Best Shopping Carts For Entrepreneurs
The #1 Best Online Shopping Cart - SamCart
What is it?: SamCart is the most advanced and fully featured online shopping cart available today. with their industry-leading checkout page builder and "one-page funnel" capabilities they offer conversion features that no other shopping cart has allowing you to generate more sales!
Why do I recommend it?: Their advanced features like split testing & customizing the checkout pages allowed me to generate hundreds of new customers from traffic I was already driving resulting in thousands of dollars per month in additional revenue. SamCart is simple to use, integrates seamlessly with everything and has industry leading tech. I have run over $1 million in transactions through SamCart and it has the best reporting and least bugs of any shopping cart.
Where can you find it?:milesbeckler.com/samcart
Runner Up For The Best Shopping Cart: Thrive Cart
What is it?:Thrive cart is a flat-fee shopping cart that gives you access to the key conversion features you need in a modern shopping cart. From bump offers to one-click upsells and deep integration to active campaign and other marketing automation tools, Thrive Cart is great for membership sites, selling online courses and digital products. The one lacking feature that makes them the "runner-up" is the lack of your ability to customize the checkout page.
Why do I recommend it?: The one-time-fee pricing option for lifetime access, five cart is an asset that can help you increase your business revenue for years to come without the burden of a monthly expense. you don't get the customization capabilities with SamCart but you also don't get the monthly fee 😉 I personally use ThriveCart on my inner circle membership because it is simple, flexible and extremely powerful.
Where can you find it?: milesbeckler.com/thrivecart
Best Budget Shopping Cart For WordPress: WP E-Store
What is it?:Built as a WordPress plug-in it will turn your WordPress site into a shopping cart and course/product delivery system. With a flat fee one time price starting at $49 there is no cheaper way to begin selling products online.
Why do I recommend it?: This is the first shopping cart I ever used and it helped me grow to reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales before I outgrew their platform. For WordPress bloggers or budget conscious entrepreneurs this is a reliable system with great documentation and support from the creator.
Where can you find it?: milesbeckler.com/estore
Best Shopping Cart With Course Delivery: Thinkific
What is it?:Thinkific is an online course creation and management system. it gives you everything you need to publish, sell and market your online courses in one convenient package so you don't have to deal with the tech headaches of integrating multiple tools.
Why do I recommend it?: You can build and sell your first three courses before ever paying Thinkific a dime! You also get the sales page builder and the professional "Member's Area" to deliver your courses beautifully. For course creators and membership site owners who don't want to deal with tech, this is possibly the number one best option around! We personally use Thinkific for my wife's main site that has done millions of dollars in revenue because of how good their members area is.
Where can you find it?: milesbeckler.com/thinkific
The Best WordPress Shopping Cart: Member Mouse
What is it?: Specifically designed for WordPress lovers, power users and developers, member my is the most powerful shopping cart system available for WordPress. if you want to keep your entire business running on WordPress and have the flexibility to grow to seven figures and beyond, this is the best!
Why do I recommend it?: MemberMouse goes way beyond being just a shopping cart and offers an entire membership site engine that can also sell and deliver online courses with many advanced features. you get a full affiliate module, a membership plug-in and a shopping cart all in one.
Where can you find it?: milesbeckler.com/membermouse
7 Critical Features for Your Shopping Cart
What features should your shopping cart have for maximum sales conversions?
Split tests
The ability to actually split test your checkout page itself is how you can take a checkout page from 5% conversion rates to 10% conversion rates, all the way to 15% conversion rates and beyond.
And that's not going to be a 10% increase in your profits. That's actually going to be a 200% increase in your profits.
It is incredibly important, therefore, that your shopping cart software allows for the split testing of checkout pages, to help you identify how to make more money with the same traffic that you already have.
Bump offers
Bump offers are little add-ons on the checkout page that can help you increase your order value. They are a great way to sell complementary products with a single click to increase the purchaser’s shopping cart value.
A timely bump offer can have the best effect on your customer’s purchase value. If your customer is at the checkout page, it can be most effective on sales.
Why? Because placing too many offers on the product page can be off-putting. Your customer is still deciding what to purchase. Showing them other options at this time can be further confusing.
