grow with your business, too. With the free trials offered by these platforms, it’s easy to road test them and try out their capabilities and ease of use for yourself.
Why you should choose SamCart
SamCart is an ecommerce platform that’s specifically designed to help you make more money from each customer that lands on your checkout page and then get them to increase their total purchases through upsells and downsells. SamCart helps their users optimize the overall checkout experience and leverage the post-checkout process to maximize sales revenue.
SamCart is a great all-around fit for online business newbies to sellers who process millions of dollars in sales each year. With SamCart’s updated features and newest pricing tiers, it’s also one of the most affordable ecommerce platform for digital product sellers and service providers.
You can sign up for a SamCart free trial and check it out for yourself.
Why you should choose ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is an integrated marketing funnel platform. You can use their Actionetics email program to nurture customer interest when they’re not yet convinced enough to buy your product or service. Once they do buy, ClickFunnels helps you maximize the amount you earn from each sale with upsells and downsells (as with SamCart).
Overall, ClickFunnels is more about creating a multi-funnel, beginning-to-end marketing ecosystem for your business with everything under the ClickFunnels roof. ClickFunnels may be your best bet if you’re a sales funnel fanatic and want a truly all-in-one platform. Although SamCart is getting close to being an all-in-one platform, it’s still lacking the built-in email service that ClickFunnels has. But “all-in-one” has certain drawbacks, as discussed above, and comes with a higher price tag.
And, while ClickFunnels probably currently has a slight edge at comprehensive funnel design, the gap between them and SamCart is narrowing. Ever since SamCart introduced the “1-Page Funnel” designs that drive massive sales with high conversions, bump offers, upsells and downsells, SamCart has become one of the stronger ClickFunnels alternatives for digital marketers.
You can sign up for a ClickFunnels One Funnel Away Challenge for free.
Sign up for FREE for ClickFunnels 3-Day Summit Event, which is designed to rapidly build your business in the next 30 days!
Considering Shopify or PayPal for your ecommerce platform?
Yep, I’ve researched both Shopify and PayPal, too. To see how SamCart and ClickFunnels compare to Shopify and PayPal's newest e-commerce and business features, read my SamCart vs ClickFunnels vs Shopify vs PayPal comparison article.
Share Your Thoughts
Have you used SamCart or ClickFunnels in your business? Why did you choose that particular ecommerce platform? What do you like or dislike about it? Leave a comment below!
And if you found this article helpful, please share it on your social media accounts so others can benefit, too.
Welcome! I’m Christine Parma. I’ve helped thousands of purpose-driven entrepreneurs, thought leaders and changemakers joyfully transform themselves, their businesses and their "real world results" in ways that align with their values, increase their impact, and achieve the bold visions they hold... and I'd love to support you, too!
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