TAM 065: SamCart With Scott Moran - The Active Marketer

TAM 065: SamCart With Scott Moran

shopping cart

Episode 65 continues the payment series that was started in Episode 63. The series covers payment processes, shopping carts, order forms, everything you need to take money online and manage those customers once they buy from you. This week's guest is Scott Moran of SamCart.

SamCart is a feature rich shopping cart platform with many advanced features to increase average sale value, such as an order form 'bump', one click upsells and product funnels. It is really designed with optimisation of the sales process in mind.

On average, one click upsells increase sales by 68.3%

Where SamCart also excels, and many of the other cart platforms fall flat, is in their customer management and reporting. All your sales metrics are in one place and easy access to important customer information isn't just a bolt on afterthought like so many others.

We Chat About:

  • How SamCart got started
  • What is a "One-Click Upsell"?
  • What is an "Order Bump"?
  • Guidelines for order forms to make it better and convert more sales
  • SamCart integrations with both Paypal and credit cards
  • Post sale customer management
  • What is "Subscription Saver"?
  • Who is SamCart right for?
  • What is in the pipeline for SamCart development

 


If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here.

If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the good stuff!

Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here.

Active Marketer Academy



Links Mentioned In The Show

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Scott: Again, this one of those things ... I don't mean to pick on anybody, but when we were Infusion Soft users-

Barry: Oh no, you can pick on them. Everybody loves to pick on us.

Scott: All right, great let's see how ... Let's throw down. Let's burn them down.

Barry: Let's rip shreds off those.

Announcer: Welcome to the Active Marketer Podcast, where we talk about how to design, automate and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at theactivemarketer.com.

Now here's your host, Barry Moore.

Barry: Welcome to the Active Marketer Podcast. I'm your host Barry. This is the podcast all about sales finals and marketing automation. And in this episode we're going to be continuing on with our payment series, where we look at different payment processes, shopping carts, order forms, everything you need to do to take money online and manage those customers once they've bought from you.

In this episode we're going to be talking to Scott from Samcart. But I just want to preface every one of these episodes with my little disclaimer in there, that there is no perfect too. There's only a perfect tool for your needs, so you really need to know what your specific needs are. So if you want to head back over to episode 63 where we talk about how to come up with the requirements you need for your shopping cart solution.

Not everybody needs every feature. What's important to you? What's not important to you? Head over to episode 63 or head over to the show notes for this episode where you can download our requirements checklist to help you really focus in on those things that are the most important to you before you go shopping for a shopping cart solution.

And before we get into this week's episode, I haven't done this for a while, the shameless social proof segment, where I read out your reviews on iTunes or Stitcher.

This week we've got a review from Mr. Hyde in Australia. 5 stars. He says, Excellent resource. Fantastic mix of content, updates, and tips on several software tools I like, Thrive Themes and Active Campaign. Plus, expert insights from his guests all delivered in nicely produced, manageable charm. I've also watched Barry's [inaudible 00:02:13] course, and now try to keep up with his vibrant Facebook group. 5 stars."

Well thank you, Mr. Hyde. I really appreciate that. And if you don't know what he's talking about, he's talking about the Automation Nation Facebook group where we discuss all things marketing automation and sales funnels. If you want to join, head over to Facebook, search for Automation Nation and join up, and we'll let you in. It's a great group, well over 4,000 people now. So I want to thank everybody in Automation Nation for making that a really great group.

All right, so let's get into this week's episode on Samcart.

All right, I'd like to welcome to the show Scott from Samcart. Scott Moran, welcome

Scott: How's it going, Barry. Thanks for having me.

Barry: Yeah, thanks for coming on. Big fan of Samcart. It's really a fantastic platform, so I wanted to get you on, you know, as part of our continuing payment series and talk about different ways you take payments and maximise your revenue online.

For those listeners out there who aren't necessarily familiar with Samcart, why don't you give us a quick history of the Samcart platform.

Scott: Yeah, so Samcart was started by myself and my brother. My brother Brian is mostly who people recognise, right, when we go to events or talk on the stage or stuff like that. Usually people look at me and they're like, "You look kind of like this guy I know." It's kind of what we get. So anyways, so I always introduce myself as the taller, better looking younger brother, but always say the two of us are the co-founders of Samcart.

