This is a Samcart vs Thinkific review that will walk you through all the features, pricing, pros and cons, and much more information you can use to decide which is right for you or your online business.
Are you looking to start selling online but don’t know where to start? Many amazing platforms, including Samcart and Thinkific, allow you to create and sell online courses and digital services without sweating.
With Samcart and Thinkific wooing many users, which of these platforms is right for your business?
Read on as we give you a deep dive into both platforms and allow you to make your choice.
Let’s start quickly with an overview of Samcart.
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Samcart Overview
SamCart is one of the best online shopping cart software out there. This tool was launched in 2013 and has become the go-to choice for many people looking to sell online. Because of its unique proposition, brilliant features, and ease of use, SamCart is a top choice for marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners looking to scale their business and boost conversion.
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What’s super exciting about SamCart is the sheer number of tools available for users to scale up their business. For instance, SamCart offers a brilliant one-click upsell functionality that has helped many businesses increase revenues. And the best part is that they provide access to robust reporting tools you can quickly deploy to gauge your business performance.
If you’re looking for software that lets you create beautiful pages to showcase your products and accept orders directly from the same page, you’ll love SamCart. This impeccable software is designed specifically for marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs who do not need a catalog store.
With SamCart, anyone can create an eCommerce store, sell tons of digital items, and boost sales without sweating it. Some of the brilliant features offered by SamCart include cross-selling bumps, one-click upsells, A/B testing, an affiliate center, one-page checkout, and more.
Thanks to seamless access to tons of valuable tools, anyone can maximize their profit using SamCart. Also, they allow users to deploy brilliant marketing tactics to increase conversion and boost sales.
Thinkific Overview
Thinkific is a powerful tool for creating, marketing, and selling online courses. Thinkific has revolutionized how people learn and earn online. Using an all-in-one platform like Thinkific, you can create powerful courses for students looking to learn.
What is so special about Thinklific is that it allows you to create powerful courses without stress. And the best part is that it provides you access to powerful marketing tools to push your business to the next level. And just like SamCart, Thinkific has a robust affiliate feature that allows you to increase your revenue.
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Today, Thinkific is used by over 50,000 independent creators and businesses looking to share their knowledge and educate students.
Who is SamCart built for?
If you sell online, you’ll love SamCart as they provide you access to robust tools needed to scale your business. Even better, you can use the platform to sell digital products like courses, webinars, books, events, and more. Besides these services, you can even sell services and offer membership solutions using SamCart.
With the incredible features available on SamCart, you can leverage the platform to scale your business. And yes, the platform caters to both small and large businesses.
Who is Thinkific designed for?
Thinkific caters to creators looking to develop and sell courses online. Regardless of your discipline or your area of interest, Thinkific provides access to robust tools to share your knowledge with the world. The icing on the cake is that you get access to robust tools to market and sell your courses.
Whether you are an entrepreneur or a large business looking to reach out to more students, you’ll enjoy the unique proposition that Thinkific offers. For creators looking to diversify and scale up their business, you’ll love everything that Thinkifc offers. Here are some people that will benefit immensely from using Thinkific.
Content Creators
Are you a digital entrepreneur looking to build a personal brand around your passion, knowledge and expertise? You’ll not be disappointed to give Thinkific a try. With access to easy-to-use features, any content creator can start out with Thinkific and enjoy remarkable benefits along the way.
Trainers
Suppose you have a passion for sharing your knowledge and you’re looking for a platform that allows you to push your business to the next level. In that case, you’ll love Thinkific as they provide you access to exciting features to boost revenue and performance. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an academician or trainer; Thinkific has everything you need to get started. From making it easy to upload your courses to offering live lessons and more, Thinkific will help you stand out from the pack.
Getting Started With SamCart
Getting started with SamCart is a stroll in the park, and you don’t need to be tech-savvy to find your way around the platform. Follow these 4 simple steps to get started with SamCart.
- First, you must sign up for an account by providing your email and password.
- Once that’s done, you can proceed to tweak your company settings. This typically involves filling out your company information, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.
- Link a payment process by choosing your preferred provider.
- Create a list and page for the items you want to list for sales
- Finally, promote your products through the myriad of marketing tools available on the platform.
