Now we all know if we want a business to be successful it is important to get sales and believe it or not a customer can be ready to pull the trigger on a purchase but if the user experience isn’t smooth and simple you may just lose the sale.
The way in which people purchase on the internet is changing everyday but the fundamentals of selling are always present.
These fundamentals things are as follows:
- Providing Value
- Understanding your customers shopping habits
- Understanding what your ideal customers are looking for
- How to best market to your target audience
If you can understand and incorporate these 4 things correctly then you should have no issues selling.
Now you know you can sell your products all day, everyday you will need a shopping cart feature and payment system.
That’s where companies like SamCart and ClickFunnels come into the picture.
So let’s start with the basics
What is SamCart?
SamCart is web-based checkout platform that offers many features to ensure you can maximise your profits from every sale.
It offers features such as premade conversion optimized checkout templates, one click upsells, subscription services and payment plan capabilities.
What is ClickFunnels?
Now for a full review on ClickFunnels I suggest you read my other article by clicking here.
However to offer a brief summary Clickfunnels is an online sales funnel builder that helps businesses, market, sell and deliver their products or services online. Clickfunnels is an extremely beginner friendly tool as it all drag and drop to build the sales funnels, because of this it allows beginners with absolutely no previous experience in building funnels make beautiful and highly converting sales funnels in a very short time frame.
Clickfunnels is armed with a whole host of functions and tools that assist in everyday marketing, with things such as progress bars, countdown timers and animations all available at the click of a button it really is one of the most user friendly yet effective tools.
WIth ClickFunnels you have the ability to build Landing pages, Sales Funnels, Host Auto Webinars, Carry out email marketing campaigns and Build membership sites.
So if you have read my article where I compare Leadpages to ClickFunnels the next part of this article will look very similar as I am going to structure it the same way.
I am going to go over some of SamCarts best features and then compare them to ClickFunnels alternatives.
Some of the best features SamCart has to offer is as follows:
- One-Click Upsells
- Checkout Pages
- Cross Selling
- Multiple Checkout Methods
- A/B Testing
- Subscription Saver
SamCarts One-Click Upsells
Upselling is a very popular sales technique which is aimed at persuading customers to purchase additional or more premium options.
Upselling can be extremely important as if done correctly it can increase your customers experience by offering them products they may find useful but also increases your bottom line by maximising sales.
A good example of upselling would be Spotify, You can listen to spotify and all it has to offer for free… Or you could pay a small monthly of $10 and listen ad free and create offline playlists so that you can listen to your music un-interrupted even if you lose signal.
Due to SamCart being a web-based checkout platform it is extremely advantageous to be able to offer a one-click upsell. The good with SamCart is because the customers have already inputted their payment information and processed an order, customers can simply click once to buy a product or service you offer them without them needing to re-enter their payment information.
This can be a great way to increase sales and conversions as customers don’t have to replay that internal battle that everybody has before making a purchase thus making a purchase much more likely.
A stat often cited by SamCart is that customers who use this feature increase their average customer value by a massive 68.1%.
ClickFunnels One-Click Upsells
Now ClickFunnels also offer One-Click Upsells and much like SamCart when their customers enter their payment information the customer does not have to re-enter them details to make the next purchase.
Now I must admit ClickFunnels by nature does this much better than SamCart, the reason this is true is because SamCart is solely a checkout platform whereas ClickFunnels is a sales funnel builder. Because of this ClickFunnels allows you to build an entirely new page to upsell that will load directly after the last step. This means you have a lot more access to additional features and elements that you can incorporate into your upsell pages making them compelling and better optimized.
In summary if your products or services are quite simple and do not require a lot of explaining then SamCart is very effective however as you will see later for very similar pricing points I would always opt for the more in depth option, that being ClickFunnels.
SamCart’s Checkout Pages
One of the other features SamCart offers is a handful of optimized checkout pages that have been forged by professional marketers and stress tested many times to formulate the perfect converting machines. Now it is worth noting that not all of their templates are that user friendly or aesthetically pleasing and if you want to stand out you are going to want to customise them.
Look I’m sure when they were first produced they would of been highly converting but what you have to remember is these checkout pages are freely accessible to anybody using SamCart, this means they have been re-issued and re-hashed many, many times.
With that being said their templates are very good and give you a perfect foothold to get you started with producing a beautiful Checkout Page.