How we kind of got into this, my brother was a hell of a college baseball player, really, really good college baseball player. I also played, but was not quite as good, so I guess he's got me on that one, but basically when he got out of school ... He's a couple of years older than me. He started a website called Train Baseball. And so he basically was working a desk job, hated his life, was wanting to spend more time with ... Newly married at the time. And yeah, so he started a site to just basically just sell digital training. We'd had good coaches and all that stuff. Anyway, so digital training about baseball stuff, and that really blew up when we ... At the time it was like 2009, I guess is when that kind of like launched.

And it really blew up when we got really good advertising, which was brand new at the time, anybody who's, you know, familiar with the timeline there.

So that parlayed itself into Get 10,000 Fans, is probably a brand that we're maybe most known for, although now Samcart has probably eclipsed that with maybe popularity or as many people know it, I guess.

Barry: Yeah for sure.

Scott: Yeah, so anyways. So our background was always in selling digital stuff, basically. I mean we used every tool under the sun. I'm sure every tool you guys have mentioned in this series that your working on, I'm sure we tried. Infusion Soft, Ontraport, I mean, One Shopping Cart for a long time, just Paypal when we were first starting out. You know, all those different tools.

And so basically they all just kind of sucked in one way or another. I don't know how casual your guys' podcasts are ...

Barry: Let it fly, brother. Let it fly.

Scott: All right nice. There you go. All right. Cool. No, I mean, they just ... They were way too complicated or way too simple, right? Like One Shopping Cart is great. It's like this Old Faithful of tools, but you know they haven't freaking touched the thing since like 1998. I don't even know if modern code languages or whatever would work with this thing. No myself, my brother ... Yeah, go ahead.

Barry: It's like Nanacast. Have you ever seen the back of Nanacast?

Scott: Yeah, Nanacast. Exactly. A great tool ...

Barry: It's like they built it on Netscape.

Scott: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They're like ... You know, they used Altavista to like look up how to do stuff with it.

Barry: Right.

Scott: Anyway, so. No, the tools were just, they were either too complex or too simple. They were not updated enough, and you know you move into tools like Infusion Soft, right? Which is itself a great tool. But myself, my brother, like we're not coders, right? Like we're not tech guys. I don't know where you fall on that spectrum, right, but we are always dealing with hiring friends or hiring tech guys and outsource people or whatever to kind of like put together things like checkout pages. And it was just ... Yeah, it was such a freaking pain.

And any time something breaks, you just have all this stuff. You're hosting you're own pages, you're embedding forms, you're messing with code. Any time you need to make a change we had to call somebody up and wait on their schedule. You know it's this whole nonsensical thing, right. If you wanted to ... Here's what we knew we needed to make a business successful. We knew we needed a beautiful checkout page design that wasn't Paypal, that wasn't standard stock Infusion Soft, that wasn't One Shopping Cart, generic bad pages, right.

And we knew we needed one-click upsells. And we knew we needed to integrate with tools that we used email marketing, whatever. And so we needed to be able to do all that stuff quickly. We needed to be able to move on our own schedule and not shell out thousands of dollars any time we needed to make a change.

Yeah, we started building Samcart ... What year would that have been? I guess it would have been really, really late 2013. So that was kind of like, Get 10,000 Fans was ... Thankfully we were doing, I don't know, a couple million dollars a year in revenue at that point. It was definitely a high point.

And so we actually found ... To make a much longer story very short, it was ... Really happened to just run into an old friend of ours, who him and a friend of his had just sold this little app. And they were kind of looking for a side gig. So anyways, so we go them started on what we called User Payment at that time, which was basically what has now turned into Samcart.

We started using User Payment. It was super simple. We didn't need anybody else's help, you know, making checkout pages on the fly, one-click upsells, seeing how things are working, changing things as we needed them, watching stats and stuff. And, yeah, enough people kind of got interested. We built a beta. For Samcart we went into a paid beta for about a year, I guess, as we were kind of continued to develop it. And yeah, Samcart has now out of beta, I guess, what, May of 2015. So right now it's ... What are we, August? End of August? Is it September yet?

Hold on, is it September where you're at? You're in September, and I'm in August. Is that right?

Barry: Oh, nope. 31st of August.