It wasn’t so bad, was it?
What we love most about SamCart is that the entire process of setting up an account is straightforward. And yes, you don’t have to be tech-savvy to finish the entire process.
Getting started with Thinkific
Setting up your business on Thinkific can be a little challenging as there are many processes to complete before your business goes live. Read on as we break the entire process down.
- To start, you’ll need first to set up an account. This would typically involve providing an email address and password. And just so you know, starting with Thinkific is free, and you won’t be required to provide a credit card. The cool thing about signing up for an account is that it unlocks access to brilliant features you’ll need to launch your courses.
- After signing up for an account, the next thing you’ll need to do is create your course, which is also hassle-free.
- Once your course has been created, you’ll be prompted to add lessons to your courses, another hassle-free process you can complete within a few minutes.
- The next thing you’ll need to do is customize your course player
- From there, you’ll need to customize your website and leverage the different marketing tools available to promote your products.
Pros and Cons of SamCart
SamCart has earned its place among the best shopping carts tools out there. But like every solution, SamCart has its selling points and a few letdowns you should know. So before you decide if it is the right tool for you, read our pros and cons of SamCart. Hopefully, it will help you make a more informed decision.
Pros of Samcart
- SamCart offers users a safe and secure shopping cart
- With SamCart, creating products and product pages is a stroll in the park
- SamCart has responsive customer support.
- Adding upsells or downsells to your store is super easy with SamCart
- SamCart lets users tweak subscription and payment configurations as they like
- The subscription Saver feature is a brilliant tool you can leverage to ensure your customers stay subscribed to your services.
Cons of Samcart
- While SamCart has a lot of remarkable features, we are afraid it doesn’t work smoothly all the time.
- Compared to platforms like Shopify and 3Dcart, SamCart is a little pricey.
Thinkific pros and cons
Thinkific stands out from other LMS platforms because of its incredible features and great price point. But it isn’t without a few letdowns. Read the pros and cons of Thinkific to know whether it is a great feat for your online course-selling business.
Pros of Thinkific
- Thinkific is among the few LMS platforms that offers a permanently free package. This package is ideal for gauging the performance of Thinkific before you sign up for available premium plans.
- The platform supports multiple payment options, making it easy for students to subscribe to your courses.
- Thinkific supports a fantastic array of resources you can integrate into your online courses.
- As an all-in-one LMS platform, Thinkific provides free hosting, access to marketing materials, course creation tools, and resources for improving student engagement.
- Opting for Thinkific’s premium plan will unlock tons of brilliant features, including the ability to create an unlimited number of online courses. Additionally, their premium plans also let you host unlimited students.
- The coolest thing about Thinkific is that they don’t charge users transaction fees on payments made by students to access courses.
- Using Thinkific’s awesome customization tools, you can customize your course pages and websites according to your branding style. And the best part is that you don’t need to have any coding knowledge to do this.
- For people who are great at coding, Thinkific allows you to make more personal customization. This makes them a wonderful choice for anyone interested in giving their online learning platforms a personalized look.
- Even though the platform provides you with a domain, they allow users to host their own domain.
- Thanks to Thinkific’s powerful voice tool, you can add crystal clear voiceovers to PowerPoint presentations.
Cons of Thinkific
- One of the complaints many users have about Thinkific is that the platform doesn’t provide a course marketplace as you have on platforms like Udemy, where course creators can easily market and sell their courses to students. With Thinkific, you’re solely responsible for marketing. That said, Thinkific provides access to amazing tools you can leverage to market your courses.
- While Thinkific supports various third-party integrations, the platform doesn’t currently have its own default email marketing tool. This means that you may incur extra charges for deploying third-party email marketing tools to promote your courses.
- Thinkific currently only provides email support. This means they don’t offer a live chat function, a brilliant feature that would have made it easy for creators to reach out to support when they need priority support.
- Thikinfic can be pricey for people just starting out.
Note: Despite the few letdowns about the platform, Thinkific enjoys support from over 50,000 creators using it to host and sell their online courses. While other LMS platforms like Kajabi do a brilliant job of rivaling Thinkific, many people still prefer Thinkific because of their unique propositions.
