Today, we’re going to talk about ThriveCart and SamCart, highly popular ecommerce platforms you might have considered when looking for places to sell online.
But which one should you go for?
In this post, we compare SamCart and ThriveCart, and see their features and pricing, to find the answer.
Let’s go!
SamCart vs ThriveCart
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.
Thrivecart
ThriveCart is one of the most popular shopping cart software tools out there. It was founded by Josh Bartlett in 2016 and over the years it has helped online businesses generate over $2.6 billion in sales!
One of its most attractive features is its lifetime license, with no monthly fees.
Key features
What you can sell
With ThriveCart 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.
SamCart also lets you integrate with Kajabi to create beautiful online courses.
Until recently, that was a huge advantage compared to ThriveCart, because the latter didn’t let you host your videos.
However, ThriveCart has launched the past year a course platform called Learn with two versions:
- Learn: available for free for users.
- Learn+: a paid advanced version containing a number of extra-powerful features.
We’ll get more in-depth about this in a minute.
Builder
SamCart and Kajabi have drag-and-drop page builders that let you create unlimited pages. However, SamCart’s list of pre-design templates is longer and it also lets you save designs as templates.
SamCart is also considerably easier to use. Its interface has easy tools to navigate through the platform, making it perfect for beginners.
Learning features
With ThriveCart, you can create quizzes, drip courses, offer certifications, track user progress and more.
Similarly, 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.
Websites
Both SamCart and ThriveCart provide you with a straightforward sales page, so people can learn about your course and purchase it.
If you already have a website, however, this can be a huge problem. You may end up with inconsistencies between your website and checkout page, confusing users.
Email marketing
Both SamCart and ThriveCart integrate with the most popular email marketing services such as Mailchimp, Aweber, ConvertKit and more.
They don’t have built-in email features so they depend on third-party integrations for email marketing. This might end up signifying very high costs for you.
Maximizing Average Order Value
You’ll find that SamCart has multiple upsells, payment options on upsell pages and post-purchase 1-click downsells, amongst several other helpful features.
ThriveCart also offers one-click upsells, bump offers and a one-time payment option to help you increase your revenue.
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, Samcart will add the tax value during checkout.
ThriveCart comes with automatic sales tax calculation which automatically applies sales tax according to the customer’s location.
Content delivery
Both platforms 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.
They will also let you offer weekly, monthly and quarterly billing.
Team collaboration
ThriveCart allows multiple team members access to the account with different permissions levels, making collaboration easy.
However, you need to pay extra to access this feature. If you are just offering online courses, you can pay for Learn+. And if you have other things to sell, you can go with a ThriveCart Pro account, which includes the sub-users feature.
Learn+ offers you specific permissions for your staff, such as browsing through all students, looking up individual students and modifying access, and more.
SamCart also has team collaboration features, even on its medium plan. On Grow, you’ll be able to 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.
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.
ThriveCart, on the other hand, has forecasting and different real-time metrics. It also comes with split testing so you can test the different variations of product and checkout pages.
Integrations
SamCart seamlessly syncs up with more than 750 integrations, integrating with ActiveCampaign, Get Response, Constant Contact and others.
ThriveCart provides more app integrations in various categories, allowing you to make your website compatible with a number of services.
They also offer an API integration on ThriveCart Developers. However, you need an account to use it. SamCart, on the other hand, has a public API you can access for free.
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.
ThriveCart, however, native supports more languages. They offer you 9 languages and two varieties of Portuguese.
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.
ThriveCart offers support via its ticket system, which you can access through your account dashboard. The delivery response can be of up to 24 hours. Sadly, they don’t offer phone support.
If you have an urgent question, you can try reaching out to fellow users via the Facebook group “ThriveCart Academy”.
ThriveCart also has tons of documentation and tutorials, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.
Pricing
The cool thing about SamCart is it doesn’t take a percentage of your sales. You’re free to grow with no punishments and keep more of your money.
All of SamCart’s plans include a 14-free trial.
- 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.
- Enterprise: contact sales. Multiple subaccounts and product roadmap prioritization.
ThriveCart, on the other hand, doesn’t have multiple pricing options. Currently, they have a Lifetime Deal for $495.
When you purchase, you can also add an upgrade for $195. This pro version gives you access to simple tax functionality, custom domain name, and advanced user management, amongst others.
ThriveCart also has a 30-day money-back guarantee.
SamCart Pros and Cons
Pros
- Sell unlimited products.
- Multiple integrations.
Cons
- Requires tons of integrations.
ThriveCart Pros and Cons
Pros
- Easy-to-use.
- Multiple learning features.
- More multilingual options.
Cons
- Only has a lifetime deal.
- No phone support.
Verdict
We’ve seen ThriveCart and SamCart are quite powerful ecommerce platforms. But it’s time to choose one as the best.
Personally, I find that although both have done incredibly well in the job of developing the tools needed for selling products, SamCart is a better choice.
Not only do they have more accessible pricing so you can start small and then expand, but they also have a very user-friendly interface. And its website builder is by far more powerful.
ThriveCart seems to be a more complicated platform, with multiple features hidden behind extra payments.
At the end of the day, it’s also important to remember neither ThriveCart nor SamCart offers a free plan, which it’s a big con.
Which one will you pick?
Tell us in the comments!
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