SamCart Vs Shopify | Comparison (1 Clear Winner!)

SamCart or Shopify, which one is a better eCommerce platform to build an online store in 2023?

Read this in-depth SamCart vs Shopify comparison to make a smart choice.

To sell your products online efficiently, you need an eCommerce platform. An eCommerce platform makes it pretty easy and convenient to sell your products, reach a greater customer market, and promote your business.

To reach this goal, they provide a wide range of eCommerce tools, increased security, performance, and speed for your store as well.

But the problem is the ever-lasting increase in the number of eCommerce platforms due to which choosing the best one out of them could turn into a nightmare for an online merchant.

Furthermore, you may encounter marketplaces and dedicated eCommerce platforms. Between these two, we prefer dedicated eCommerce solutions as they help promote your brand by letting you create a standalone store with advanced features and greater creative freedom, whereas in a marketplace, you won’t have an individual identity.

We know the importance of eCommerce platforms therefore we make it straightforward for you to choose the right one by comparing the two platforms against different categories.

In this article, we will compare SamCart and Shopify against eCommerce features, ease of use and customizability, theme library, pricing, customer support, and much more.

So stick around if you want to make the right decision.

Shopify Overview

Shopify is indeed a giant of the eCommerce platforms as it provides a wide range of robust features making it an all-in-one SaaS eCommerce platform. It also provides affordable pricing plans, 24/7 customer support, an intuitive dashboard, a huge app market, an impressive template library, flexibility, and creative freedom.

SamCart Overview

SamCart is one of the simplest digital selling tools and a prominent checkout and shopping cart software that helps generate quick sales and drive rapid conversions. It has made its name in the market owing to its remarkable features, template library, drag-and-drop editor, ease of use, and affordable pricing.

A Quick Summary of Comparison

In a rush? Check out the SamCart vs Shopify comparison summary below.

Short Verdict�?

Shopify is the indisputable winner of the SamCart vs Shopify comparison as it takes the lead over its counterpart in all the categories.

Shopify is an all-in-one solution that promises an impressive collection of eCommerce features, helpful support options, a huge app market, affordable pricing plans, ease of use and customizability along with greater creative freedom, and an unrivaled template library.

On the contrary, SamCart is easier to use both is mainly geared towards creating sales funnels and checkout pages.

1. eCommerce Features

The core of an online store is its eCommerce features as they play a vital role in running and growing your business and store. Who do you think will win the SamCart vs Shopify eCommerce features comparison? Let’s find out.

Samcart’s Features

SamCart is although a simple sales funnel encompasses various impressive eCommerce features. For starters, you can sell physical, digital, and even subscription-based products, while you can also list unlimited products on your sales page.

You simply need to add a product and enter its name, price, description, URL, and product image. It also allows you to create various discount and coupon types if you want.

In addition to that, SamCart helps you in reaching the global market as you can sell in any language and currency, depending on the location of your customer. SamCart also provides numerous customization features to build an attractive sales or checkout page without writing code.

But before you drive your campaign, there are some pretty cool features to make use of. The highlight of the show is A/B split testing tool that helps compare the conversion potential of different versions of the same page.

This saves you from an annoying and time-consuming effort while assisting you in discovering ways of creating a productive campaign strategy.

Other than this, it offers one-click upsells to maximize your profit enticing the customer to buy another product with a single click during checkout, without adding additional information again.

Similarly, cross-selling can come in handy to convince customers to buy a complete bundle of products. Moreover, it offers Smart Pixel Tracking, Add to Order, an option to set “Pay what you want”, and in-depth insights through traffic, subscriptions, and charges reports.

SamCart also provides an automatic shipping process and the ability to set different shipping charges. Unlike Shopify, it has a single-checkout page so customers are not redirected to another web for payment processing, thereby, minimizing your cart abandonment rate.

One of the impressive marketing features of SamCart’s affiliate system by letting users sign up for an affiliate program for your products, boosting your sales.

Furthermore, SamCart also offers a customer portal to manage customers, custom fields, flexible options for managing refunds, and a Cart abandonment feature to recover lost sales.

Now let’s see what Shopify brings to the table. 

Shopify’s Features

Shopify, as one of the best eCommerce platforms on the market, is expected to provide all the core and even numerous advanced features. To be honest, it does not disappoint at all.

Shopify is mainly used for selling physical products, but it also allows you to sell digital goods, subscriptions, memberships, and videos.

It supports unlimited product entries and product categories. You can also set different variations of the same product along with the ability to set different prices for different versions of the same product.