SamCart vs Thinkific: How They Compare
There are a lot of similarities and differences between Thinkific and SamCart, and we will use this opportunity to show you how they stack up. Let’s get started, shall we?
To start with, both of these platforms allow you to create, market and sell your products online. If your business involves selling digital products and services, you’ll love Thinkific and SamCart. Let’s look closely at how they compare.
SamCart vs Thinkific: Product Creation
Creating products on Thinkific and SamCart is a stroll in the park, and you don’t need to be tech-savvy to get started as they have simplified the process. Let’s break things down a little to make it easier for you to comprehend precisely what we mean.
Thinkific Course Creation
Creating and hosting your courses on Thinkific is a breath of fresh air as they have simplified the process. Thanks to its robust drag-and-drop editor, you can set up your courses within a few minutes. And because it is so easy to use, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to get started.
Also, you don’t need to understand coding to use Thinkific’s drag and drop editor. Thinkific’s entire course creation process is graphical, and because of its brilliant drag and drop editor, your courses should be live in minutes.
What we love most about the editor is that it works smoothly. To this end, you should be able to organize your course elements and content without sweating it. Using the drag-and-drop content editor, you can rearrange, add, or delete sections within your courses. What’s even more exciting is that you get to customize your courses according to your preferences.
When it comes to building online course content, Thinkific provides the flexibility you won’t enjoy on other LMS platforms. Besides text and videos, Thinkific allows you to add audio files, quizzes, lessons, PDFs, surveys, download options and more. With this in place, you can rest assured that your students will have the most exciting learning experience as they have access to many resources to enrich their learning process.
Another thing we love about Thinkific is that all files uploaded on the platform are hosted by Thinkific. This means you don’t have to worry about file compression or other tricks to maximize memory space.
You can take things up a notch by signing up for one of Thinkific’s premium plans. The advantage of this is that you get to create unlimited courses and enjoy seamless access to amazing resources.
SamCart Product Creation
Like Thinkific, creating products on SamCart is super easy. Whether this is your first time using a shopping cart tool or not, you should be able to create a new product page in a matter of minutes.
With SamCart, you only need to provide basic information, including product name, URL, images, and tags. For marketers, businesses, and entrepreneurs selling digital products, you can upload your products at this stage.
Thanks to providing users access to premade templates, you can design unique checkout pages for each product.
Keep in mind that the templates available on SamCart are pretty basic. Thankfully, they can be easily customized. In terms of customization, you can play with colors, fonts, logos and more. Not just that, you can also add testimonials, custom sections, bullet point lists and more.
Also, since SamCart uses a simple text editor for custom sections, users are free to embed links and images if they want. And yes, you also get to preview what your product page looks like using SamCart’s live view mode.
Thinkific Vs Samcart: Our Verdict on Product Creation
While both platforms make it easy for you to create courses and products, in terms of simplicity, Thinkific comes top. And the reason is that the platform has a great drag-and-drop editor that makes the entire process a walk in the park. If simplicity is your thing, you’ll love what Thinkific offers.
Thinkific vs SamCart: Payment Integration
When choosing a tool that lets you sell products online, many businesses, marketers, and entrepreneurs usually opt for a platform with a wide selection of supported payment methods as their main focus is making it easy for customers to pay for their products and services. And honestly, Thinkific and SamCart aren’t doing too badly in this area. But don’t just take our words for it. Here is how both platforms stack up in terms of payment integration
Thinkific Payment Integration
When it comes to payment integration, Thinkific currently supports PayPal and Stripe. Since these payment gateways are insanely popular, anyone, irrespective of location, can pay for your products and services using either a credit or debit card or PayPal.
So if your goal includes making payment easy for your students, you won’t be disappointed to use Thinkific. And the icing on the cake is that Thinkific allows you to receive payment in multiple currencies.
The only caveat with Thinkific’s current payment integration system is that they don’t support crypto payment, which may be a deal breaker, especially if you have students who want to pay for your courses using digital currencies.
SamCart Payment Integration
SamCart supports Stripe and Paypal, making it easy for customers to pay for products using their credit or debit card or PayPal, whichever is more convenient for them. Where SamCart absolutely blows our mind is that they have expanded their payment integration to include Google Pay and Apple Pay, making it even easier for customers with these payment options to make payments for products and services.