Scott: 31st. Oh dang it. 30 days in August. So close. Anyways, so I guess here we are anyway, what, mid to late 2016, so Samcart's been out of beta for a little bit over a year now. Obviously we've hit a tone. We have a thriving user base of 7,000 users who are, most of them, people ... The feedback we get is that people are just like us. They want the same things we want, right. They want the easy tech. They want simple tools that they don't need other people's help setting up. They want to make their own changes when they want to, and, yeah, stuff like one-click upsells, order bumps and all that kind of advanced payment stuff that people used to kind of look up at people who could do those things. Like, "Oh my gosh, how are they doing that, right?"

We're trying to just make that available to everyone with a pulse basically, that we can ... If you have a Samcart account you can do all that stuff that you need to to make your margins go higher, all that good stuff.

It just works with everything else in your business and that's basically the long and short of how it got launched and where we are now.

Barry: Very cool. Very cool. That's a pretty common story, you know people want to scratch their own itch, where they just get tired of-

Scott: Bingo.

Barry: -all the tools that suck. But setting out to do Samcart, obviously you guys wanted a certain feature set in there that you weren't finding somewhere else, so what were those must-have features when you set out to build Samcart?

Scott: The must-have things, again, were one-click upsells and integrations with other tools, and we needed speed. Above all else, speed. I mean we were constantly testing things on the fly. We were constantly swapping out upsells that aren't converting well. But definitely, the biggest single thing was definitely one-click upsells. So that was really what we were good at. That's the bread and butter of our businesses that in the past that had clients and stuff we worked with, whoever, right? That was always the biggest single driver of revenue and profits, definitely was one-click upsells. So we needed to be able to do that, make it simple, know our numbers and, yeah, those would be kind of the biggest drivers behind why Samcart exists right now.

Barry: For that odd listener out there who might not know what a one-click upsell is, can you explain that?

Scott: Yeah, definitely. So essentially think of it like, kind of like what Amazon does to you every time you check out, right? You're going check out. "I bought product A," and then basically Amazon is Amazon and Apple is Apple and these huge companies are huge companies because they help their customers spend more money with Amazon or with Apple. If it's easy, you'll keep buying stuff.

So I check out, I buy product A from you. And then you're going to give me a chance to buy product B, probably throw a discount on it or whatever. And all I have to do to buy it is click one single button. So a one-click upsell. You basically have the ability ... And it's pretty advanced tech actually on the back-end side. But basically to run the card that they just gave you, so they don't have to re-enter credit card information. They don't have to go to a new checkout page. You're just giving people the ability to buy something that easily, to just say, "Cool, run the card I just used. You know, one click of the button, buy it. I'd love to buy this from you." You've got happy customers, and you've got more money.

Barry: Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned another feature there, the order form bump, which is kind of a very similar thing. You want to explain what that is?

Scott: Yeah, definitely. I'm trying to thing, what's a really good example of an order bump in real life. That's how I always try to tie it back, but anyway, basically, think of it ... You've got a checkout page and down near the buy button after you've filled out your credit card, you've filled out whatever other information you need, there's like a little, usually there are cheap kind of things that says like, "Hey, would also like to add this to your order?" Like, I guess, McDonald's right. You go in there, buy a burger or something and they're going to upsell you a little. An order bump would be like, "Would you like fries with that?"

It's just a nice, easy way to say yes and say like, "Cool, add this to my order," and then check out. It's just another cool way to make sure that you're ... You know, the incremental bumps, the taking someone from a $20 customer to a $25 customer. Or a hundred to 110. It's the little things like that that can do big things for your profits.

Barry: Yeah, I think a good example I saw was someone was selling a book, you know, whatever it was, $39. And then the order form bump was for an extra $10 you want the audio version of the book as well.

Scott: Bingo. Exactly. 100 percent.

Barry: So it doesn't take you to a separate product page. It's just a little tick box on the bottom of the order form that says, "Oh, you can add this extra thing for a little bit of money."

Scott: Yeah.

Barry: Well you guys have probably seen thousands of checkout pages by now.

Scott: That might be an understatement, yeah.

Barry: Yeah, yeah. So do you guys have some guidelines or some must-dos when you ... What's the thing that you can do to your order form that's going to, to make it convert better, to make it more powerful.

Scott: Yeah, definitely. So one of the coolest things that we get is, because thousands of businesses now use Samcart everyday. I mean it's ... What is it? I guess the last ... We were just looking this up, the big number. In the last 12 months Samcart customers have processed $102 million in sales.

