#209 - Thrivecart VS Samcart

Foreign.

Guys, it is Kate here from. Hello, funnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Today we've got a bit of a tech smackdown for you where I'm going to be running you through the real pros and cons of ThriveCart versus SamCart. I've been in there recently, I've been analyzing the two. One came out a clear winner and I'm going to tell you all about it right inside.

Alrighty, guys, so if you've been listening to some of the recent podcast episodes, you would have heard us talking about how we've been updating some of our tech this year. It wasn't really deliberate. We sort of had our hand forced on one sort of major piece of tech in our toolbox, which was our courseware. It was time to move. And after doing that, it's sort of like this, like whole house of cards things happened. And basically over the last few months we've pretty much updated every single major piece of tech. Like our whole tech stack is new. And one of the ones that I really found the most difficult and the hardest to find some really good information on was which would be the best checkout for us to use, because that's a really, really important piece of software. Previously we'd been using ThriveCart. We had been using ThriveCart for years because of the move from Kajabi to Circle. There were a few different things that we were looking for. You know, for example, like the ability to actually integrate directly with our new platform would be nice. And also another thing happened where with ThriveCart there was a bunch of stability issues happening and I wasn't liking what I was seeing as far as the response from the ThriveCart team. So what happened was within. And I tried not to, you know, like, I've got all the notifications on these groups all muted because I know people can kind of get a bit hysterical about things and I don't like to buy into Internet drama and you know, no tech is perfect. Think sometimes tech is always going to have some issues and problems. But you know what I think is really important, particularly for a piece of software that is important as a checkout where basically if it's not working, people can't make money. I think it's really important the response from the business and how quickly they are attempting to fix it. And there were just some long running problems not happening to everybody. That was the crazy thing. Like it wasn't like the entire platform was down, some accounts were having issues, pretty major issues with the functionality of the checkout, like people were not able to purchase or people were getting double charged or all kinds of things. Buttons weren't appearing on mobile, just weird things like that. And the response from ThriveCart seemed to be to delete the post, complaining about it, no stepping up and saying, hey guys, we're aware of the problems, this is what we're doing about it, or even making recommendations. It turns out that most of the problems are being caused by their newer updated designs. So you know, they could have just come out and emailed everyone, let everyone know, hey, the new designs are not as stable. If this is concerning to you, roll them back, here's what you do. But there was just none of that. And I just thought that's not great, that's not what I want in a provider now backstory, obviously ThriveCart is a lifetime payment platform, which means they just don't have the resources of other platforms. And I understand, myself included, like we paid $500 for platform probably like 10 years ago, so they've probably got some things going on with their model in the back end. Anyway, I'm not here to talk about that, but it did mean we were stuck with a really very real problem is that I don't want to have our checkout that doesn't work or potentially is double charging clients or anything like that. Like that is not good business. It didn't look like it was going to get fixed anytime soon, so it kind of forced our hand to start looking at what else was out there. And I looked at a bunch of things. I know there's lots of things out there, you know, you could use clickfunnels, you could use go high level, you could use obviously Kajabi. But we just moved off Kajabi so I didn't really want another all bells or whistles kind of thing. That did a bunch of other stuff. I really just wanted another checkout software that was just a checkout software but that was going to still tick some very important boxes. So we landed on samcart and I want to test it thoroughly and I found some very real like pros and cons between the two and that's really what I want to chat about. Like what were the differences? What does one do well and the other not do well? So that if you are trying to figure out, you know, which one's the right one for you, you won't have to go through this whole testing process and hopefully I can help to shed some light. So, alrighty, let's start off with the big ones price. So obviously samcart it has lower price options but to be able to do anything useful you really need the $149 a month option and that adds up quite quickly. Whereas ThriveCart, it kind of depends. I think it's around about five to $600. They always have this like forever going away soon. Lifetime price that's never gone away but that's lifetime license. So bit more investment upfront but really after a couple of months you're already ahead if pricing was your main concern.