The most exciting part is that SamCart allows you to offer payment installments, a unique feature you won’t find on other shopping cart tools.
With SamCart, you can seamlessly set up upsells for each product, making it appealing for users who want to increase sales. After setting up a few products, you can activate upsells. For instance, let’s say you are selling one eBook; SamCart Upsells feature allows you to add another eBook as an upsell. This feature is not only great for you but also makes it easy for customers when shopping.
Besides SamCart’s brilliant payment integration options, the platform lets users add an upsell funnel to their products. With this option, you can lay out steps your customers will take until they eventually buy your products. Besides upsells, SamCart also allows you to add a down-sell. A down sell is when you offer a similar but lower-priced product.
Our verdict on Payment Integrations
Even though Thinkific and SamCart make it easy for users to pay for products by providing them with multiple payment options they can choose from, SamCart wins this category as they provide users with more payment options. Besides supporting Stripe and Paypal payments, customers can also pay for your products using Apple Pay or Google pay. And the most thrilling part is that you can also offer installment payments with SamCart.
Thinkific vs SamCart: Affiliate
Selling products and services online will involve leveraging many marketing tools and strategies to increase sales. And if you’re using independent tools like SamCart and Thinkific, where you’re solely responsible for marketing, you’ll have to be creative and think outside the box to rake in sales.
But guess what? Thnikfic and SamCart both have a unique affiliate feature you can leverage to increase your sales dramatically. By leveraging this option, you can hire an army of affiliates who will handle a better part of marketing, allowing you to sit back, relax and watch sales pour in. But the big question is, how does Thinkific and SamCart affiliate feature compare? Read on as we break everything down.
Thinkific Affiliate program
While Thinkific has many remarkable marketing tools you can leverage to promote your courses and increase sales, they also have a robust affiliate marketing feature that many creators are leveraging to increase their revenue.
With Thinkific’s affiliate program, you can enlist affiliates to market your courses and services to users without paying anything upfront. You only get to pay affiliates commission when they make a sale. So if you have been looking for a way to put your products out without spending a ton of money on marketing and third-party tools, you’re welcome to give Thinkific’s affiliate program a try.
SamCart Affiliate program
Like Thinkific, SamCart also has a brilliant Affiliate Program that users have come to love because of its incredible benefits. Using SamCart’s affiliate program, you can dramatically increase sales and boost your revenue. And the cool part is that the entire process is easy to set up.
Once the affiliate program is set up, you can create a new signup page for new affiliates. With this, you can either approve or reject an application. Also, there is an option to automatically accept affiliates if that works better for you.
Once affiliates signup, they receive a unique link they can share with others. And just to add, SamCart has a cookie length of 30 days, which you can easily adjust.
What we like most about SamCart’s affiliate program is that you can tweak settings easily, including the percentage of commissions your affiliates get when they make a sale via their unique links.
Also, they have a comprehensive affiliate dashboard where you can easily see how well your affiliates are performing. Additionally, the affiliate dashboard lets you see how much each affiliate has made. This way, you can easily decide if having an affiliate program is worth it or not.
Our verdict on Affiliate Programs
Thinkfic and SamCart have a superb affiliate program that has made it incredibly easy for course creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses to increase sales. For this category, both platforms perform well, so there isn’t a clear winner.
SamCart vs Thinkific: Marketing
Selling products and services online can be incredibly challenging, especially if you’re just starting. But with a platform like Thinkific and SamCart, you’ll have an easy ride, especially as both platforms provide access to robust marketing tools that are easy to use. But, which of these platforms does it better regarding marketing? Read on as we dive deeper.
Thinkific Marketing
Thinkific is a leading LMS platform for a lot of reasons. To start with, the platform provides users access to tons of brilliant marketing tools for selling courses online. And the cool part is that these tools are easy to use, so you don’t need to have hands-on experience before you can start leveraging all of the brilliant marketing tools available on this platform to promote your courses and services.
To be honest, the entire platform is a robust marketing and selling engine for online courses. One thing you’ll notice right away is that Thinkific spreads out its marketing tools to make it easy for users to deploy. Nonetheless, if you’re having difficulty accessing these tools, you can simply visit the Market and Sell section on your dashboard to enjoy seamless access to the bulk of the marketing tools Thinkific offers.