Unlike SamCart, it also has a decent inventory management feature along with an ability to add and manage videos and 3D assets on product pages.

Amazingly, besides selling your products on Shopify, you can connect different marketplaces like eBay and Amazon and sell there too.

Additionally, it also comes with a blogging engine, and full-featured CMS to host your entire business website on Shopify. Commendably, you also get a mobile app to manage your store easily from anywhere.

Now that the products are set, to grow and flourish your business, Shopify comes with plenty of marketing features.

You can, for instance, offer gift cards and discounts, create and manage intriguing emails using email templates, generate sitemap.xml, and even sell on different social media platforms like Facebook.

The SEO features are also praiseworthy as it allows setting meta tags, titles, custom URL, 301 redirects, etc.

Once your business flourishes, it’s also essential to keep a track of it. For that, Shopify provides outstanding analytics that provides in-depth stats of almost everything like traffic, customer rate, top pages, conversion rate, visitor’s location etc.

Not to mention comprehensive reports, like sales, retail, profit, customers, marketing, inventory reports and many others.

Furthermore, it also offers dropshipping features, a free SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, free shipping, options to set shipping rates, automated tax handling, and abandoned cart recovery to pull back customers.

It also made cross-border a piece of cake as it allows you to translate the store into 50+ languages and product prices into 133+ currencies. Shopify also automatically calculates import fees and provides secure payment gateways.

To cut the long story short, SamCart comes with a fascinating feature-set for quick selling through checkout pages, however, these do not come close to what Shopify offers. Shopify provides all the core and important eCommerce features geared towards all different aspects of running an eCommerce store.

Winner: Shopify. 

2. SamCart Vs Shopify: Template Library

Templates and their editing options are an essential consideration, especially for beginners who don’t have any coding skills. So let’s see what SamCart and Shopify have to offer.

SamCart offers around 20 templates which are all free. The templates are the result of expert marketing professionals putting in vigorous effort and repeated testing to get you the best templates proven to be effective in driving traffic to your store.

Moreover, you can also choose an empty layout so that you can start working on a blank canvas.

Within these templates, there are some checkout templates for a simpler checkout process and one-page funnel templates ideal for single-page websites. SamCart mainly provides for checkout pages rather than themes for full-fledged online stores.

SamCart lets you preview the template on both desktop and mobile versions, meaning the templates are responsive on a mobile screen.

Any element of the template can be edited through a simple customization process using its drag-and-drop editor.

However, with SamCart, you can modify mainly basic features such as fonts, the position of blocks, layout colors, edit text, buttons, images, videos, and sections (full-width containers) that hold the page’s content.

What Shopify has to offer to compete with SamCart? let’s see

Shopify comes up with an eye-catching template library containing a wide range of enchanting templates, each of which is modern, professional and optimized for high conversions. However, out of 70 templates, only 10 are free.

The premium templates cost a high amount but are worth it for businesses making high sales. As a beginner, one should start with a free template and then upgrade to a premium one as it obviously offers greater functionality and is more attractive.

You also get a free trial in premium templates so no need to worry there as well.

Unlike the one at SamCart, this library is well organized, categorizing all the themes into various different categories including Home and Garden, Sport, Health and Beauty, Arts and Photography etc.

The templates are designed for a complete full-fledged online store, so they are not focused on checkout pages. Shopify also gives a preview option while all the templates are mobile responsive as well.

For template editing, you can make use of its intuitive drag-and-drop editor turning it into a unique eCommerce site.

To mention the few editing options, you can change the logo, colours, add banners, more sections, homepage layout, fonts, slideshows, etc.

It also allows you to do extensive tweaks by getting access to underlying HTML and CSS coding.

In addition, to that, you can ask for its in-house team of developers and designers, that can design a professional and distinguishing custom eCommerce template for your site at a certain cost.

In summary, Shopify is the winner as it offers a wider range of versatile templates for the whole online store, rather than just checkout pages of SamCart.  Shopify has greater template editing options however SamCart’s templates are all free.

Winner: Shopify 

3. SamCart Vs Shopify: Ease of Use / Customizability

It’s time to find out who provides better ease of use and customizability options between SamCart and Shopify. Ease of use has always been a priority of users so they don’t get frustrated using it and start running their store quickly and easily.

SamCart lets you get started within a few minutes while helping you get rid of bland checkout pages like the one on PayPal. With the ease of use of SamCart, even the ones not aware of coding can make a magnetizing checkout page.

The interface is also neat and intuitive for easy navigation through different options.