Going back to what I touched on earlier about customizing the pages, each of these templates can be edited by changing things such as headers, footers, buttons and colours thereof. You can also additional sections such as Headlines, Descriptions and bullet points.
Another important feature that falls under this section is the ability to test the payment gateways and checkout forms prior to launching your site/ checkout page. SamCart calls this ‘Sandbox mode’. This is important as you want to ensure everything is up and running prior to making your page live, another fantastic perk is that you can test this without your tests being included within the reporting.
ClickFunnels Checkout Pages
ClickFunnels also have a whole host of fully optimized premade checkout pages. ClickFunnels refers to these as Order Forms but ultimately they are they same things.
The good with ClickFunnels templates is they are 100% full customizable. This means you can make small changes such as alter the headings, content layout or colors. Or delete everything on the page and completely start from scratch. With ClickFunnels templates you can add a variety of elements from text, images and videos all the way to progress bars, countdown timers and calendars.
SamCart’s pages are all mobile responsive however you can specifically edit mobile pages so how they are optimized out of the box is how they will be. With ClickFunnels you can dive a lot deeper, when designing your checkout page in ClickFunnels you will notice a little mobile icon in the top left, once clicked on you will be presented with how your template will look if opened on Mobile.
Within this tab you can fully edit every single detail of this page to ensure your mobile customers are met with an aesthetically pleasing page that is designed with the customers end use in mind.
Much like SamCart you can fully test the page prior to launching and you can also test each payment gateway by toggling on what ClickFunnels simply calls ‘Test Mode’.
SamCart Cross Selling
Cross Selling is slightly different to upselling but both have the same end goal.
It is fair to say that if your customer has purchased one of your products or services there is a good chance they will be interested in others you have to offer. This is where cross selling comes in to play. A common form of this would be bundling.
If you bundle your main products with complementing items or accessories you can greatly increase your profits from each sale.
The restaurant and fast food services have been using this technique for years to remain profitable. Did you know that McDonalds actually lose money to get their customers through the door to purchase a burger. However by adding one simple phrase (or upselling) ‘Would you like fries and a drink with that’. McDonalds are able to remain profitable and increase their customers purchase from $2.00 to $6.00+
ClickFunnels Cross Selling
Now as mentioned above Cross selling and Upselling although different in principle are both executed in a very similar way across both platforms as such I won’t cover the ClickFunnels equivalent as this is sufficiently covered in ‘ClickFunnels Upsells’
SamCart Multiple Checkout Methods
What once seemed so revolutionary now just a sign of the times is multiple checkout methods. Now a days it is quite common to offer customers a variety of different payment methods such as stripe, paypal, debit card etc.. On top of the multitude of payment methods, companies these days specifically those who sell larger ticket items may also offer different payment plans and this is where SamCart really does take first place.
SamCart keeps visitors on the page whilst they decide rather then taking them to 3rd party payment gateways, this increases your bounce rate for the better and keeps up user engagement on your site which is a huge bonus in the eyes of the search engines.
ClickFunnels Multiple Checkout Methods
Now ClickFunnels also offers multiple checkout methods and again these can all be displayed on a single page much like they can in SamCart. Now with ClickFunnels Payments methods they often take you away from the main page which is certainly something you the SamCart has over ClickFunnels.
SamCart A/B Testing
Now you may be surprised to this heading. I mean sure everyone has seen or heard of split testing adverts, sales funnels, landing pages…
But not many people talk about split testing check out pages, which when you think about it is just ludicrous.
You want you’re check out pages to be aesthetically pleasing but more importantly simple and easy to follow.
I’m sure we have all heard the saying ‘a confused mind never buys’.
Well with SamCart we are able to split test the designs and layouts of our checkout pages with ease. From experience I would suggest the best thing to do when split testing is to start with 2 polar opposite designs/ layouts and keep tweaking both of them until they start to look similar. Eventually you will have the perfect hybrid that will convert like a dream.
Once you have your split designs all sorted you can monitor the statistics of both within SamCart to see which one is converting better.
The main drawback you do have with SamCart is you aren’t able to easily split test prices. If you want to do this you will need to create a whole new project trying to closely copy your existing one and set a new price point.
ClickFunnels A/B Testing
With ClickFunnels creating A/B testing is as easy as clicking one button literally.
