The snow is gone. The sun is shining. Opening Day is right around the corner (Go Orioles). It’s time to bring everyone up to speed after a busy winter in the SamCart Office.
The dev team does this every morning after their stand up. They swear they will all make it eventually. It’s been weeks…
Now, we’ve been pretty quiet the last few months. So I figured it was time to pop my head up and give an update about what we’ve gotten done lately, and what has been keeping us so quiet lately…
A Quiet, Busy Winter
So first things first….SamCart customers are absolutely killing it.
SamCart customers has sold over $135 Million of their own products & services in the past 12 months. And they are on pace for over $200 Million in 2017.
Thats $4 Million every week. And that number is growing constantly.
Since December, we’ve been heads down, laying the foundation for a big year. We have set big goals for 2017, both for the company, and for the tool.
So while I’m excited to catch you up on what’s happened recently, I’m over the moon about what is coming soon to a SamCart account near you.
With that, let’s dive into the 9 most recent round of SamCart *Features, and give a sneak peek into what is just around the corner.
Now, I put an asterisk there because not all of these are “features”. While they all mean big things for SamCart users, “feature” isn’t always the right word. You’ll see what I mean, let’s just get to it…
1) Pinpoint Your “Prospects”
You know how plenty of visitors hit your checkout page, but never buy anything?
For the uninitiated, that’s called Cart Abandonment, and it’s a huge problem. SamCart’s entire mission in life is to help lower your cart abandonment and capture more sales.
Well, SamCart’s newest report is ‘Phase II’ in SamCart’s fight against Cart-Abandonment.
Any customer that hits one of your checkout pages, but does not complete an order is added to your Prospects tab.
You can go in and grab the names, emails, & phone numbers of every person who abandoned their cart.
SamCart customers are emailing, calling, and even texting their Prospects to close easy sales. And this is just the beginning…
Hopefully you see where we are going with this one. You can expect automated follow-up messages, integrations with your favorite email tools, and more.
If you want to learn more about the Prospects report, check out this article from the Knowledge Base.
2) The Checkout Popup
Want to have customers order without leaving your site? Then SamCart’s checkout popup is what you’re looking for.
Activate the popup template, and your visitors can complete their order right there on your sales page.
And this is not some wimpy little popup. Your SamCart popup comes fully loaded with order bumps, one click upsells, multiple payment options, coupons, & all the other profit-boosting features you know and love.
Once again, this one template is just the start. Stay tuned, because SamCart is getting a lot closer to your website in the near future.
If you want to learn more about the SamCart Popup Checkout, click here to see the Knowledge Base article.
3) Checkouts Load Twice As Fast
Ok without getting too much into the weeds, we’ve spent a lot of time since December restructuring how SamCart Checkout Pages are built.
This has to be the LEAST sexy thing our development team has ever done, but it has ‘Big-Time-Timmy-Jim’ long term implications. Anyone else love that commercial?
This un-sexy work is the foundation for some much bigger things coming soon. But the good news is, this un-sexy background work has produced some side-benefits that every SamCart user can cheer for.
This foundational work has cut your checkout load speeds in half.
Not only are your checkout pages loading more than two times faster, but making checkout pages is faster, loading orders is faster, getting your stats is faster.
A fast tool has gotten even faster. A reliable tool has never been more reliable. And all of that while more and more businesses are using SamCart every single day.
4) Added Integration Triggers
Customers rave about how SamCart helps them get more out of their other favorite tools.
We think that integrations with your favorite tools for email marketing, membership sites, & more shouldn’t stop after your customer places an order.
You know how it usually goes with other tools, customer places an order and you add them to an email list. Ho hum, end of story.
Well with SamCart, you can setup integration rules that automatically follow your customer’s entire life cycle. Sure, you run an action when someone places an order. But you can also run an action if that order is refunded, or if a subscription is cancelled, or if a charge is declined.
So your email lists are always perfectly segmented! You can be 100% sure that your customers are here, and your leads are over here. Not a single subscriber is out of place, because SamCart makes it easy to keep people right where they should be.
And thanks to so recent updates, you now can automatically add and/or remove customers from different lists (or add/remove tags, depends on the tool!) anytime the following actions happens…
- A New Order Is Placed
- A Order Is Refunded
- A Payment Is Declined
- A Payment Is Recovered
- [New] A Subscription Is Cancelled
Just another way that SamCart is your best employee. Working around the clock to make sure your entire business works seamlessly together.
To see more about how you can use SamCart’s integrations to save countless hours of your time, click here to see the Knowledge Base article on Integration Settings.
These actions are also being added to the SamCart Webhook. For those of you reading between the lines, here comes the SamCart API.