But, when they reach the checkout page, it means they’ve already selected their product. Now you can show them other products relevant to their purchase.
For example, if they’ve purchased an iPhone from your online store, you can offer them a screen protector.
Or, if they’ve purchased a sales funnel course from you, you can offer a few extra training videos.
One click upsell
You should be able to add one click upsells. It's the easiest way to increase your average order value.
Generally, a solid one click upsell script is going to convert 30% of customers from product A to also add on product B.
And, depending on the cost and the value, it can literally result in hundreds of extra dollars in your average order value.
The one click upsell increases your average order value, which allows you to pay more for a customer.
So if Facebook advertising costs are going up, or if you simply want to scale to buy more customers, having a one click upsell helps you do that.
But this will only work if your upsell offer is relevant to your core product.
For example, if someone purchases your funnel course, you can upsell them a course on how to drive traffic through their funnel.
Customization or One Page Funnel
The next must-have feature is customization. So beyond split testing, being able to customize your checkout page can allow you to do something like the one page funnel, which is where you actually have sales copy above the checkout process... or, you have sales copy next to the checkout process.
You will see this most often in SamCart, with their one page funnel functionality, and it just really works well. You also see it in ClickFunnels with their two step checkout process that ultimately is used for the free plus shipping.
It says enter your shipping information right there on the actual sales page, and that initiates the checkout process.
Two Step Order Form
The two step order form helps you fetch a small amount of the user's information on the first page. You don’t ask for the credit card info, you only ask for their name and email address... and maybe their shipping address.
Once they submit the first step form, it creates a micro commitment that comes out of Robert Cialdini's book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. And, from a psychological perspective, it makes them more likely to complete the second step, which is where you ask for payment info and order confirmation.
This is because, as humans, when we take one step, we're more likely to take the second follow up step.
So having a two step order form, just as in Thrivecart, can increase your chances of securing a purchase.
Advanced Integrations
As your business scales, you might want to start offering physical products without shipping the products. For this, you’ll need a number of advanced integrations.
For instance, there are product fulfillment integrations like ThriveCart, which connects with disk.com so somebody could purchase a home study course, they could get six DVDs and workbooks in a binder along with a thumb drive that has everything.
And, that fulfillment could be done automatically.
When they check out, the order gets passed from ThriveCart directly to disk.com, where disk.com receives it, and ships it out to your customer. So you're really hands off in the delivery of physical products.
Another example is of a learning management system (LMS) that’s useful for people selling courses and membership. You'll find plenty of relevant WordPress plugins and accept payment via PayPal, Stripe, and credit cards.
SamCart integrates directly with Thinkific. So somebody purchases on SamCart, and they get an instant integration, no third party tools, no Zapier needed, which means it's going to work better.
In the long term, it's going to be bulletproof for ecommerce businesses. There are simply fewer moving pieces, so there's a decreased possibility for things to go wrong.
Also, like a checkout that runs a membership program, a drip automation or any sort of fancy marketing automations can come handy.
For instance, ThriveCart integrates directly with Active Campaign, and so does SamCart... and you can do just about any of the advanced marketing automations you want.
Affiliate Module
You may also want an affiliate module in your shopping cart software to allow other people to sell your stuff for a commission split.
All of the softwares available commercially have affiliate modules, allowing you to create a way for consumers and affiliates to register for your affiliate program.
The Best Shopping Carts to Increase Sales
1. SamCart
SamCart is equipped with responsive themes and a comprehensive content builder that lets you create a one page store within minutes –no coding needed. You can deploy your online store on any platform you want.
SamCart’s potent features help you track your store, convert more leads into buyers, and upsurge the value of each acquisition.
It has three pricing plans: Launch, Grow, and Scale.
You can use the Launch package ($49 per month) to create a striking one-page website to display your products. You can only have one admin user, but it doesn’t support reporting.
With the Grow package ($99 per month), you can have up to three admin users.
The Scale package ($199 per month) includes all the advanced features you’ll need for selling at scale. You can have up to ten admin users. And, unlike the other two packages, it supports CRM integrations and custom integrations such as with WordPress.
Why SamCart?
Overall, I believe the best shopping cart is SamCart.
Why?