Next thing, stability as we already mentioned thrivecart stability, not great. And they had had other issues going back as well. Samcart is one of the things on their website that they guarantee a 99.9% uptime rate or something like that. Don't quote me on that, but something very, very high that made me feel very happy that this was something that they were addressing that literally promising it on their page. And that was, you know, I think is very, very important. And from what I've seen so far, they definitely win in that side of things. Next comes support. ThriveCart Traditionally support is terrible. You can go and ask in the their Facebook group. Usually no one from ThriveCart will respond to you. They're really relying on the community to respond. If you send them through a ticket you may never hear back from them again. I understand they're pricing model sucks so they're understaffed but that's not really their end user's problem. Right. Whereas samcart they do have an option for support. It's not super fast to get back to you, but if you did have a major problem you could upgrade to paid support which is supposed to be a more priority service. So it's mean, not ideal but good to have that option. If something was, you know, you're in the middle of a launch, for example, something's gone wrong and you really need help because. Because you just don't have that option. With ThriveCart the next thing I wanted to talk about was the school side of them both like they both offer courseware inside their shopping carts and to be honest the winner, like the clear winner here is actually ThriveCart. It there's is much easier to use, although still not as easy as something like a Kajabi or whatever or a Podia. There's still if you're wanting a really good courseware, that's probably not what I would go for. But yeah, the ThriveCart one, it's easier to use, it looks nicer, it's easier to manage and you know, obviously because you own it for life. If you do go and put your programs in there and then you wanted to change your checkout, you wouldn't have to worry about moving everything. Like you could still leave stuff there and zap people into it if you needed to. SamCart looks bad and it's so hard and fiddly to create a program in there. Like we initially we thought we would create our programs in there and we started it went no, this sucks. So we, we moved all of our legacy programs over to ThriveCart instead. It was part of our leaving Kajabi whole big process. So yeah, for the courseware side of things, thrivecart wins hands down. It also has some really cool features inside the thrivecart learn where you can grant certain things based on tags and do a bunch of other like cross selling and stuff like that, which they just don't seem to have inside of samcart or not that I I could easily see anyway. But literally just trying to set up a basic lesson in Sam Carp was a nightmare. So I would just never want to have to inflict that on anyone. Okay, next up, design again. I think if you've listened to any of my other podcasts, things looking nice is really important to me. I mean that's why we use show it rather than like click funnels or something like that. So design wise, ThriveCart wins with a big asterisk. So ThriveCart's new designs, like their new checkout designs are great, they're beautiful. They've got so many options you can make them look amazing. But those are the ones that were having the stability issues. So if you compared like to like with that previous legacy version of the ThriveCart shopping carts with SamCart's shopping cart designs, ThriveCart actually still wins. They're a bit more customizable. The tamcut ones are very rigid what you can and can't do and some of their formatting gets weird quite quickly if you try to make it look exactly like your website, for example. So I would say like they're both fine for the legacy ones, but if I was to pick a winner between the two it would be ThriveCart and if ThriveCart ever sorts out their issues with the newer versions, then they would absolutely smash samcart when it comes to nice looking checkouts. One con when it comes to samcart and I couldn't think of a category to put this into but was important is you actually can't embed the checkout form into your sales page. So if you had a sales page that was being, you know, you designed elsewhere, like on showit or somewhere else, and you were just wanting to embed the form, which a lot of people like to do, particularly for low ticket office. If you listen to our last couple episodes, you know, we love a low ticket offer and it really can help to increase conversions because anytime you make people click and open another page and things like, that's another step and you're gonna have people that drop off. So I really like the ability to have a checkout page that you can customize your embedded in the actual sales page. You can't do that with samcart. I know they're looking to bring something out like it's in the works, but it's not there yet. And the option that they did give for embedding has zero customization. So you couldn't add things like order bumps and stuff like that, which again, I think is very important. Okay, speaking of order bumps, that brings us to the next thing, which is the order bump design. So you know that little box on your checkout where you go to buy something and there's like usually a little box with an image and a little bit of text. It's like, hey, do you want to add this thing? Click here. So for design wise, I would say ThriveCart is actually easier to use and it has better options. You can kind of hack samcart to have those same options, but they're not built in. You have to go and use the HTML box and start like manually inserting images and, you know, doing your own padding and stuff like that. So if you're okay with a little bit of css, little bit of HTML, then you can