Barry: Nice.

Scott: So that's pretty cool. So anyways, so we get to watch all that data. Like that's probably the coolest thing about Samcart is we get to just sit up here from the bird's eye view and really, really actually look at what works on checkout pages and what doesn't.

So one of the biggest things is the length of your checkout page. So, like, Barry, on your checkout pages that you have out there right now, what information do you require from someone? Usually it's what, like name, email address, obviously credit card info. Do you have anything else on there?

Barry: No that's pretty much it. I'm trying to make it as frictionless as possible.

Scott: Bingo. Yeah. So that's a lot of things that, but with other tools, that can be a lot more difficult. With Infusion, I mean, like, they give you this big checkout form and removing stuff and making stuff un-required, it takes a lot of time. But with Samcart it's real, real simple to remove fields you don't need, and the results are crazy.

So one of the split tests that we run is, if you use your baseline of needing name, email address, phone number, shipping address, billing address and a credit card, that's kind of our baseline. And every time you remove something, this is what happens. So if you remove shipping address from that, you're going to capture 13 percent more sales, just by taking away a shipping address. If you're not physically shipping anything, you don't need it. Get rid of it. It's 13.4 percent bump.

And if you can take the extra step and take the billing address out of there as well, it is a 35.1 percent bump.

Barry: Wow.

Scott: So 35 percent more sales-

Barry: Wow.

Scott: -just by removing fields you don't need. Isn't that crazy? It's just nuts. It's funny, a couple things ... We'll touch on this here, right. But it's just one of those things with Samcart, like if ... You know people put all this time and all this love and effort to make their sales pages or their landing pages look great and infuse them with the marketing stuff that we all know and love and works, right. But the checkout page is like this red-headed stepchild, for lack of a better term, that people just kind of throw up there and expect to work.

So let's see, what's another cool one? Let me keep going. So one-click upsells, which we talked about. So of Samcart users ... And there are plenty who don't use upsells, and then versus the ones do use upsells. If you don't use upsells then your average customer value is whatever product price your selling. I'm selling a $100 product, my average customer value is $100. Can't go up from there.

But if you introduce even just a single one-click upsell, then you are on average going to be making 68.1 percent higher average customer values than people who don't, from one upsell. So not an upsell funnel, not many upsells in one funnel, but just a single upsell offer. 68.1 percent.

So if I use that same example. If I'm selling $100 product, and you're selling a $100 product and I introduce one upsell I'm going to make, on average, $168 on the same customer that you're left spending or you're left collecting $100 from. So, again, imagine ... Of course that's a big bump in sales, but think about profits. If our profit margins are the same, you and me, and we make $20 on each customer that we sell. Each $100 customer is $20 profit. My profits are 400 percent higher than yours.

That's the kind of mindset that we like to introduce with Samcart, is let people know their numbers and get in there and see that kind of stuff. But yeah, that's a huge bump. 68.1 percent.

Barry: Yeah and the other thing about that too is that means my cost per acquisition of the customer can go up and I don't lose money.

Scott: Exactly.

Barry: The person that can acquire the most customers wins, right? So if I can-

Scott: Bingo.

Barry: -If I can outspend you on my advertising because I've got a higher cart value than you do, then I'm going to-

Scott: You'll price people right out of the market. Yeah. 100 percent.

Barry: Do you have any stats around ... Like one of the features I really like about Samcart is the fact that you can have Paypal and credit card options on the same payment form without sending them off to Paypal and-

Scott: Definitely.

Barry: -and putting that friction in of sending them off to another site. Do you have any stats about how many people choose one payment gateway over another?

Scott: Yeah, definitely. So we have a pretty one-of-a-kind Paypal integration for anybody listening. Like he said, basically if you ... You can offer Samcart ... Or, I'm sorry. On a Samcart checkout page you can offer credit card and Paypal, and our Paypal integration does not take anybody way. So it's kind of everything you love about Paypal, being able to offer it to your customers because they love the security and all that stuff, but without all the stuff that we know kills conversions, like taking somebody away from a page, and it's all these many steps.