Because Samcart has the features that matter most and has helped me earn over a million online.
| Bump offers | Yes |
| Split tests | Yes |
| One click upsell | Yes |
| Customization/1-page funnel | Yes/Yes |
| Two step order form | No |
| Advanced integrations | Yes |
| Affiliate Module | Yes |
You can turn it into a sales letter with the checkout page built in, which reduces friction in the sales process.
You can split test your checkout pages. You can add order bumps as well as one click upsells. It can split test one click upsells, create 1-page funnels fast, and can even test combinations of upsells and downsells for you.
It's the most advanced and you can Try it free here: https://milesbeckler.com/samcart
2. ThriveCart
ThriveCart is an easy to use cart platform that offers one-click bump offers, one-click upsells, an embeddable cart, a funnel builder, A/B testing, affiliate centers, webhooks, auto-followup, and so much more.
Its large database of fine-tuned and well-optimized themes helps you instantly increase your conversions and boost profits as soon as you switch them on.
ThriveCart starts at a one-time payment of $495, no other transaction fees.
Why ThriveCart?
In terms of the best value, I’d say ThriveCart wins.
It’s a one-time pay option, so it’s $495 upfront right now. But that's equivalent essentially to three months of SamCart's payment.
So after about three months to six months compared to all of the other ones, ThriveCart pays for itself.
| Bump offers | Yes |
| Split tests | Yes |
| One click upsell | Yes |
| Customization/1-page funnel | No |
| Two step order form | Yes |
| Advanced integrations | Yes |
| Affiliate Module | Yes |
I use ThriveCart for my membership programs. And after two years of running on ThriveCart, I've saved thousands of dollars, and also get all of the advanced functionalities. You get the bump offers, you get the one click upsells, and you get all of the advanced integrations.
The one thing you don't get with ThriveCart at the moment is the ability to completely customize the checkout page. It is embeddable on your site, so you can customize around it.
And rumor has it that they're launching a kind of a front end editor to allow you to customize a webpage, but it hasn't launched yet.
So ThriveCart is the best value for people running membership programs, selling digital products, etc.
If you're on a budget, you want to buy something once and be able to run millions of dollars in transactions over the next several years, without a monthly commitment or a monthly payment.
ThriveCart is the only option for you on the list. (Get it for life at one price here: https://www.milesbeckler.com/thrivecart)
3. Best Budget Shopping Cart: Member Mouse
For most people, I think that Member Mouse is the best option. It is a simple and effective option for selling your own digital products or membership from your website.
With a low $20 per month fee, it is the least expensive option that offers you the ability to run one dollar trials and one click upsells's... Both are extremely important for running a six-figure membership funnel and for building an optimized funnel you can market with Facebook ads.
The shopping cart and sales funnel integration you can build with MemberMouse works very well and I love that they check out on my site... On the other sites, like SamCart or ThriveCart The user physically leaves your website to a different domain.
Also with MemberMouse, you can do dollar trials and one click upsells's and even split test pricing, Which is important for optimizing your funnel.
You can get more 'clickfunnels-like' functionality out of Samcart, but you will also pay 5x as much per month which is why I chose Member Mouse before we were making over 10k’s per month.
Member mouse works! They have found a fantastic balance between functionality, ease-of-use, and elegance for your customer experience.
4. Thinkific
As an online course system, Thinkific brings unique value to the shopping cart world.
If you’re not interested in selling courses, then Thinkific probably isn’t going to be the choice for you.
But membership site owners can also make use of Thinkific’s intuitive shopping cart software to charge for memberships. In fact, Thinkific does a great job of giving you complete control over the pricing model you want to use for your courses and materials.
If you want to create a membership site that works based off of a subscription model, Thinkific will let you do it! And the built-in shopping cart will literally handle everything required for collecting payment.
As far as ease of use is concerned, and being able to create and sell three courses for free, it just doesn’t get any better than that.
But, a lot of people don’t understand that Thinkific also gives you the ability to build your own sales funnels.
Thinkific gives you the power to…
- Build an opt-in page and offer a lead-magnet to potential customers
- Build a sales page that can convert traffic into customers
- Add a shopping cart, so that customers can purchase your courses
- Create a members area, where only people who have paid for access gain access to the courses
These are all incredibly important pieces of the sales funnel puzzle. Add an awesome email service, like aWeber, and you will literally have everything you need to set up and monetize dynamic sales funnels for your business, literally today!