make it look fine. But for most people you're going to end up with something and they generally don't render very well on mobile and stuff like that. So I would say that auto bump box design that ThriveCart wins. However, where Sam Cart wins is that you can have multiple order bumps on SAM Cart. You can't do that on ThriveCart. And for some people this works really, really well. So I think that's a great option. It's not one that we're currently using, but I really liked that it was there. Next up, affiliates. So ThriveCart one price, everything is included, right? Unless you want to add ThriveCart loan, which I think is a bit of an upgrade. But then for Samcart, they have pricing tiers and you actually need one of the higher tiers, like we're on the $149 tier and we don't even get affiliates included. So I was quite shocked with that. I just assumed it would be included. We don't really have an affiliate program, not an active one currently. But you know, and I think to get to the next tier is quite a jump. So for us, if we were going to go and do affiliate program, we probably go get a third party one rather than, you know, make that jump for no reason. So I thought that was a bit that, that, you know, didn't make me no brownie points to Sam Car on that one. Anyway, another pro that I wasn't again sure exactly what category to put this under, but it's a pro for Sam cart is that you can actually have different upsell tracks based on the price point that people purchase. Again, it's not something we played with, but I think that's really great that if someone for example, came into your program and they paid in full, then maybe the upsells you offered them might be different and at different price points or maybe they are a different payment plan or whatever than if someone came in and took your, you know, your 12 part pay plan. So you're probably not going to go and offer them an upsell of like an $1,000 one off thing. But maybe you can add an upsell that's an extra $100 a month instead. So I think that really could help to increase conversions if done well. And there's just another little thing that goes into like the smart box. Like the vibe so far is that Sam cart just a little bit smarter and Thrive cart's a little bit simpler and prettier. That seems to be my overall vibe. All right, next. I'm almost done guys, but a few more important ones. So next reporting. Okay, so as a long term Thrive Cart user, I have always hated their reporting. It's too simplistic, it's too hard to change the views. Things don't actually necessarily like. Their MRI reporting is actually not accurate and used to drive me nuts. And people complain about it all the time. And again, they were just like radio silence wasn't a priority for them. They're just like, shut up, you guys have paid your money. You're not paying us anymore. We're not helping. You seem to be. The general vibe got into samcart was so exciting that they were supposed to have better reporting. And while they have more reporting, I don't think it's actually any better as far as just Generally being able to see like on one page, this is how many of this program sold versus that. That's great because you can't really see that easily in ThriveCart. In ThriveCart, you can see totals like this is how much money was made or this is the number of sales. But then you had to kind of go to manually count how many were of different programs and products, which I thought was a bit silly. So that problem is solved in samcart. But where thrivecart actually has it better is where it comes to funnel reporting. So what I mean by funnel reporting is if you are for example, offering upsell tracks on things, so having, you know, an order bump and some different upsells behind your different offers inside ThriveCart, you just open up the page of that funnel and it will show you, it will say this converted this and this converted this. And this was the total amount of money earned from each individual upsell as well as overall, you do not have that view inside samcart. Inside samcart, you have to Google each product individually, manually tab it all out and manually do your own calculation. So I thought that was a bit separate sad considering they have all this other smart stuff for their funnels. But there's no nice way to actually be able to see your numbers. You've got to do it manually. So that kind of sucks. All right, so that's the main pros and cons differences, extra features, lacking features that we found for how we use the checkout. So in case you're wondering after all of that what our final decision was, well, the final decision was Sam Cart, because at the end of the day with a lot of these other nice to have things, for me, the most important thing is stability and, and support. Yes, even I have to pay a premium for it, but obviously that's not going to be the case for everybody. And also it's not the case for Everybody that their ThriveCart was messing up. So if you've never had any problems with ThriveCart, then you're probably pretty happy to stay there. Unless you know, things like the extraordina bumps and the customizable upsell offers is something that, you know, tickles your fancy because, you know, as a super nerd, it's definitely something that tickled mine. So anyway, guys, I hope you have found this useful. I hope if you are trying to make the decision between the two programs that this has helped to guide you and made it pretty clear which is going to be the best next step for you. If you've loved this episode. I would really love it so much if you remember to subscribe, to follow and to share. Because that's how we get the word out. That's how we get more eyeballs on what we have to offer. And you know, it really means a lot to a small business. So thank you again for joining me today. Hope you loved it and I will see you with more nerdy goodness next week.