But a really, really interesting stat. So for a long time we never used Paypal on our own checkout pages because we hated what Paypal did to our conversions. So, but how about this? A standard Samcart checkout page is ... You know, if that's our baseline, just offering credit card is just our baseline. If you add in Paypal then you are going to look at ... I'm sorry, what is it? You're looking at a 19.7 percent increase in sales by offering both credit card and Paypal. So 20 percent more sales is what you can be capturing by offering both of them side by side. So we like that one heck of a lot.

As far as how many people are actually selecting one versus the other, it's actually really heavily in favour of credit card, which is really interesting. I thought offering both credit card and Paypal maybe you'd see like maybe a 50-50 split or 60-40 at the most in favour of credit card, but it's actually closer to like 83-17 in favour of credit card. So it's highly, highly in favour of credit card, which is interesting.

I think maybe if you had done the same ... If there had been access to this information 10 years ago, I bet that would be totally flipped, totally flipped. But I think people are getting a lot more used to buying things online, and of course all the Samcart checkout pages are totally securely hosted, so they got the little green lock there in the URL bar, which I think is another great way to ensure people are safe and feeling confident in your buying process, stuff like that.

Barry: Yeah another interesting think, a friend of mine has, like a membership or a newsletter type thing where he sells monthly or yearly subscriptions. He offers both Paypal and credit card, and he said the monthly stuff is about 50-50 between Paypal and credit card.

Scott: Right.

Barry: But he said when people buy the annual subscription, for some reason it's like 90 percent Paypal. It's interesting.

Scott: That's crazy. And that's another thing. I'm sure those numbers ... You know you dive into each individual
market, I'm sure they vary wildly. I'm sure there are people like that. I'm sure there are people who are the total flip. And it's interesting. It's nice. We enjoy being able to allow people to do whatever fits their market best. Maybe some people it's just Paypal, but whatever it is we like to be able to offer people the ability to off Paypal without totally ruining the checkout experience.

Barry: Yeah, for sure. And another interesting thing or another thing that you guys do really well that I think a lot of people don't take into account when they're choosing a payment ... So if they're first getting started with payments and they're trying to find a payment or checkout shopping cart software to use, what they don't take into account is what happens after the sale.

Scott: 100 percent. Absolutely.

Barry: So you start getting 10's and hundreds and thousands of customers that you've got to manage now with refunds and expiring credit cards and stuff like that. And you guys have just ... It looks like you've put a tonne of thought into how do we manage that customer after the sale.

Scott: Yeah.

Barry: So maybe can you talk a little bit about some of the features that are there for managing those customers post-sale?

Scott: Yeah, definitely. And that's really what it's all about. One of the things that made us, thankfully, successful in other stuff that we've done was that just like you mentioned, if I can make more money from the same customer than you can then I'm going to win. In the long run my business can spend more money, I can acquire more customers and in the end I win.

So part of that, of course, doesn't end, like you said, at the checkout page. So we're talking about email follow-up series. We're talking about doing promotions and sales down the road, making it easier for people to come back and buy again. And so one of the biggest things is our simple integrations. So we try to make it as simple as humanly possible for you to keep all of your lists perfectly clean.

I guess when you think of standard kind of integrations with AWeber or with Infusion Soft or things like that, other tools might allow to say, "I'm going to add somebody to a list when they buy this product." Or, "I'm going to be able to add this tagged Infusion Soft or Ontraport or whatever it is when they buy this product." But we like to take it one step further, so what we like to do is, let's just say you're integrated with Infusion Soft. When someone buys you can add multiple tags, you can also remove multiple tags. And it doesn't end there. You can also set rules up so that when someone, if they cancel their subscription, you can add and remove multiple tags. If a payment declines you can add and remove multiple tags. If they come back and totally ... They refund a purchase you can add and remove multiple tags.

And you can do the same thing with Aweber, with lists. So you can add and remove people from, not only when I ... Okay, I'm going to add someone to my customer list, but you can automatically remove them from, say, a leads list when they buy, when they cancel, when they refund, if a payment declines.

So it's this whole ... We like to view it as more of we're helping you manage the entire customer life cycle, and it's really, really dead simple, again. Of course, one of the things that's really big for Samcart is simplicity, and so we like to say that you never touch code. It's really as simple as picking things from drop-down menu. So not only are they simple to set up, you never tough any code or anything like that, but we also give you more options to help keep your lists perfectly segmented, perfectly clean so you're always talking to people at the right time.