You can also get into marketing right away by taking advantage of the platform’s Checkout process and Sign Up theme pages. Similarly, the site editor allows you to easily create a sales funnel you can use to market your products.
Another feature that is great for marketing and available on the Thinkific platform is the sales widget feature. This feature can be integrated into your platform by leveraging a unique HTML code provided by Thinkific. Once set up, the sales widget will direct leads to your course landing page. With this option, you won’t need to deploy a separate landing page tool. Also, you can use the sales widget to direct customers straight to your checkout page.
The sales widget can be tweaked to either appear as a plain button or feature some text and images, depending on what works for you.
And just so you know, premium Thinkific users can improve their marketing options with coupon campaigns. This is important for creators who want to promote their services on third-party platforms. With Thinkific, you have control over all primary coupon settings, including your preferred discount rates, the number of times a coupon can be used, expiration date, the dollar amount, and much more.
The exciting part about using Thinkific is that you don’t need to be the only one doing the hard job of promoting your courses. Thanks to Thinkific’s affiliate marketing program, you can get an army of affiliates promoting your courses on their blogs and social media pages.
SamCart marketing
SamCart isn’t doing too badly with its marketing propositions. Using all of the brilliant tools available for marketing, you’re sure to push your products out there and enjoy amazing returns. For people still trying their footing, you’re welcome to leverage all of the exceptional marketing tools provided by SamCart.
While the platform allows you to integrate third-party tools such as Zapier, Mail Chimp and more to improve your email marketing campaign, SamCart has a robust one-click upsell feature.
You’ll maximize profits and increase revenue by leveraging SamCart’s one-click upsells. Top eCommerce platforms like Amazon leverage one-click upsells to increase their revenue, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using it.
For instance, if a customer orders a product on your website, you can offer one-click upsells to make shopping for other products seamless. Instead of providing an email, delivery address, and preferred checkout options for every product, one-click upsell makes it possible to add a product to your shopping cart without providing other details like shipping address and more that could delay you.
While SamCart has made it super easy to upsell, they also report that upselling could increase your revenue by almost 68.1%.
Another brilliant marketing proposition that SamCart offers is the bump offer feature. You’ll dramatically increase sales by leveraging the bump offer feature provided by SamCart. Let’s assume you sell laptops, for instance; you can leverage SamCart’s bump offer feature by offering laptops, laptop bags, antivirus and more in a single deal. So instead of just selling a laptop, you’ll end up selling laptop bags, antivirus solutions and more.
And just like Thinkific, you can also take advantage of SamCart’s affiliate marketing feature to increase your sales. With SamCart’s affiliate marketing system, you don’t have to be the only one marketing your products. With your army of affiliates doing the bulk of the work, you can sit back, relax and watch your revenue increase.
Our Verdict on Marketing
With both platforms offering users seamless access to many impeccable marketing tools, it had to pick sides. One thing is certain: Thinkific and SamCart offer access to powerful marketing tools you can leverage to drive sales. Besides providing access to powerful marketing tools, what we love most about both platforms is that they allow users to integrate third-party marketing tools.
Nevertheless, Thinkific stands out in terms of marketing, and that’s because of the sheer number of marketing tools available to users.
SamCart vs Thinkific: Pricing Plans
Before signing up for any shopping cart tool or LMS platform, most users will consider pricing before deciding. This decision is often impacted by the available budget and features that come with opting for a particular plan. Read on as we take you through pricing for each platform and what you stand to gain from opting for a particular plan.
Thinkific Pricing Plans
Thinkific offers five brilliant plans you can choose from to scale your online course-selling business. While the platform has a robust enterprise solution uniquely designed for fortune 500 companies, our focus today is on exploring Thinkific’s top 4 features. Let’s jump in.
- Free plan: Thinkific is among the few LMS platforms offering users a free plan. Just as its name suggests, the free plan from Thinkific is offered free of charge and is great for testing all of the brilliant features available on the platform. If you want to gauge Thinkific performance to see if it lives up to the hype, you’re welcome to give Thinkific’s free plan a try. We are sure you won’t be disappointed.
