Lately, I have considered all the leading ecommerce platforms on the market. At a glance, one may think they are all the same, but there are slight differences between them.
Mostly, because the market is competitive and online marketers are more experienced and eager to learn and excel at their businesses.
Consequently, beginner digital marketers and creators get confused when building their portfolios.
Today, I will compare Kartra Vs SamCart feature by feature, and then I will write a pros and cons list to cast some light on the subject and help you decide the best option for your online store.
Katra Overview
Kartra advertises itself as an all-in-one platform with the tools you need to build an online business.
Using Kartra helps you create, market, and launch products or services using their visually engaging templates and straightforward drag-and-drop builder. So you do not need to have prior coding experience.
They do not have many integrations because they have native apps and tools to help you build sale funnels, manage campaigns, create and manage affiliate programs, and sell digital and physical products, membership sites, and online courses.
Kartra is a product of Genesis Digital, a company based out of La Jolla, California.
SamCart Overview
SamCart has been in the business long enough to earn a reputation. The e-commerce platform was launched in 2014 to help digital marketers sell online.
Using SamCart allows creators and online marketers to create e-commerce storefronts with a responsive drag-and-drop builder, so you do not need to be a coding expert to get started.
The software allows you to sell online courses, membership sites, ebooks, consulting services, and more.
SamCart has been in the market long enough to prove the value of its product.
Who Can Benefit From Kartra
Kartra is an all-in-one platform for course creators to host, market, and sell digital goods. The platform has respectable popularity among solopreneurs, course creators, and other digital product developers because it allows them to count on a single platform for their operations.
Among their users they have:
- Consultants
- Online fitness trainers
- ecommerce companies
- Tutors
- Online instructors and academies
- Personal coaches
- Startups
Who Can Benefit From SamCart
SamCart is basically for anyone who owns an online business to sell physical or digital products. According to their site, their product is for: :
- Authors
- Agencies
- Amazon/Etsy Sellers
- Course Creators
- Coaches & Consultants
- Entrepreneurs
- Nonprofits
- Physical Product Sellers
- Side Hustlers
But like any other product, SamCart is specifically designed for a particular user in mind, so depending on what you sell, you need to research to find out if it works for you.
Kartra Feature By Feature
A/B Testing & Split Testing
Give clients what they want and excel at your game. The Kartra A/B testing feature enables you to create better-converting pages based on accurate data.
Allow customers to choose, show two versions of the same page, discover which performs better, and stick to that design.
The tool is simple but potent. Setting up for A/B testing takes about 10 minutes and the data automatically integrates into your Kartra dashboard.
The A/B testing feature enables you to:
- Show up to 4 versions of the same page
- Customize traffic percentage for each page.
- Set and track your goals
- Statistic report
Affiliate marketing
Kartra knows the importance of affiliate marketing for an online business. Using their affiliate marketing tool enables you to convert your customers into passionate promoters.
Kartra affiliate management system grants the freedom to contact your affiliates, set their commissions, and find the best way to encourage and incentivize them.
Kartra enables you to set up multiple commission tiers, custom affiliate portals, landing page tags for your affiliates, and more. All these features aim to help you succeed in your affiliate marketing efforts.
To maintain the best relationships with your affiliates and monitor their behaviour, Kartra enables you to create mandatory invite questionnaires and terms and conditions to enter your program.
Bump Sales
The Kartra product bump feature allows you strategically display supplementary products on your orders. Your product bum displays next to the “Submit Payment” button and helps your customers add the bump product with a single click.
The Kartra Product Bump feature allows you to display supplementary products on your order.
Cart Abandonment
Some of us tend to overthink when buying online. You find the perfect running shoes and fancy a pair, but after you have them in your shopping cart, you change your mind.
Cart abandonment is a common problem. The study conducted by Baymard Institute compared data from 41 different cart abandonment studies and found that the cart abandonment rate is close to 70%.
With Kartra, sellers can set up a cart abandonment tag in their CRM, and the system will send your customers automatic reminders, offers, and more to encourage them to press the buy button and complete their order.
Integrations
Kartra is a complete marketing platform. So what some people consider a lack of features is the intention behind the product.
Kartra replaces your email marketing platforms. So it does not have email marketing Integrations with Actionetics, ActiveCampaign, Convertkit, MailChimp, HTML forms, and other email marketing platforms.