Barry: Yeah, so most of the listeners would probably be Active Campaign users, and you have great-

Scott: Definitely.

Barry: -Active Campaign integration like Best of Breed.

Scott: Awesome.

Barry: You can add tags, remove tags, which a lot of the other cart platforms haven't really given it the forethought you guys have, where they've just said, "Oh, if somebody buys something, put them on this list." And it's like, well, it's not really how it works.

Scott: Yeah, exactly. I know, isn't that funny? It's like Active Campaign is built so you can do all this cool, robust stuff and then you have to deal with these other tools that limit that. So if anybody there is listening that owns or runs or is involved in the shopping cart tool, just stop listening. You guys can just turn it off right here. So we'll just keep that secret in our back pocket.

Barry: That's right. That's right. I remember I was kind of playing with this new cart. I won't mention their name, but it was pretty easy to set up a payment page. You could do Paypal and stripe on the same payment page.

Scott: Right.

Barry: But once you took the booking, if you dove into the cart platform, I'm like, "Well where's that purchase I just made?"

Scott: Right.

Barry: "Where's that customer?"

Scott: Sure.

Barry: And I even emailed it to them. I'm like, "How do I get back to the purchase?" And they're like, "Oh no we don't keep that stuff. You're going to have to go into Paypal and find it."

Scott: Isn't that crazy?

Barry: I'm like, "What?"

Scott: What the heck? It's so ... And that's what we keep running into is the more ... And again we're obviously, this is our market. We keep an eye on competition and we have accounts and stuff like that. But it's just nuts. I feel like there's never really been a tool that's built for someone who understands what we all do everyday.

We have many Samcart accounts and people who manage them, and I'm still in there all the time running orders and adding things to people's orders. This is what we do. We like to think that this is probably the first and only tool that's been built for people like us that are ... I want to sell, and I need to manage the order, I need to see them through to the finish line and deliver products and add them, move them around my email campaign so I can talk to them right.

It's crazy when people just stop maybe at the ... You're driving the ball all the way down, you kind of stop at the 1-yard line. It's like, "Just get me to the finish line here."

Barry: Yeah, for sure. And another thing, if anyone who's ever done subscription business knows is a giant pain the butt, is when credit card expires. And you guys have that-

Scott: Oh, big time.

Barry: -pre-dunning stuff built in, yeah?

Scott: Yeah, definitely. So we call it subscription saver, just because mostly people don't know what the word dunning is. I honestly [crosstalk 00:22:59]. Yeah, I know right? I laugh.

Barry: I don't even know where that came from either.

Scott: It's actually a guy. I actually know. I know this story now because it's like, "What the heck is this?"

So I always knew what it was, dunning being the process ... Anybody listening, you know what it is, you've just never heard it called that. If my payment declines today, you're going to try the payment again tomorrow and then again two days from then and again five days from now or whatever, until they're officially gone. You let them go.

So that process is called dunning. And so it's after some guy. His name was like Albert Dunning or something. He pioneered this system.

But we have that built into every Samcart account. We call it subscription saver. It's a fancy rewording of the same idea. Basically, if I would subscribe to your monthly whatever, if my payment declines I'm going to get an email from your Samcart account automatically, no matter what time of day or whatever it happens, basically with a link that I can update my credit card info right from my inbox or right from my laptop, or wherever I'm at. And we do that again and again until we save the subscription or until we're sufficed to say this subscription is lost. But then, even then it's easy for you to find them, so if you want to follow them manually, that's great.

But, yeah, Samcart's working around the clock to make sure that all of your subscription payments are totally saved. I think to date, what is it? That feature's been live for something like five months and I think to date it's saved $413,000 for Samcart account users, so we're pretty proud of that one. It's definitely ... It's doing its job, and it's another one of those things that we feel should be built in. We feel like everybody should have access to it. There's no reason if you have a system that's running subscriptions, why that shouldn't be doing it. I can't even imagine trying to manually do that. It's a cool one, and we definitely like that feature.

Barry: I can because I've done it, and it's a pain in the ass. It's a pain in the ass.

Scott: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Barry: So, yeah. That's a great feature. And it's something that people just, you know. It's not on their radar, "Oh yeah, my card expires. Oh yeah."

Scott: Yeah, you don't even know it's killing you until you find out. Two years down the road, you're like, "Oh my gosh, what have I done?"