5) Customer Support Rock Stars
Now here’s some stuff that has nothing to do with the the tool itself, but still critically important to you and us.
In October of last year, we put a huge emphasis on improving SamCart’s Customer Support. We had just brought in a mountain of new users, and we honestly just weren’t ready for it.
Thought we were, super weren’t. And we lost plenty of customers over it.
So we got to work. And I am so excited to tell you that our Customer Support team has been quietly killing it for months now. With more customers to help than ever, response time is way down, customer satisfaction is way up, and issues are getting resolved faster than ever.
- Support hours have been extended to help out our friends on the west coast. SamCart in-app messaging is now covered Monday through Friday, 9 AM – 8 PM Eastern Coast Time, USA.
- Average Response Time is under 30 minutes for the weekdays.
- Customer Satisfaction is over+90%.
I could go on. But needless to say I am extremely proud of Nicole & our Support Team. They fight so hard for our customers, and it’s just so cool to get more and more comments like this one in the Customer Facebook Group.
If a member of our team has helped you out, tag them in a comment. I know it would make their day!
This also is not the end of the story here. We have so much more planned to help support you even better, but this is a great start.
If you happen to be someone who left SamCart because you didn’t feel the support was up to snuff, baby come back…we’ve changed 😉
But in all seriousness, the days of losing customers to underwhelming support are behind us.
6) Checkout Redirect
Every good promotion has a close, a deadline that marks the end of the sale.
Well, as a simple way of helping you close down your sale when it’s over, SamCart now has a checkout redirect feature. When it’s time to “close” your checkout page, just paste in any URL and instead of being able to place an order on your checkout page, your visitors will be redirected to the URL you choose.
If you want to open that checkout page back up, delete the URL! Easy as that.
When your sale is over, redirect visitors somewhere that builds a waiting list, offers them the same product at full retail price, or gives them a different product to buy.
7) Template Color Presets
This is a fun one. Lots of users love customizing their templates to match their branding.
After getting enough requests to see our templates in certain color schemes, we built in some quick color presets for you to mess around with.
Take each of your checkout templates and switch between color schemes to see how they match your branding. Customize and tweak each one however you see fit!
8) Fixed Plenty Of Smaller Stuff
Ok, now on to the less glamorous (but still important) stuff. In addition to the big-picture foundational work, our team has worked their butts off to fix the small stuff as well.
Here’s just a quick list of fixed items that maybe you noticed, maybe not. But important to mention them all the same…
- Affiliate Center Signup: page was screwy when an affiliate’s password didn’t match. Not any more.
- Template Fixes: Plenty of our original templates has some glaring formatting issues. Check again.
- PayPal & Add to Order: Some PayPal users couldn’t use the Add to Order feature. Fixed up.
- Reporting: Dunning & Sales By Product reports were doing some weird things with dates. Boom, done.
The list goes on. The list of minor bugs that popup is long, and we don’t need to list then all here. But let’s just say that bugs are getting fewer and fewer every day. And the ones that do popup are getting fixed faster and faster.
So proud of the team we have in the office, and the tool that is helping our customers process over $30MM each month.
9) The Checkout Cure
We are always searching for new ways to help you succeed. There’s so much to teach & share about how to use SamCart to sell more stuff. So we created a training series called, “The Checkout Cure”.
The Checkout Cure is a step-by-step training course that we deliver to new customers via email. Each day is a new tutorial, helping new customers to get setup & selling with one little step every day.
It has everything from creating your first product to using one click upsells. And our new customers love it!
If you want to check it out, send in a message to our team. We’d love to send you through it.
Bonus: What Is Next For SamCart
Ok I told you we would try and get a sneak peak into the future of SamCart. Well let’s do this in two parts.
The Near Future
Here’s some stuff that is already in testing, and you can expect them all soon…
- SamCart’s newest membership integration with MemberPress will be live.
- You will be able to assign links & swipe emails to specific affiliates in the Affiliate Center so that only certain partners can promote certain products and/or landing pages.
- If you already have a customer’s information, you will be able to pre-fill your checkout page with their name, email, phone number, and more.
The Near-Ish Future
Now these are more big picture items that we’re working on. This is the list that we’re dying to get out there, and have invested months of background work into making these possible.
- More in depth reporting on payment plans, split tests, etc. We’re working on letting you get every stat you need, and exporting it however you want so you can make better business decisions
- Better account management inside SamCart so you can see what level you’re on and upgrade/downgrade between levels
- Better on-boarding so you know exactly how to get started selling your products once you sign up
- New checkout page templates
So bottom line, we’re aiming high in 2017. If we’ve been a little quiet, it’s because we’re busy. But we can’t wait to show you everything we’ve been working on.
Alright, back to work. We’ve got a lot to do.