- Basic plan: This is the first paid plan available on Thinkific. Signing up for this plan will cost you $49 per month, and you can drive the price further down by opting for an annual plan, which would cost you $39 per month. Signing up for this plan will unlock access to incredible features like custom domain, email integration, affiliate benefits, SEO tools, and more.
- Pro plan: Thinkific’s pro plan costs $99 per month. And if you opt for the annual plan, you’ll end up paying $79 per month, which is a significant discount. While this package features all of the brilliant functionalities available on the basic plan, it also provides access to other exciting features like 24 hours customer support, community building tools, robust email integration, multiple course admins, zoom meeting integration and more.
- Premier package: This plan starts from $499 per month with an opportunity to drive pricing down to $399 if you opt for the annual package. This plan gives you access to some of the most remarkable onboarding features. To add to that, you also get exclusive customer support, multiple 50-course admins, community building tools, incredible marketing options, group analysts and more.
As we mentioned right from the get-go, pricing is super important when looking for a reliable course selling platform. While Thinkific offers different plans to choose from, we suggest you compare pricing against the benefits and features that comes along with a plan. This way, you can easily decide which plan is best for you.
SamCart Pricing Plans
SamCart provides access to remarkable features and charges competitive fees for their incredible plans. Compared to other shopping cart tools, SamCart is affordable. For customers who prefer paying monthly, there are four exclusive plans you can choose from. Here, check them out.
- Launch Plan: This is the cheapest plan available on SamCart and costs $49 per month.
- Grow Plan: This package comes loaded with many exciting features and costs $99 per month.
- Scale Plan: The scale package offered by SamCart costs $199 and is among the most subscribed plan on SamCart.
- Enterprise Plan: This is SamCart’s most expensive plan. This plan costs $399 per month and comes loaded with tons of remarkable features.
What we particularly love about SamCart’s pricing is that customers get the opportunity to lower their pricing. If you opt for a yearly plan instead of a monthly one, you’ll save up to 20% on all prices.
As we mentioned earlier, SamCart offers access to robust plans you can use to scale your business. And yes, each plan provides access to many brilliant features designed to push your business to the next level. Let us also add that each plan builds on features supported by the previous plan.
The Growth plan, for instance, has all of the features available on the launch plan. Besides that, it also comes loaded with many advanced features, including customer management features, subscription charge reminders, and cancellations.
With the Scale package from SamCart, you’ll enjoy access to all the exceptional features that come with the Grow plan and more. Some of the advanced features of this plan include a powerful affiliate marketing system, CRM integrations, dunning tool, A/B testing and even more.
The unique aspect of SamCart’s pricing is that each plan comes with a 14-day free trial. So even though they don’t offer a free plan like Thinkific, you still get to explore all of the platform’s exceptional features by taking advantage of their 14-day free trial. Also, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
To get mouthwatering discounts, we suggest you opt for SamCart’s yearly subscription, as it would save you extra money you can channel into other aspects of your business.
Our Verdict on Pricing
If you’re on a budget and looking for a platform that charges less to host your online selling business, you’ll definitely find SamCart worth trying. Compared to Thinkific, SamCart is a lot cheaper. On the flip side, Thinkific unlocks access to better features. The only caveat is that their plans are more expensive than what you get with SamCart.
SamCart vs Thinkific: Reporting Tools
Before opting for a shopping cart tool or an LMS platform that is perfect for your business, it’s important you go for a tool that provides you with extra insight into how your business is performing.
With platforms like SamCart and Thinkific, you get access to top-notch reporting tools that help you gauge your overall business performance. Here is how both platforms stack up in terms of their reporting tool.
Thinkific Reporting
One of the many reasons anyone would bother paying for LMS systems is the course tracking functionalities they provide. While selling course content on a standard website is easy, you need a platform that takes things up a notch. With a learning management system like Thinkfic, you’ll be able to track students’ learning progress over time. What we love about Thinkific’s tracking and reporting tool is that it is scalable and can handle growing demand.
Compared to other LMS platforms, Thinkific has made its tracking tools a lot easier, and that’s because they have a centralized tracking and analytics system. While their reporting tool can be used to monitor multiple courses and students, these tools also provide accurate figures direct from the main admin channel.
Using Thinkific’s reporting tool, you can generate insights such as last login date, course starting date, online course activation date, course completion date, name of students, email address, percentage of courses completed and more.
