Comparing Samcart to Shift4Shop: Which is Better?
Choose the right eCommerce platform to build and grow your business
VS.
Founded in 2013 by Brian and Scott Moran, Samcart is a web-based checkout platform that puts a large focus on putting products and checkout all on a single page to streamline the conversion process. This service is designed to be a quick and easy way to build a checkout page for online sellers with one main product. Their unique platform lacks the typical online store website structure in favor of a streamlined approach to eCommerce. Samcart has two main offices, with one in Fulton, MD and another in Austin, TX.
Shift4Shop is a feature-rich eCommerce platform serving businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries across the globe. Offering an unmatched free eCommerce solution, the company provides everything you need to start — and grow — your business. This turnkey eCommerce experience includes powerful tools to help businesses succeed — a robust website builder, product and order management, customer marketing tools, and more. Customers can choose from dozens of professionally designed, industry-specific templates, all of which are mobile-friendly, SEO optimized, and highly customizable.
Samcart calls itself full-featured eCommerce software and attracts many with its simplistic and optimized one-page checkout structure. However, a closer look will reveal that their software is meant exclusively for sellers with one main product; if you have an online store that sells multiple products, then Samcart is not the best choice for you. You don’t even have the option to remove “Samcart” from their checkout URLs, limiting your branding potential and putting off potential customers. Because Samcart’s platform is entirely limited to a single page that combines a product page with a checkout page, there’s no way that you can natively create a legitimate online store with all the pages and features it needs to gain and keep customers. Samcart is focused on one thing only: perfecting a simplified sales funnel. But, by doing that, they ignore all of the other factors that go into establishing a successful online store, such as a unique branded storefront, easily-accessible category and product pages, landing pages to promote products and help customers with vital information, and more. If you want to build an online storefront, Samcart directs you to a third-party site builder like WordPress to get the job done.
Shift4Shop is a feature-rich eCommerce platform serving businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries across the globe. Offering an unmatched free eCommerce solution, the company provides everything you need to start — and grow — your business. This turnkey eCommerce experience includes powerful tools to help businesses succeed — a robust website builder, product and order management, customer marketing tools, and more. Customers can choose from dozens of professionally designed, industry-specific templates, all of which are mobile-friendly, SEO optimized, and highly customizable.
Branding & StorefrontAs an online store owner, you probably want to have complete control over how your online store looks and functions, all within the same eCommerce platform. Unfortunately, Samcart lacks the ability to build a storefront for your online store entirely, instead referring you to services like WordPress to build one that links to their checkout pages. You’ll have to hope that you can nail your exact brand aesthetic using various platforms, or else you’ll suffer from a non-cohesive experience when customers navigate from your site to your checkout page. With Shift4Shop, you can build your entire cohesive online store, including a customizable storefront, product pages and checkout pages, all from the same dashboard within the same theme.
Features and PricingSince Samcart is limited to just a single one-page product and checkout page, it’s lacking a ton of essential eCommerce features. Logically, you may assume that, since Samcart is only offering one piece of the online store puzzle, that they may be charging less than a full eCommerce platform in order to use their service. Regretfully, this is not the case; the lowest amount you can pay for Samcart is $99/mo. for their Pro plan, and you’re still missing out on a ton of features that you can get with Shift4Shop for free. But Samcart gets even pricier because, in order to gain access to their Affiliate Center, you’ll need to upgrade to the $199/mo. Premium plan. If you want to add any features to your Samcart store that aren’t built in or available on their small app store, then you’ll have to resort to Zapier integration at an extra cost.
“When I decided to go with Samcart, I was pulled in by their promise of a sales funnel that was perfectly optimized to get me the profits I was looking for. Having to build my own website on WordPress definitely didn’t thrill me, but I figured that Samcart’s expensive service would be worth it. But, once I realized how limited their platform is and how difficult it was to actually list and sell all of the products that I have, it became clear to me that I was spending a whole lot of money for a whole lot of nothing. Finding Shift4Shop really put into perspective how much I was paying for how little I was really getting.”
– Samcart Customer
Flexibility & VersatilityA well-designed eCommerce platform is able to work for online stores of any industry, whether they sell tons of products, digital products, physical products, or services. While Samcart offers the option to sell these types of products, their checkout page platform is optimized for merchants with one main product and isn’t ideal for most online sellers. Due to fact that they only offer Stripe and PayPal as payment gateways, industries that may be considered “high-risk” or merchants outside of a select few countries are completely barred from doing business through them. Rather than limiting online merchants to one specific way of selling products, Shift4Shop comes built-in with a ton of customizability that can fit any online store, regardless of what they sell.
How do free Samcart themes stack up against free Shift4Shop themes?
Samcart offers 18 page templates that are said to be designed with conversions in mind, mimicking a sales funnel that directs customers towards converting. Many of their templates are strikingly similar, with three templates actually being direct clones of each other with swapped color palettes. Editing these templates is limited to basic changes like colors, text, and adding your logo. But, possibly the trickiest aspect of customizing your cart pages is the fact that you have no way to view your edits in real time as a preview; you have to configure all of your settings in the dashboard blindly before activating the template.
Offering a huge (and growing) selection of free themes designed for an entire online store, including a storefront, category pages, product pages and checkout pages, Shift4Shop gives online merchants much more in the way of designing their eCommerce website. All themes by Shift4Shop are designed to be fully responsive and utilize their Core Template Engine framework, ensuring built-in compatibility with any mobile device. With any Shift4Shop theme, you also have access to customization through the easy-to-use Theme Editor and HTML Builder, allowing you to design your entire online store any way that you want.
Shift4Shop comes with Shift4 Payments built in and also lets you offer customers many different ways to pay, so you can cover multiple industries and countries. You won’t have to worry about not being able to take payments from customers with Shift4Shop; it’s all made simple due to unrestricted access and easy integration.
Samcart only allows the use of 2 payment gateways for its merchants; Stripe and PayPal. Unfortunately, while these two gateways are some of the most popular, they are not available in every country and tend to disallow some stores for being “high-risk.” This puts an unnecessary restriction on merchants, customers, and product lineups.
Shift4Shop integrates with hundreds of popular software solutions that cover everything your business may need, from shipping and taxes to marketing and email automation. Connecting your Shift4Shop store to your favorite software integration is quick and easy, so you can get right into selling more on your store.
Samcart has a very short list of integrations, which you’ll inevitably be forced to look through after coming up empty when it comes to their short list of built-in features. If you want to integrate your favorite software solution, you’ll end up paying extra for a third-party integration through Zapier.