Have you been looking for the best place to sell online?
Do you need to change your usual ecommerce platform for something that actually makes your life easier?
Then you’re in the right place. In this post, we will compare two popular ecommerce solutions, SamCart and Kartra, to find out which is a better option.
We’ll consider their pricing, integrations and main features to end up with a pros and cons list.
Let’s see where that takes us.
SamCart vs Kartra
SamCart
SamCart is an ecommerce platform that lets you sell physical and digital products. These include online courses and coaching sessions.
As an all-in-one solution, they don’t only help you deliver your online courses but also convert your potential customers and know where your sales are coming from, amongst other things.
Kartra
Kartra was released in 2018 by Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsaime who own several software solutions as Genesis Digital.
It is a marketing platform that allows you to sell anything online while you market and scale your business.
You can take a look at how it works on their view demo.
Key features
What you can sell
With Kartra and SamCart you can sell digital products and services such as online courses, coaching sessions and even podcasts. Both platforms also let you sell physical products.
Website Builder
SamCart and Kartra have drag-and-drop page builders that let you create unlimited pages. They have long lists of pre-design templates and they also let you save designs as templates.
Both also let you host your website on their server or publish it to your own domain.
Additionally, Kartra Pages is also equipped with Behavioral Adaptive Marketing. That means it will recognize whether a visitor is already subscribed to your newsletter, and based on that, it can display or hide forms accordingly.
Learning features
SamCart includes quizzes, assignments, drip content and auto-enroll. You can also require a student to complete the quiz before they proceed to the next lesson. This means you’re able to identify and address any gaps in their knowledge from that lesson.
Kartra has a similar feature but for maximizing conversions. You can give your leads a personality quiz so you can assess their knowledge of a subject and evaluate what type of training they need. That way, you’ll be able to send the right sales message at the right time.
Conversions
Email marketing
Every Kartra account is provisioned with Kartra Mail, its own email gateway, and it also integrates iwith SendGrid, MailGun, Elastic Mail and Postmark.
SamCart, on the other hand, doesn’t have built-in email features so you’ll have to integrate with a third party. However, unlike Kartra, it integrates with top-rated email marketing services such as Mailchimp, Aweber, ConvertKit and others.
CRM
SamCart has a basic Student management area where course creators can enroll students in their courses. If you wish to access more advanced CRM features, you can integrate with HubSpot, Keap or other powerful third-party options.
Kartra doesn’t provide integration with these tools since it has advanced built-in features to help with your marketing campaigns.
Maximizing Average Order Value
You’ll find that both SamCart and Kartra have multiple upsells, payment options on upsell pages and post-purchase 1-click downsells, amongst several other helpful features. Kartra also has last-minute “add-on” offers.
Check out
SamCart lets you provide multiple payment options. Amongst them, you’ll find a Pay What You Want option.
They support PayPal, Stripe, Apple and Google Pay, Authorize.net and Braintree.
SamCart also lets you set up a percentage or flat value from your settings. That way, it will add the tax value during checkout.
As to Kartra, it automatically calculates and adds the sales tax or VAT to your checkout process. It has fewer payment gateway options than SamCart, integrating only with Stripe, Authorize.net, PayPal and Braintree.
Content delivery
Both SamCart and Kartra let you integrate with Kajabi to create beautiful online courses.
They also have high levels of flexibility regarding how your content is delivered.
Whichever platform you choose, you’ll be able to offer free and paid tiers to your courses. You can have one-time payments, recurring subscriptions and limited payment plans.
Integrations
SamCart seamlessly syncs up with more than 750 integrations, integrating with ActiveCampaign, Get Response, Constant Contact and others.
Kartra also offers tons of integrations with big names such as Google Calendar, Zoom and Twilio.
If you or your development team want to code your own custom integration, Kartra also offers API, IPN and Custom App system with all the tools you’ll need. They replace automate.io and Zapier, although you can also integrate Kartra with Zapier if you want to.
Team collaboration
SamCart has team collaboration features, even on its medium plan. On Grow, you can add up to 3 Admin level users whereas in Scale, you can add up to 10 Admin, Support or Read-Only level users.
Support users are meant to help you support your customers and they can create, delete and turn on/off coupons on the product page.
Read-only users can download all corresponding CSV files related to reports.
Meanwhile, Kartra lets you add team members right from the start, on its lowest plan. You can add up to 5 members in the Starter plan and fine-tune role permissions.
So unlike with Samcart, with Kartra you can actually pick which access you give to each user and customize the levels. You’ll see a long list of sections like pages, payment settings and membership and you’ll be able to choose who gets access to what.
Analytics
SamCart has many marketing optimization techniques like split testing, all-time statistics designed to give you a high-level view of your subscriptions’ performance, and a charges report.
They also let you collect UTM tracking parameters on your SamCart checkout pages to pinpoint exactly where your sales are coming from.
As to Kartra, it gives you analytics for everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything.
You’ll see how your traffic and conversions are doing, how many customers renew their subscriptions, how much time it takes to resolve a helpdesk ticket, truly anything.
You won’t get A/B testing everywhere, only with your email funnel and website pages, but with the amount of simple diagrams and easy-to-read displays you’ll get, you probably won’t need more.
Languages
SamCart allows you to translate your checkout page and order summary into other languages that aren’t English. Its pre-filled language dropdown includes eight languages: Spanish, Japanese, French and others.
If your desired language isn’t on the list, you can directly enter translations into the Language fields.
Kartra, on the other hand, offers instant translation to 15 different languages including Dutch, Bulgarian and Slovak.
Support and resources
SamCart has a knowledge base, a blog, the SamCart University and free training videos to help you start selling in a heartbeat. If you require help, you can reach out via chat or email.
They also offer an add-on plan called Access that gets you one-on-one calls with a Customer Success Manager.
Kartra also has a learning center and a blog full of tips and guides. They also have a Facebook community and 24/7 product support via chat.
Kartra is also open to feedback so you can request new features or even vote on features already requested by other Kartra users!
Pricing
All of SamCart’s plans include a 7-day free trial and a monthly fee:
- Launch: $59 per month. Standard integrations for one user.
- Grow: $119 per month. On-demand executive reports and built-in SEO engine.
- Scale: $299 per month. Custom CRM and API integrations.
Kartra has three premium plans with a 30-day money-back guarantee:
- Starter: $119 per month. Includes 5 team members and unlimited websites.
- Growth: $229 per month. Unlock unlimited language support, surveys and quizzes.
- Professionals: $549 per month. Add up to 20 team members and get helpdesk live chat.
SamCart Pros and Cons
Pros
- Multiple integrations.
- More payment gateways.
Cons
- Fewer built-in features.
Kartra Pros and Cons
Pros
- Behavioral Adaptive Marketing
- Built-in email features.
- Supports more languages.
Cons
- Doesn’t include a free trial.
Verdict
SamCart and Kartra are both amazing software solutions for anyone who already has a team. As you can see, they have monthly fees that not everyone will be able to meet. If you’re just getting started and cannot pay for a plan, I recommend you read our post on Gumroad, which only takes a percentage of each sale.
However, if that’s not your case and you’re debating between SamCart and Kartra, I believe Kartra is a better choice.
Not only do they have built-in features that are nonexistent in SamCart, but they also give you the tools to integrate with any app thanks to their API.
Which ecommerce platform do you choose?
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