Barry: And the other thing I really like too is ... We kind of touched on it a minute ago, was that the cart quickly becomes ... It's not even a cart really. It's more. It's so much more. It becomes kind of the lifeblood of your business, right? Like, "How's my business doing?" The metrics that you guys got in there, the dashboard about how much sales you're making, the churn-

Scott: Yeah, definitely.

Barry: -if you're running a subscription business and stuff like that, is fantastic. Maybe can you talk a little about some of the metrics that you guys have on your dashboard?

Scott: Yeah, 100 percent. Again this is one of those things, like, I don't mean to pick on anybody, but when were Infusion Soft users-

Barry: Oh no, you can pick on them. Everybody loves to pick on us.

Scott: All right, great let's see how ... Let's throw down. Let's burn them down.

Barry: Let's rip shreds off those.

Scott: Yeah, it's just ... We'd pull our hair out all the time because Infusion is so advanced, all these tools are so advanced. But finding my freaking customer lifetime value ... It's like I needed to go hire some guy to write a script and hope it was right. It was just nuts.

We like to, right there on every Samcart dashboard we ... The things we make available like your MRR, your monthly recurring revenue, basically how much recurring revenue can you expect the next 30 days. Customer lifetime value, again, not something you need to go diving for. We love to make sure people know that right off the bat. Your subscription stick rate. So I have a subscription. How long on average are people sticking around? Which is great for, "I want to offer a yearly payment option or whatever." You can go find out on average how long are people sticking around and make intelligent decisions about your business.

Your card conversion rate. You can break that up by products, so you know how each product is doing. Your active subscriptions. We love to make sure that everything you need is right there in one spot. So yeah, we love to think that of course Samcart is about making beautiful checkout pages and giving you those advanced features, but analytics is really our third pillar of what Samcart, at its core, what are we offering everyone.

Yeah, so we love to make sure all those stats that you guys need ... And we know you need them because we need them. Again it's one of those things, I really do honestly think Samcart's probably the first tool that's truly built for people running one, two, three-man operations by people who run one, two, or three-man operations. We don't have time. We don't have teams or staff or analytics, some guy sitting in the corner running data or something. We need tools that make that stuff available and that's what we like to think we've done with Samcart.

Barry: Yeah, and if you don't have those tools, those metrics, those dashboards in your, somewhere in your business-

Scott: Right, yeah.

Barry: -you're really not ... If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. If it's not given to you by the cart for example, then it's ridiculously hard to figure out. Like you said, you've got to write some scripts or have some sort of Excel spreadsheet or some sort of-

Scott: Oh we've shelled out all kind of money just to find that stuff out, yeah.

Barry: So very, very cool. You touched on a little bit there, but there's ... Everyone kind of ... The question I get all the time is what's the best tool, insert type of tool here. What's the best shopping cart? What's the best automation platform? What's the best funnel? And my response is kind of always the same. There is no best tool. There's only a tool that's best for your requirements.

Scott: Exactly. Yep.

Barry: If you walk into a hardware store and you go, "Hey, what's the best tool in here?" They're going to look at you funny right?

Scott: Right.

Barry: So we kind of touched on it, but who is the ideal Samcart customer? Who is Samcart perfect for?

Scott: Yeah, definitely. I would say that Samcart is really ... In all the people that we've talked to the people who were the happiest with Samcart for sure is, we're talking about one, two, or three-man shops. We're talking about people who need results. The need to move fast. They need to avoid tech stuff. It is 100 percent for non-techie. If you're a coder or a developer there's some stuff that you can mess around with in there, but you know really we're looking for people who are like, "I don't have time to wait for someone else's schedule. I need to make changes. I need to take action, do stuff now."

And the only other thing I'll throw on that is probably people who are less than 20 SKUs. Samcart's really not for the person that needs-

Barry: Yeah, the big ...

Scott: -a Shopify.

Barry: Yeah, yeah. The big shopping cart. Add these three things and check out.

Scott: Bingo. Yeah, exactly. We're really looking for marketers who understand value of, "I'm selling one thing at one time right now to this person." So not that you can't have upsells and sell other products and order bumps that help you sell more stuff, but people who really understand the benefit of, "I'm having one conversation with one customer, selling them one thing." And I'm not, "Oh, you want to buy something? Here's my e-commerce storefront and you can pick three pairs of pants and two shirts," and that kind of stuff, that kind of unfocused marketing attempt. It's really built for, meant for people who are, "I'm selling one thing right now," and they understand the benefits of doing exactly that.