But despite all these unique propositions, Thinkific is still lacking compared to other LMS platforms that provide users access to advanced analytics tools. That said, most creators are comfortable with the reporting tools available on Thinkific. More so, these tools are free to use, so you aren’t paying for them.
Again, Thinkific has made things flexible by allowing creators to integrate third-party reporting tools. So if you want more advanced analytics reporting tools, you can include third-party reporting tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Segment, and more. You can even deploy third-party plugins for more wonderful insights.
Using Google Analytics, for instance, you’ll be able to track site visitors and campaign performance.
SamCart Reporting Tools
SamCart has pretty decent reporting tools. These tools will provide detailed sales breakdowns, subscriptions, refunded products, upsells, and more. By leveraging SamCart’s Subscription Saver feature, you’ll get remarkable insights into your business performance.
Another wonderful place you want to pay keen attention to is the Prospects section. This reporting tool gives wonderful insights into customers who haven’t completed the checkout process. You also get their contact information, the date they initiated the purchase, and the products they wanted to buy. With this information, you can reach out to customers and pitch the same products to them with a discount coupon.
The thrilling part is that you can export all reports generated as .CSV files.
Our Verdict on Reporting
Thinkific and SamCart provide access to wonderful analytics tracking tools users can deploy to gauge their business performance. But when it comes to performance and the sheer number of reporting tools, Thinkific stands out from SamCart.
So if you’re looking for a platform with robust reporting tools, you won’t be disappointed to check out Thinkific. And good enough, these reporting tools are free.
SamCart vs Thinkific: Mobile App
One of the things we love about most LMS and shopping cart platforms is the unique functionalities they offer. But that aside, most of these platforms have robust mobile apps that make it easy for businesses to manage their business on the go. Here is how Thinkific and SamCart compare in terms of their mobile apps.
Thinkific Mobile App
Unfortunately, Thinkific doesn’t currently have a dedicated mobile app, and we hope they can design one in the future. But despite not having a dedicated mobile app, we love that Thinkific has a clean, intuitive and user-friendly website that can be accessed via mobile phones, desktops, or web browsers.
With many LMS platforms launching a dedicated mobile app, we are optimistic that it is only a matter of time before Thinkific launches a dedicated mobile app.
SamCart Mobile App
SamCart has a robust mobile app that makes it seamless for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs to manage their business on the go. Using the SamCart mobile app, you can upload products, create campaigns and manage your business effortlessly.
Their mobile app is so special because it is designed for different environments, including on Android, iOS and desktop devices. And yes, we love their remarkable UI too, which has made their app super responsive.
Our Verdict
Since Thinkific doesn’t currently have a dedicated mobile app, you’ll agree that it is trailing SamCart in this category. Using the SamCart mobile app, you’ll seamlessly manage your business on the go. Also, the app provides you with wonderful insight into your store performance. From sales to campaign management and more, you can do everything directly from the SamCart mobile app.
SamCart vs Thinkific: Security
Whether you’re selling digital products, services, or courses, security is one thing you don’t want to take for granted. So when choosing a shopping cart tool or an LMS platform, most course creators, marketers or entrepreneurs usually consider the security provided by their preferred platform. In terms of security, Thinkific and SamCart haven’t disappointed their users as they both have a solid security infrastructure designed to protect your business at all times. Let’s explore how both platforms perform in terms of their security offerings.
Thinkific Security Architecture
Thinkfic doesn’t joke with users’ security and has gone the extra mile to provide robust security for all creators leveraging the platform for their online course-selling business.
Over the years, experts have praised Thinkific for its secure cloud hosting. By providing secure cloud hosting, Thinkific ensures that user data and courses are protected. More interestingly, Thinkific ensures that users’ data are regularly backed up. With this in place, you have nothing to worry about as you’re confident your courses are securely backed. So should anything ever go wrong, you’ll be able to retrieve them.
Let us also add that Thinkific comes with a sophisticated built-in SSL certificate. This security provision means that payment and course content are secure, making it difficult for hackers to breach your platform. And yes, Thikific grants users complete control of course data, which is missing on other LMS platforms.