Once you get in, you can select a pre-filled template or a blank one and get on with the customization process.

Once you create the checkout page, you can easily connect it with a Stripe or PayPal account. With SamCart, you can also easily offer Affiliate programs without complications and offer courses.

For customization of the content page, you have SamCart’s drag-and-drop content builder. This way you can drag blocks like a text block, video block etc, and drop them on the canvas on the left.

To customize each element, you simply need to click it, and the content editor menu will change offering numerous customization options.

In addition to that, you can also drag and drop widgets including Testimonial, countdown, FAQs, Progress bar etc. This further gives you access to changing the settings and style of each widget to index it well with your taste and your brand.

Widgets and elements can be arranged vertically or side by side as well. Within a row or column, you can add as many elements as you want. Furthermore, to add an image, you can also explore the free image library and add it on the checkout page.

When you select a content-filled template, you can also easily click on each content and access numerous editing options right there. Simply customize each element, add, or delete it.

Now let’s check out how Shopify would compete against SamCart here.

Shopify lets you sign up to your account in just a few clicks so that you can get started with selling your products within a few minutes. Overall Shopify is easy to use but it may get cumbersome when making use of dozens of options and features it provides.

However, it is safe to say that amongst the fully-functional online stores, Shopify is one of the easiest and simplest to use. With the customizability options and ease of use it provides, it is best for both beginners as well as for experts.

Shopify helps you create an eCommerce website right away with pre-designed templates which can then be customized through dozens of customization options.

In addition to that, the interface is neat and intuitive with the options menu to the left and the canvas for editing on the right.

For customization, you get a drag-and-drop editor through which you can easily drag blocks, sections, forms, and move them around on canvas with ease. It allows you to customize typography, colours, pages, shopping cart, checkout, add collections, and much more.

Furthermore, real-time editing can be done on pre-filled templates, by simply selecting and modifying the elements. Some of these elements are product pages, headings, collage, announcement bar, header and footer, newsletter, and much more.

Shopify also guides through the store development process and even provides a straightforward store management process.

The editors allow you to make a unique and mesmerizing storefront without any technical skills. But still, one can access its HTML and CSS to get complete creative freedom of your store.

Moreover, with Shopify, you can not only build a store but also host a complete business website with ease.

In conclusion, Although SamCart is more intuitive when considering the wide range of customization options provided by Shopify along with flexibility and ease of use, Shopify has an upper edge over SamCart.

Winner: Shopify 

4. SamCart Vs Shopify: Pricing

It’s time to check how much you have to pay the platform in exchange for their promised services, features, and tools. So who do you think will win the SamCart vs Shopify pricing battle?

SamCart lets you start selling for free which is praiseworthy. But once this 14-day trial is over, you will have to select a premium package to go for.

During this 14-day trial, you can explore the functionality of the system and make sure that it’s the right choice for your store and business.

There are three premium plans (starting at $49 a month) with a straightforward pricing structure. As usual, each plan builds on the features of the previous plan, hence adding new features plus the features from the previous one.

 The details of the SamCart pricing plans are as follows;

Commendably, SamCart does not charge a transaction fee on any of its plans irrespective of the payment gateway you choose.

Additionally, if you have many accounts to handle and an enterprise-level business, you can contact SamCart and get a custom plan.

You get two ways to pay for your plans; month to month or on a yearly basis. If you pay upfront for the whole year, you will get a 20% discount on all SamCart’s premium plans.

Besides the 14-day trial, SamCart offers a 30-days money-back guarantee where you will get a full refund with no questions asked even for yearly plans.

Let’s dig into Shopify’s pricing plans.

Shopify also grants a 14-day trial where you gain complete access to all of its features without even entering the payment details. Once the trial is over, you can select from any of the premium Shopify plans.

These plans include 3 main pricing plans (starting at $29) and 2 additional plans; Shopify Lite and Shopify Plus.

Shopify Lite is the cheapest plan that allows you to sell unlimited products by simply adding a “Buy Now” button to any of your existing websites or blogs.

Although you will not have a standalone store, you can still accept payments and make use of tons of eCommerce tools and features.

Shopify Plus is a cost-effective solution offering large-scale business generating high sales volume amazing advanced features like sophisticated security, dedicated account manager, etc.

The Shopify pricing plan structure is as follows;

Shopify charges no setup fee or transaction fee unless you use Shopify’s built-in payment system. Otherwise, you will be charged a transaction fee of 0.5-2% depending on your plan. Moreover, there is a credit card rate to factor in as well.