Barry: Fair enough. Fair enough. And anything coming down the pipeline? Any nice little features you guys want to-

Scott: Heck, yes.

Barry: -let us in on before they happen?

Scott: This is the top secret section of the show[crosstalk 00:29:37]

Barry: All competitors please leave.

Scott: Exactly. Yeah. Everybody stop listening. Yeah, exactly. So this a verbal trademark on any of these ideas. But some of the cool stuff coming down the pipe is we're super pumped about our Zapier integration. Zapier, for those of you guys who don't know, a tool that helps tools work with other tools. That would be the weird way to explain that. But basically, if you're using a tool that Samcart doesn't directly integrate with, you can use Zapier as an intermediary for accounting software or delivering physical products or all kinds of different use cases for that. But Zapier is definitely a cool one.

We have a lot of stuff coming for physical product people. So we have some pretty basic, standard physical product stuff, like you can charge variable shipping costs and you can have quantities. People select more than one of something. But we have some really cool fulfilment integrations and some other stuff like that.

We have VAT tax coming, so a lot of people that are EU based and different VAT taxes around the world, some of that's going to be built into to Samcart pretty soon.

And a lot of cool things to do with the checkout page. So we have some pretty cool innovations, I would call them, on the checkout experience and how that works, and so we're really excited to kind of bring some of that stuff out. I'll play that one a little closer to the chest, but definitely be staying tuned for that because basically the checkout page as you know it ... Some of those things as you'll have the opportunity to do some very cool things with your checkout experience and with Samcart's signature simplicity.

So we're going to be doing some pretty advanced stuff and making it pretty simple for people.

Barry: Nice. And when's Zapier's integration supposed to drop?

Scott: So we're hoping by the end of September here. So we have a big promotion actually coming up here in September, and that's ... We're on pace, on par for that to be wrapped up as part of that big promotion.

Barry: Very cool. All right, Scott. We might wrap it up there. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing a bit of the Samcart story. And obviously if anybody wants more information they can just head over to Samcart.com.

Scott: That is the one. Absolutely. Barry, thanks for having me. Everybody, thanks for listening. We'll catch you guys around the bend.

Barry: Thanks, Scott.

I'd like to thank Scott for taking the time to come and give us a little bit of the Samcart story there. If you want to head over to the show notes over at theactivemarketer.com/65, there'll be a lot more information there, links to everything that we talked about during the show.

And if you want to give Samcart a try you can head over to theactivemarketer.com/Samcart and set yourself up with a free trial. It is a really great product.

Again, there's only a right product for your needs. So there is a very specific need that Samcart is fantastic for, and if that's, you're an online marketer and you sell single products with some upsells, downsells perhaps or order form bumps, Samcart is a really fantastic product. If you're running a shop with 100 different items and you want people to put stuff in your cart and then check out, then obviously Samcart's not the right solution for that, but a lot of you internet marketers out there, Samcart is a fantastic product and I would urge you to check it out. Head over to theactivemarketer.com/Samcart to set yourself up with a free trial and have a play. You can see how good it is.

Which brings me to another point. If you are struggling to get your sales funnels set up and humming like a well-oiled machine so that you can design and automate and scale your sales process up, then I would urge you to head over to the Active Marketer Insiders. The Active Marketer Insiders is a private community where we share tips, tactics, techniques, shared automations, templates. I provide personalised coaching, individual advice. We run monthly mastermind calls as well, with all the latest tactics and techniques and how to implement those, more importantly, how to get them running in your business quickly.

If you want to head over to theactivemarketer.com/members you can find out a whole lot more. And if you put in the special coupon code Podcast, you'll get a special discount if you join up, especially for podcast listeners.

Well that'll do it for this week. We'll see you again next week. In the meantime, get out there and design, automate and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. See you, everybody.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Active Marketer Podcast. You can find the show notes and all the latest marketing automation news over at theactivemarketer.com.

Barry Moore

Entrepreneur, aviator and former eCommerce and technology executive, Barry Moore is the founder of TheActiveMarketer.com. When he isn't geeking out about how sales and marketing automation can help your business, you can find him in the surf or in an airplane.

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