Best for E-commerce: Zipify on Shopify
Zipify offers lots of useful products to support your eCommerce store on Shopify. Zipify Pages helps you build first-class, conversion-tested landing pages with just a few clicks.
Its OneClickUpsell is a post-purchase upsell tool that lets you make more money from your Shopify orders. Your customers can add products to their order with just one click, no extra cart sequence!
It offers two pricing plans: OCU Essential and OCU Pro.
OCU Essential ($56 per month) includes unlimited funnels and traffic, post-purchase one click upsells, pre-purchase upsells, A/B testing, and much more.
OCU Pro ($81 per month) includes all of the above, plus priority support and live onboarding support.
You can enjoy its 30-day money back guarantee.
Why Zipify?
When it comes to an eCommerce store, Shopify is a great tool. But you need to add on the Zipify OneClickUpsell functionality. And this will allow you to essentially offer physical products and then you're upselling more physical products.
| Bump offers | Yes |
| Split tests | Yes |
| One click upsell | Yes |
| Customization/1-page funnel | Yes/No |
| Two step order form | No |
| Advanced integrations | Yes |
| Affiliate Module | Yes |
Plus, they have Zipify pages that allow you to make landing pages and sales pages. You kind of need both of these tools with Shopify. (Find Zipify here: https://www.milesbeckler.com/Zipify)
Sales Funnel Shopping Cart Runner Ups
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a powerful sales funnel building platform that has a built-in shopping cart. It supports several payment gateways; those supported via API as well as 3rd party products.
There are plenty of customizable themes, a drag and drop landing page builder, robust reporting and analytics, an autoresponder called Actionetics, and lots of additional features to help you get started.
ClickFunnels offers two pricing plans. Its Startup plan costs $97 per month and the Full Suite plan costs $297 per month. These plans differ in terms of the number of landing pages and sales funnels allocated per month.
It also offers a free 14-day trial.
Why ClickFunnels?
A runner up on our list is ClickFunnels. You get a lot of the cool advanced functionalities. It's easy to set up, you can split test it, but it's still buggy.
| Bump offers | Yes |
| Split tests | Yes |
| One click upsell | Yes |
| Customization/1-page funnel | Yes/No |
| Two step order form | Yes |
| Advanced integrations | Yes |
| Affiliate Module | Yes |
As great as it may sound, ClickFunnels has a few problems. It is very limited to what you can do. For the advanced customization of getting it to run dollar trial memberships, you'd have to actually get into the JavaScript code. And this has been notorious for breaking.
Plus, they are also known to have very poor customer support.
But if you're running simple basic stuff, Try it free for 14 days here: https://www.milesbeckler.com/funnels)
How Much Difference Can Your Checkout Page Make?
Whether you're a digital marketer, an info marketer, or an e-commerce retailer, you can sell your digital and/or physical products online with a sales funnel.
The spot where visitors become paying customers and submit their credit card info saying goodbye to their hard-earned money in your sales funnel is the checkout page, this checkout page is where your potential customer connects with your shopping cart.
This is why it is so essential to design your checkout page well.
It's the ultimate stop for customers shopping on your site.
So, is it enough to just integrate PayPal on your website?
Not really.
If you're serious about simplifying your customers' experience regarding payment and wish to increase sales for your business, you'll want to have full control over the entire checkout process.
But, people often neglect their checkout page.
They think, "My customers have already made their final buying decision before reaching the checkout page. So why bother?"
Did you know, a whopping 69.57% of shopping carts are abandoned on average?
This means, for every 100 users who initiate the checkout process, around 69 don't finish.
So, you'll hardly have 31 out of 100 people buying from you.
If your checkout page doesn't meet their expectations, your conversion rates will decrease, and your earnings will plummet.
And this is a massive problem.
Which Shopping Cart Should You Use?
If you're selling an online course, membership program, or a physical product in a sales funnel, then SamCart is going to be your best shopping cart option.
If you are not at the place to subscribe to a monthly service, Thrivecart is an incredibly full-featured one-time payment option.
Whereas, if you're a bootstrapping startup like I was, MemberMouse is a simple solution that integrates easily into a WordPress website.