Shopify gives you an option to either pay on a monthly basis, or pay upfront for a yearly or a 2-year plan. In that case, you get a 10% or 20% discount on yearly and biennial plans respectively.

When it comes to Pricing, Shopify has a slightly upper edge over SamCart as it offers flexible and affordable pricing plans especially taking account of the feature pack, it obviously provides greater value for money.

Winner: Shopify. 

5. SamCart Vs Shopify: Integrations And Add-ons

Every eCommerce platform comes up with integrations, apps, and add-ons to extend the functionality of your website.

SamCart does not come up with an app store, but it does allow you to integrate basic tools with your SamCart account.

A total of these 30 integrations are divided into categories which are Email, membership, marketing automation, page builders, and payment providers.

For page builders, you get only WordPress while it provides Stripe, PayPal, Authroize.net and Braintree as payment processors.

In the email category, integrations like Mailchimp, AWeber, etc are available. Likewise, HubSpot, Drip, and others can be integrated for marketing purposes.

Other than these, Zapier is also available that in turn allows you to provide over 3000 integrations to automate your business.

Now let’s see what Shopify has to offer here.

Shopify encompasses an enormous app store containing a wide range of over 2000 apps, add-ons, and integrations.

Here you can find any type of integration or app you wish for which are neatly divided into several categories like store management, marketing, merchandising, store design, conversion, fulfillment, etc.

These categories and collections are in turn divided into subcategories and then sections making it much easier to search for the right one.

The diversity of the integrations and apps is such that to discuss even the major ones would require a separate dedicated topic.

For example, for marketing and SEO,  you get MailChimp, Privy, Snapchat ads, Facebook channel, Google channel, Insta feed, Booster SEO, Shop Channel, and dozens of others.

For dropshipping, you can integrate Obelo and Spocket or for print-on-demand integration with apps like Printful, Printify.

Other than these, you get plenty of apps for store development, finances, security, analytics, Shipping solutions, promotions, upselling, customer feedback, cart modification, images and media, inventory planning,  internationalization, navigation, store pages, product variation, advertising, direct marketing, and for various other categories.

In addition to that, you can integrate with famous platforms like eBay, Walmart, Amazon, WordPress, and even Zapier that in turn gets you access to thousands of integrations.

Briefly, Shopify takes the lead due to the full-fledged app store it provides as opposed to only a few basic tools of SamCart.

Winner: Shopify

6. SamCart Vs Shopify: Customer Support

Customer support is the factor that will help you out when you are stuck in developing or running your store. So what do SamCart and Shopify have in store for us?

SamCart offers a thorough Help Centre containing dozens of articles that comprehensively tend to cover issues you may encounter. The articles even explain solutions with the help of pictures and video tutorials. These are also divided into several categories for ease of browsing.

Other than this, you also get access to blogs, free training, FAQs, and Facebook groups, to help you gain more information on certain topics. But if you want to reach a real live agent, that is also easily possible.

You can get in touch with their support team through email and live chat which is only available from 9 am – 5 pm ET on weekdays. The support team is responsive and there to help you out during business hours.

Do you think Shopify offers better customer support? Let’s check it out. 

Shopify also encompasses an enormous knowledge base full of articles and guides. These are also well arranged into several categories and subcategories along a search bar, like in SamCart, so you can effectively search out your solutions.

Besides the Help Centre, Shopify offers various webinars, podcasts, blogs, guides, business courses, FAQs, social media platforms, video tutorials, and a Business encyclopedia.

All of these grants you access to a wide range of Business and eCommerce information which can come in handy. Additionally, a community forum is another way to ask for solutions from fellow users, developers, and product experts.

If all these self-help resources weren’t enough, Shopify also offers technical support through 24/7 live chat, email, and a call-back service. Amongst these, LiveChat gets you the fastest response.

In short, it’s vivid that Shopify takes the lead owing to numerous self-help resources and support options as opposed to limited self-help resources and limited hours of technical support of SamCart.

Winner: Shopify 

Final Verdict

SamCart and Shopify both have different specialties making them ideal for different scenarios. SamCart with its eCommerce features, ease of use, support, and affordable pricing plans is a good option for digital marketers and course creators or for those who want to sell a single product. It helps build and manage sales funnel and checkout pages for effective customer conversion.

Shopify, on the other hand, is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that provides robust eCommerce features, flexibility and creative freedom, intuitive interface, dozens of support options and resources, pocket-friendly pricing, enchanting theme library, and an enormous app market,  for running a full-fledged online store. In conclusion, Shopify is an undisputable winner of the SamCart vs Shopify comparison.