But it has other valuable Integrations like Zapier + Webhooks, membership software, checkout software, analytics, webinar software, bot software, calendar tools, and custom Integrations API.
One-Click Upsell
One-click upsells are an excellent marketing technique. It is a feature you want to have on your ecommerce platform.
With Kartra, you can rely on one-click upsells to provide your clients with the best value on every purchase.
Pricing
They offer four different levels to suit your needs. You can decide to pay monthly or yearly. If you pay yearly, you can save 25%.
- The Starter Plan costs $99 monthly, and you access a custom domain, up to 2,500 leads, and up to 15,000 emails.
- The Silver Plan costs $199 monthly, and grants you up to 3 custom domains and unlimited emails.
- The Gold Plan costs $299 per month. You get 25,000 leads and five custom domains.
- The Platinum Plan costs $499 per month and gives you 50,000 leads, ten custom domains, and unlimited everything else.
Kartra includes the following features for all its plans:
- Kartra Checkouts: sell online your products or services using safe checkout forms.
- Kartra Pages: intuitive drag-and-drop page builder and hundreds of professional-looking templates.
- Kartra Leads: to build your leads, prospects, and customers database.
- Kartra Funnels and Campaigns: to engineer multi-page funnel flows to convert visitors into leads, customers, and loyal clients.
- Kartra email: for live or automated email/SMS marketing campaigns.
- Kartra Memberships: deliver your content, course, or training material with a drag-and-drop editor to build your membership portal.
- Kartra Marketplace: market your services and resources, or discover resources created by other users.
- Kartra Affiliate Management: to help you recruit, manage and track an army of affiliates to promote your products.
- Kartra Surveys and Quizzes: to help find valuable information about your audience and fine-tune your strategies.
- Kartra Videos: Add pop offers mid-way through your video, inject lead capture forms, multi-video playlists, etc.
- Kartra Calendars: Organize everything from your dashboard.
- Kartra Helpdesks: with ticketing and live chat that integrates with checkout.
When you buy the annual subscription, you save 25%.
Templates Library
Creating a website can be fun for creatives, but when you are busy or do not feel creative pre-made templates become your best friends.
Kartra provides 100 visually attractive full-page templates to help you have a professional-looking page in five minutes (or less).
In the Kartra templates library, you have multiple templates, to name a few: lead capture pages, sales pages, coming soon pages, and more.
All the templates are created by Kartra’s expert marketing team to convert.
SamCart Feature By Feature
A/B Testing & Split Testing
When using SamCart, you can create variations of your checkout page to discover what converts.
The split testing feature enables you to create one or multiple versions to test. The data will help you enhance your marketing strategies by choosing the best-performing page. Remember, one small element can positively impact your checkout page, so allow yourself to find what works best for your ecommerce business.
Affiliate Marketing
Using SamCart, you can create your own private sales team to promote and increase your sales.
You can offer your customers a commission for promoting your product, and every time someone goes to your checkout page by that person’s reference they will earn a commission.
SamCart allows you to create your own private sales team that promotes and sells your products for you.
Bump Offers
Bundling, also known as order bumps are an effective strategy to market your products and services. Bundling your main product or service to complementary products is one of the best strategies to increase your profits from each sale.
For example, let’s say you sell life coaching and healthy eating services, when someone purchases one of the products, you can make a bundle offer and increase your income.
SamCart includes a Bump Offer feature that enables you to implement this technique, once you set it up, the platform will get customers to purchase using your optimized checkout process.
Cart Abandonment
The cart abandonment feature lets you rescue a potential sale, and give you the customer who left the article without completing the payment on your checkout page.
Using SamCart you can personalize emails, SMS, or Facebook ads and remind your customers what they left in your cart.
The advantages of the cart abandonment features are that it has the potential to
- Help you increase conversion rates.
- bring back lost traffic.
- Help you create valuable and lasting relationships with your clients.
Integrations
SamCart takes integrations seriously, and it has a curated list of partners to provide you with only the most powerful integrations to build, grow and scale your business.
Integrations with payment providers
One of the first steps, when you log in, is setting up your payment processor. They give you multiple options so you can offer your customers the best user experience by letting them select the perfect method for their transactions.
