Are you looking for an eCommerce platform that will maximize conversions and minimize stress?
When it comes to marketing automation tools—and online shopping carts especially—you’ve probably noticed a LOT of platforms vying for your attention.
With so many options for selling your products and services online, it can end up being a bit of a hair-pulling exercise trying to decide which one is best for your business. But without a seamless process guiding visitors to your checkout page and encouraging them to buy, you could be putting the brakes on your business’s growth.
So today, we’re going to fast-track your decision with an in-depth look at two of the most popular software used by entrepreneurs to scale their online businesses: SamCart and ClickFunnels.
Buckle up for our comprehensive review of both platforms, their key differences, and, of course, our ultimate verdict on which one comes out on top.
What is SamCart?
Both SamCart and ClickFunnels provide a way to effectively promote and sell your services and products (physical as well as digital), but they do go about it quite differently.
SamCart specializes in high-conversion checkout pages that focus on simplicity. Because many checkout pages are designed for functionality rather than conversions, it’s pretty common for consumers to pull out of online transactions. In fact, marketing automation platform Drip reports that the average cart abandonment rate is just under a whopping 70%!
SamCart is a checkout tool and page builder designed to minimize cart abandonment through the use of clear, well-built, and focused one-page product pages and sales funnels.
What makes SamCart’s shopping cart platform unique among shopping cart software is that everything is designed to increase your sales.
Not only does it contain everything you need to sell online in one package, it’s super user-friendly, AND when its features are used effectively, it will—in theory—earn you a ton more revenue (SamCart claims the average user makes 3-5x more than if they were using another online shopping cart software)!
While many of its competitors, including ClickFunnels, focus on being more of an “all-in-one” platform, SamCart has stuck to its specialty (checkout experiences) and delivers on it incredibly well.
What is ClickFunnels?
While ClickFunnels is also a tool that supports customer checkout, it is first and foremost a website and sales funnel builder. ClickFunnels is designed to solve one problem that online entrepreneurs face the most: significant drop-off rates at the initial stages of the sales funnel.
ClickFunnels does this by helping you to increase engagement early on in the customer journey so that more and more of your customers make it to your conversion-optimized checkout pages.
SamCart vs. ClickFunnels Features
Checkout Pages
We love SamCart’s intuitive interface and the fact you can design and optimize your payment pages to align with your brand. They also provide pre-built checkout page layouts, which include customization options to streamline the buying process and enhance customer satisfaction.
The simplicity of SamCart’s templates is complemented by their straightforward drag and drop builder, making it a dream for the not-so-tech-savvy users to get set up!
ClickFunnels also includes checkout pages (known as “order pages” in the application) but they don’t quite live up to the fantastic range of templates and custom design options offered by SamCart and almost feel like a bit of an afterthought.
Our winner: SamCart
Known for its expertise in checkout optimization and simplicity, SamCart is definitely the go-to option if your goal is to create an engaging, conversion-optimized checkout page.
Revenue Optimization
Whatever the “would you like fries with that?” equivalent is in your business, both SamCart and ClickFunnels include the option to create pages for upselling product upgrades and services.
(Psst: If you’re selling online and not offering upsells, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table!)
Just like with checkout pages, SamCart offers a more complete solution, with pages that are easy to build and allow your buyers to upgrade their product purchases with just one click.
ClickFunnels also has a one-click upsell feature that allows customers to add product upgrades and additional items easily. And since billing information is stored in ClickFunnels, there’s no need for customers to re-enter their credit card number in order to purchase upsells.
One feature that makes SamCart stand out here is the ability to add exit pop-ups to upsell pages, keeping customers engaged and increasing your conversion rate. Using an exit pop-up, you get the opportunity to market to your customer again and show them an extra call to action.
Our winner: SamCart
As a dedicated checkout platform, creating upsell pages is one of SamCart ‘s strong suits. We are also big fans of their split testing feature, which allows you to create one or more checkout page variants to see which one has the greatest success in terms of conversions.
Integrations
When you’re using a bunch of tools to run your business, you’ll want to pick a platform that easily connects with the other marketing tools and applications in your technology stack. Luckily, both SamCart and ClickFunnels allow you to keep data flowing to one place, either natively or through Zapier—a tool that allows different platforms to connect and communicate.