SamCart Security Architecture
To be honest, no one would want to do business with a platform that isn’t secured. That’s why most businesses today opt for shopping cart tools that provide an extra layer of security for their business by deploying some of the latest security features.
Like Thinkific, SamCart has robust security features to keep your business secure. SamCart provides users with free SSL certificates to beef up the security of their business. Additionally, with an SSL certificate in place, you can rest assured that customers’ payments are protected.
Also, SamCart provides cloud backup for your business, so you can rest assured that user data and general content are backed up. In the event of an issue, you can always retrieve this data whenever you request it.
Our Verdict on Platform Security
Thinkific and SamCart know the importance of providing security to their teeming users and have ensured they incorporate the top-notch security architecture for optimum security. From deploying powerful SSL security to providing secure cloud hosting to providing regular updates and more, both platforms ensure users are adequately protected.
That said, we are impressed with the level of security provided by Thinkific. In terms of security features, Thinkfic stands out for the impeccable security options available on its platform.
SamCart vs Thinkific: Support
For those who run an online business, you’ll agree that having access to a responsive customer support team is undeniably important to the success of your business. With seamless access to the customer support team, you’ll be able to resolve issues when they pop up. Good enough, SamCart and Thinkific both offer robust customer support that business owners have come to love. Stay with us as we delve a little deeper.
Thinkific Support
Thinkific is doing a pretty remarkable job with its customer support services. To start with, the platform has a highly responsive customer support team you can always reach when you run into a brick wall or need clarifications. Typically, their customer support team respond to support tickets within a couple of hours.
More so, Thinkific has a thriving community across social media platforms. You can always reach out to these communities for help should you ever need assistance.
With Thinkific, you enjoy optimum support, including:
- Onboarding email
- Getting quick response for support tickets
- Access to tutorials
- Regular support via Facebook community and other platforms
- Rich knowledge base
- Online tutorials.
Another thing we love about Thinkific support is that users can leverage live call support to fix important issues. With live call support available from Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM daily, you won’t have to wait hours to get an email response.
SamCart Support
If there is one thing that got many entrepreneurs interested in SamCart, it is the level of support they provide their customers. SamCart has the most responsive support we have come across compared to other shopping cart resources. Customers who use SamCart for their business enjoy a variety of support, including email support, live chat support and access to an engaging Facebook community where you can easily get help for issues in real-time.
Another area where SamCart blows the steam off competitors is their detailed documentation site. And since their entire platform is user-friendly and intuitive, you’ll find your way easily across the platform. Let’s take a closer look at support services provided by SamCart.
User-friendly design: SamCart has a brilliant and user-friendly platform that is easy to navigate. Users are given a guided tour once they visit the platform. Thanks to the robust support provided by SamCart, you’ll get help on how to integrate the platform into your existing online selling business easily.
Help center: SamCart’s help center provides well-researched resources, including video tutorials to guide you on your journey. By leveraging these resources, you should be able to resolve issues whenever they arise.
Live chat support: If you want to resolve issues quickly, you’re welcome to explore SamCart’s live chat support. With this option, you’ll get real-time access to a customer service rep who will provide solutions to any issues you may be having.
Facebook community: With a large Facebook community of over 24,000 members, you’re sure to get help for any issue you may be having. Keep in mind that members in this community run similar businesses like you and may have encountered the same issue you’re having. So feel free to use this resource to your advantage.
Email support: While SamCart doesn’t currently provide a direct contact you can reach in terms of support, we are thrilled that they offer comprehensive email support. If you don’t mind waiting a couple of hours, you’ll find their email response quite helpful in resolving any issues you may be having.
Our Verdict on Platform Support
Looking at the level of support provided by both platforms, there isn’t a clear winner in this category. In terms of their support services, both Thinkific and SamCart go head to head.
Final Thoughts
After hours of researching and looking closely at each platform’s unique features, pricing, and functionalities, one thing is sure: both Thinkific and SamCart provide incredible services that customers have come to love.
From course creation to product design to unique customization to marketing, both Thinkific and SamCart have performed superbly.
And even though each platform has its respective selling points and downsides, one thing we are confident of is that they will make an excellent fit for your business.
If you’re still having difficulty deciding which platform to opt for, we suggest you go through the features highlighted in today’s article once more for clarity.