Currently, SamCart integrates with the following payment processors:
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Braintree
- Authorize.net
- SamPay
- and Easy Pay Direct
Integrations with Membership sites
When you sell subscription products it’s fundamental to have a membership platform, luckily SamCart supports multiple platforms. Like MemberPress, Thinkific, WishList Member, OptimizePress, MemberMouse, Kajabi Digital, and Access Pass.
Integrations with email marketing tools
For digital marketers, it is important to build good relationships with existing and potential customers. For that reason, you need reliable email integrations within your e-commerce platform.
SamCart has you covered because it integrates with:
- Maropost
- MailChimp
- iContact
- GetResponse
- ConvertKit
- Constant Contact
- AWeber
Integrations with marketing tools
To excel in your marketing strategies and increase your sales and customers, you need to have the proper set of tools to automate and monitor your sales, your business performance, and your productivity in general.
- Klavio
- Ontraport
- ActiveCampaign
- Keep
- Hubspot
One-click upsell
SamCart has remarkable features, but in my opinion one of the most important ones is the one-click upsell feature. This is a strategy used by many giants of the industry, like Amazon for instance.
Offering your customer additional products after their checkout is a strategy to increase your sales and profits. Particularly when selling ebooks, coaching programs, and video courses, the one-click upsell strategy helps you increase funnels to your order and increase your earnings significantly.
Pricing and payment options
Kartra offers a free seven-day trial, so you can get familiar with the platform before buying a subscription.
They have three plans, so you can start small and grow as your business grows.
- Launch ($59/month) is the entry-level plan, but it still has all the tools that you need to get started like email support, onboarding webinars, flexible customer billing options, dashboard and sales reports, weekly webinars, and preview of CreatorU.
- Grow ($119/month) is a more advanced plan, it has all the features of the Launch Plan plus 1-day email support, 1 on 1 launch support call with an expert from SamCart, post-purchase upsells, UTM tracking, and the best of all custom checkout fields.
- Scale ($299/month) everything included in the Grow Plan plus custom CRM and API integrations, cart abandonment, subscription saver, affiliate center, A/B testing, and automatic reporting.
Save up to 33% when you buy the annual subscription.
Subscription Saver Feature
This is the most valuable feature to pay attention to if you sell subscription products. SamCart protects you against expired credit cards and declined payments alike by sending your costumes an email on your behalf.
The email is well-written and it has a link where customer can easily update their payment information. This feature saves you lots of time and energy because you do not have to waste your time and energy chasing your customer to collect your payments.
What if they do not update? After several failed attempts SamCart will automatically cancel your customer’s subscriptions and mark them as “delinquent” so you identify them and reach out, in case you want to.
Templates Library
A clean and fast checkout process can improve your conversion rate significantly. With this in mind, SamCart provides you with templates designed by professional experts for maximum productivity and conversion.
The tools are easy to use, you can create your checkout pages from scratch or take advantage of the pre-designed templates. Using the templates you can customize your checkout page to your liking. Add your logo, your colors, and your terms and conditions checkbox for an enhanced user experience.
Other options for Kartra and SamCart
It is always a good idea to test multiple ecommerce platforms, whether to build yourself a portfolio or to use the absolute best tools for your business, you have the right and almost the obligation to test everything.
I suggest you check out these alternatives if you feel Kartra and SamCart are not what your business needs.
- LeadPages
- Simplero
- Builderall
- LearnWorlds
- ClickFunnels
Can I use them for free?
SamCart offers a seven-day free trial so you can test before you buy a full subscription, Kartra, on the other hand, does not have a free trial but gives you a 1$ fourteen-day trial to get acquainted with their tools.
Wrapping up
Both platforms have amazing features, but online business owners must be aware of their goals and the tools they need to achieve them.
Kartra is an ecommerce platform, but it also has multiple tools to help you manage your online business from one dashboard. The best part is that it has a respectable toolkit to save you money on third-party integrations, this is an advantage that you do not want to miss.
On the other hand, SamCart is great for anyone planning to start an online business. Their product targets course creators, influencers, ecommerce businesses, and coaches among others. It is a suite of simple but valuable features that enable you to grow and scale your online business quickly.
Take your time to consider all the evaluation criteria, think ahead and project shortly to find out what works best for you.
Did you choose one already? Let me know in the comments.