You will notice in the above image there is a highlighted box that has A/B testing (Split testing) When this button is pressed it will create a copy of the original checkout page. From here you can edit every single finite detail.
Now much like SamCart you can’t currently split test price points directly from the order form but unlike SamCart there is a solution to this on ClickFunnels
As ClickFunnels is a funnels builder you can simply insert another step in the checkout page and offer an OTO (One time offer) page. With this OTO page you can split test pricing points to your heart’s content.
Subscription Saver
As far as I know this is something that is very specific to SamCart as I must admit it is genius and takes a lot of headaches from you as the user.
One massive pain point with Membership sites is monitoring who has and hasn’t paid, obviously if someone hasn’t paid their subscription they shouldn’t have access to your service/ resources. Well with Subscription service SamCart send out an automated reminder email to ask your customer for payment.
If the customer does not pay or settle the balance within a certain timeframe and do not update their payment information after several reminders. SamCart will automatically cancel their subscription and remove their membership privileges.
On top of this SamCart highlights them as ‘Delinquent’ in your account so you can see exactly who they are and potentially get some user feedback from them as to why they cancelled or stop using the service.
ClickFunnels Membership Sites
As I said the subscription saver to the best of my knowledge is strictly a SamCart feature and ClickFunnels has no similar fail safe. However one thing I did want to touch on is with ClickFunnels Membership sites your customers don’t have the ability to cancel or change the subscription or plan.
In order to cancel or change their plan they have to email you and you have to change the settings in your stripe account.
So if you were planning on using ClickFunnels for a membership site please bare this in mind.
SamCart Integrations
SamCart much like most softwares these days integrates with lots of 3rd party tools so make sure you check before purchasing that your favourite tools work with SamCart to avoid disappointment.
Now previously when I have written these articles I like to insert a nice simple table featuring all possible integrations but as SamCart has placed these on their website in a rolling in fashion I will have to type them Im afraid.
Integrations:
- Stripe
- Paypal
- Hubspot
- Zapier
- ConvertKit
- Intercom
- AWeber
- Kajabi
- Infusionsoft
- Drip
- Active Campaign
- GetResponse
- ConstantContact
- Wishlist Member
- Post Affiliate Pro
- Memberpress
- MailChimp
- IContact
- Maropost
- Ontraport
- OptimizePress
- WordPress
- Thinkific
- MemberMouse
- Digital Access Pass
ClickFunnels Integrations
Look I get it there is nothing more annoying than purchasing and getting used to tools to finding a great software renders them useless. Well ClickFunnels understands that sometimes you just prefer using 3rd party tools and software to make your pages just right and carry out other forms of marketing.
Now unlike SamCart, ClickFunnels does have a nice simple table image featuring all their integrations and you will notice there is a lot, so chances are your favourite tools and softwares will instantly and seamlessly work with ClickFunnels
SamCart Pricing
So SamCart actually has 3 plans each set at quite drastically different pricing points.
The 3 plans they have are as follows:
- Basic Plan
- Pro Plan
- Premium Plan
So what are the prices on each and what’s included.
SamCart Launch Plan
Now before I get into too much detail about this plan I must strongly advise you don’t even bother with this plan. Its limitations are very prevalent and the plan takes away lots of the useful functions that SamCart offers.
On top of the limitations already in place the basic plan comes with a 1% transaction fee and SamCart branding on your checkout pages with the higher tiers don’t have.
However with that being said the Launch plan is $49/Month
Remember when I said that it lacks vital features on the basic plan?
Well the features not included in the basic plan are as follows: one-click upsells, A/B testing, Free and Paid Trials, Subscriptions, Payment plans, Lead Generation and the ability to set up an affiliate programme to encourage others to promote your products.
As I said you lose out on nearly all the essential features so I would definitely consider getting the higher tier plans if you want to go with SamCart.
As luck would have it, you can’t actually directly access the basic plan through their website anyway.
SamCart Grow Plan
SamCart’s Grow Plan is their most popular option and comes in at a cost of $99/month.
The Grow plan comes with all the features I listed above and allows you to have unlimited products as well as full integration with Zapier.
This plan also offers a wide variety of templates that you can use and edit at will
SamCart Scale Plan
Their most expensive plan is the Scale plan at $199/month.
This plan comes with all the above features plus full access to all integrations.