You can integrate SamCart and ClickFunnels with payment providers, email marketing tools, webinar tools, and membership platforms. The Circuit Sales system team particularly loves how Samcart seamlessly integrates with our email marketing tool Drip!
An additional SamCart feature we love is the helpful sandbox that lets you test if everything is running as it should–a vital step before pushing your sales funnels out into the world.
Our winner: Both
SamCart and ClickFunnels both integrate with a lot of software.
Reporting & Analytics
In the world of eCommerce, neglecting key metrics can lead to a lack of clarity on important business decisions (and affect your bottom line). Fortunately, SamCart and ClickFunnels both place a lot of emphasis on tracking key metrics.
In SamCart’s basic plan, you only get access to the sales reports. This means that while you can track sales performance, you cannot analyze it or use it to optimize performance. As soon as you move to a higher grade, you’ll have access to all the data required to analyze your sales and conversions.
ClickFunnels offers detailed analytics reports which provide in-depth insights into various key metrics, including orders, conversion rates, and much more. As your sales funnels are live with ClickFunnels, you can monitor the performance of each one using simple tools on the platform.
Our winner: Ok, we’re on the fence with this one…
SamCart’s reporting system is easier to understand than ClickFunnels’, making it a more suitable option for beginners. While it doesn’ have everything, we think it has everything that you need.
ClickFunnels offers a more comprehensive range of analytics and reports tools, making it a bit more attractive to experienced marketers.
Courses
Many of our Circuit Sales System students are, like us, in the business of selling life-changing courses. SamCart has become even more appealing to digital product-based businesses through its ability to create and host courses with its new Courses App.
For entrepreneurs that want to create and sell basic courses alongside other digital products, this is an effective solution with an incredibly easy-to-use interface. Building a course really couldn’t be simpler, and managing your students is a breeze.
ClickFunnels lets you create a membership funnel easily but their membership sites aren’t as visually appealing–especially on mobile–and they don’t include video hosting. While it does a great job at building sales funnels and landing pages, its membership site builder is very limited, providing a poor end user experience.
Our winner: SamCart
Thanks to their new built-in course integration, Samcart is a little more intuitive when it comes to building your online course, offering seamless course setup with a high degree of customization.
Ease of Use and Customer Support
Both ClickFunnels and SamCart are designed with user-friendliness in mind. However, ClickFunnels may have a steeper learning curve for complex funnel setups, whereas SamCart’s focus on simplicity makes it an excellent choice for beginners.
With its ease of use, we don’t think you’ll need too much support using SamCart. But if you do run into trouble, there are plenty of resources from blog articles, guides, and tutorials in its “Knowledge Base” to help you get unstuck.
ClickFunnels also offers ample support, but you have to pay to access a lot of that training. Besides its impressive library of tutorials, ClickFunnels also offers chat support–not necessarily with a human–to equip you with the best resources to overcome your technical challenges.
Winner: SamCart
One of our favorite features of SamCart is hands-down the phenomenal training and customer support that they provide. But with such a user-friendly interface, we highly doubt you’ll even need to make use of it.
The Problem with “All-In-One” Solutions
We totally get that having all of your marketing needs inside one platform sounds like a dream come true. But as they say, ‘a jack of all trades is a master of none.’ There’s a reason that certain software are known for one thing over another—it’s nearly impossible to do everything well.
When it comes to building your online business, you need every advantage. And choosing the best software for a given task might just save you some headaches in the long run versus trying to get one software to do it all for you.
Hiring a team member for one specific role and then expecting them to do all kinds of different skills is unrealistic (we learnt this the hard way) and this is no different–we can’t expect one marketing tool to deliver everything to the best possible standard. While ClickFunnels prides itself on being an “all-in-one” solution (with a hefty price tag), SamCart has stayed in its lane and become the master of checkout experiences.
Final Verdict
For creating and managing your checkout and product sales process, we strongly believe SamCart is the stronger of the two pieces of software.
What sets SamCart apart is its user-friendly interface, making it easy to set up and customize high-converting checkout pages and sales funnels.
While ClickFunnels is a more complete tool for the entire sales and marketing process, SamCart gives you an incredible degree of control over how your cart and checkout looks, feels and performs–everything you’d expect from a specialized, standalone application.
Want to see it in action?
Find out how you could put more money in your bank with SamCart’s optimized online checkout process: Try it out FREE for 7 Days
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