The main difference between this plan and the ‘Grow Plan’ is the ability to set up an affiliate programme so that other people can promote your products or store for commissions.
If this is something you want to do to try and generate more business than you will need to upgrade to the premium plan. If not you would be fine with just the Grow plan.
ClickFunnels Pricing
ClickFunnels also have 3 pricing plans although only 2 of the most are well known or even promoted on the official ClickFunnels site.
ClickFunnels Share Funnel Plan
Much like the SamCart ClickFunnels also has a not so well known cheaper plan. This is called the Share Funnel plan.
The Share Funnel plan is $19/month and again has many limitations.
As the name suggests this plan allows its customers to have upto 3 funnels that have been shared with them.
When on this plan you are not able to edit these funnels you can only use them as they were originally sent, so if you are planning on carrying out your own marketing this isn’t the plan for you.
It is mainly used when you have someone building funnels for you, perhaps and agency or freelancer or to share funnels with newly formed partnerships.
ClickFunnels Startup Plan
The Startup plan is the most popular option and to be honest is probably going to the one I recommend to all of you. However this recommendation does come with some caveats.
for example the nature of your business and the size of your customer base, or more importantly the size of your email list.
The Startup Plan is $97/month and allows you to have 20 Funnels, 100 pages, 20,000 monthly visitors and unlimited leads.
The basic plan also includes 3 custom domains that can be inputted into ClickFunnels.
This plan includes all of the features noted above plus many more. There is also no restrictions on customization to any of the funnels or the hundreds of templates that ClickFunnels has to offer for no additional costs.
It is worth noting that you can still receive shared funnels however you have free raign to edit them on this plan, they do however count towards your 20 funnel limit.
ClickFunnels Platinum
The premium plan that ClickFunnels offers is called ClickFunnels Platinum, this plan costs $297/month and offers unlimited funnels, pages, visitors and leads. It also comes with the some pretty huge features called Daily Virtual Hackathons, Funnel Flix & Funnel Hacker Forum
Daily Virtual Hackathons
If you have ever watched something on youtube called Funnel Fridays which you can find on the ClickFunnels youtube channel, this concept will sound familiar to you.
Daily Virtual Hackathons are a series of training videos in which you can lean how to build a variety of sales funnels in a wide array of business and niches.
Using these trainings you can replicate the teachings and put them into your own funnels to reap the rewards.
Funnel Flix
Funnel Flix is the stand out feature for me.
This is netflix but business owners.
There is a large array of content from documentries, trainings to even a behind closed doors look at seminars and conferences hosted by the likes of Russell Brunson that cost the attendees upwards of $10,000 to attend in person.
Funnel Hacker Forum
Funnel hacker forum was brought in to allow paying ClickFunnels members a private place to conduct networking, help each other with queries and generally just discuss business and clickfunnels.
Previously this was the Facebook group however if you find the ClickFunnels facebook group, you will notice there is well over 200,000 members.
When you compare this to the roughly 100,000 paying ClickFunnels members you can see there is quite a disconnect.
SamCart vs ClickFunnels Which One Should You Use?
Now to me the answer seems painfully simple but I appreciate after reading the above you may be thinking the SamCart sounds comparable as a Checkout Platform and when you look at ClickFunnels just as a checkout platform then it probably is comparable.
Even though truth be known ClickFunnels offers a lot more customisation within their checkout forms.
ClickFunnels is sooooo much more than just a Checkout platform. ClickFunnels allows you to create sales funnels, landing pages, host auto-webinars and even perform targeted email marketing if you are willing to get the etison suite.
With all this in mind, it seems like a no brainer to me to get a software that can do everything under one roof rather than needing multiple tools and paying for various services. Ultimately you are going to want, no. Need a sales funnel if you want to be successful in business so there is a high chance you will end up getting ClickFunnels or something similar anyway.
The other benefit to getting a software that has all these capabilities under one roof is they will work together in unison much more seamlessly as they are all hosted by the same servers.
Now with the above being said I would recommend you go with ClickFunnels as it is the same price as SamCart but allows you to do so much more with your business in terms of marketing.
If you want to try ClickFunnels for FREE before you decide if it’s right for you, you can do so by clicking below.
Get your ClickFunnels 14 Day risk Free Trial
By Clicking this link you will get to try ClickFunnels and all it has to offer for a full 14 days without paying a penny.
If you are looking to try out SamCart for free click the below link.