How Nicole Burke Hit $500K in 24 Hours (After 4 Years of Trying)
How Nicole Burke Hit $500K in 24 Hours (After 4 Years of Trying)
Published On
Feb 4, 2026
Updated On
Feb 5, 2026
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There's a Better Way to Sell Online
Let AI handle your product pages, sales copy, and checkout optimization while you focus on growing your business. SamCart's all-in-one platform gives you everything you need to sell more—from content creation to conversion.
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What if you could add $300,000 to your annual revenue without creating a single new product or getting more traffic?
That's exactly what happened when Nicole Burke, founder of Gardenary, finally gave her checkout page the attention it deserved.
After four years of chasing a million-dollar launch and making "every mistake possible," Nicole's gardening education business achieved its biggest win yet: over $500,000 in a single 24-hour period. The difference? She stopped treating checkout as an afterthought.
Here's the story of how one founder transformed her business by optimizing the last step of her sales process—and what you can learn from her journey.
The Four-Year Journey to a Half-Million Dollar Day
Nicole Burke runs two sides of her business through Gardenary: she teaches gardening enthusiasts how to grow beautiful, productive kitchen gardens, and she also trains aspiring entrepreneurs to become professional garden coaches themselves—helping others design and maintain their gardens for a living.
It's this second program—teaching people to launch garden coaching businesses—that became her game-changer.
But getting to this level of success wasn't straightforward.
"We've been putting in the reps for years," Nicole shares. "It's been on my vision board since 2021. We've made every mistake possible—from gathering the wrong audience with ads, to overspending, to even having a teammate accidentally send an email saying the cart was closing before we even opened it."
Sound familiar? The turning point came when Nicole shifted her focus from just marketing and sales to the complete customer journey—including what happens at checkout.
The Checkout Strategy That Changed Everything
For over a year, Gardenary had been using SamCart for smaller products—$9 guides to $300 courses on topics like seed starting, soil health, and organic pest control. Then, they started testing features like order bumps, upsells, and downsells on these lower-ticket items.
The results stopped Nicole's team in their tracks.
"Our page builder reviewed the numbers at year-end and said, 'Why have we never done this before?'" Nicole recalls. "It was a 20 to 30% bump in average order value."
That's when it hit them: they'd been leaving serious money on the table with their flagship $3,000 program by not using SamCart's checkout features there.
Nicole explains it simply: "Some people are going to buy one thing and they're done. But a lot of people don't just want the red shirt—they want the purple shirt, the green shirt, and that belt too."
The insight: When you give customers the option to buy more at the right moment, they often will.
Through these expansion revenue features, Gardenary generated over $300,000 in additional sales—revenue that came purely from letting customers purchase complementary offers during checkout.
The Last-Minute Launch Day Additions
Even on launch day, Nicole was still optimizing. While preparing her presentation slides, she made three critical additions to her SamCart checkout page:
Dual pricing options: A payment plan and pay-in-full option gave buyers flexibility
Trust-building guarantee: Added social proof and reduced purchase anxiety
Strategic Upsell: A VIP offer that converted at 8%, revealing significant demand for premium support
"We added these to SamCart just hours before cart open," Nicole explains. "The upsell was an offer we'd never tried before—it's converting at 8%, which tells us there's a lot of opportunity here on the back end of this offer."
The Numbers: How Checkout Optimization Compounds Revenue
Let's break down the financial impact of Nicole's checkout strategy:
Before SamCart optimization:
Used their course platform's basic checkout (no thought given to optimization)
Single product offering with no additional options
One price point, one transaction, done
After implementing SamCart features:
20-30% increase in average order value
$300,000+ in expansion revenue over the past year
$500,000+ generated in a single 24-hour period
8% upsell conversion on VIP offer
Thousands of recovered abandoned carts
The math is compelling. If you're doing $1 million in annual revenue and you increase average order value by just 25%, that's an extra $250,000—without acquiring a single new customer or creating any new products.
The Launch Day Moment
Nicole's launch strategy was solid: she taught live classes every day leading up to cart open, building genuine value and trust with 14,000 registered attendees. Her webinar, "How to Make Your First $3,000 As a Garden Coach," outlined seven doable ways to start earning—then introduced her $3,000 program with a bold promise: help students earn back their investment within 30 days.
"By Thursday, I looked at my husband and said, 'I don't want to get my hopes up, but I think this might be the one,'" Nicole shares.
With 1,800 people attending live on day one, the energy was different this time.
When the sales started rolling in, Nicole wasn't watching the dashboard. "I never see the sales when I'm selling because I'm just in the zone," she says. "We have a text thread, and Liz sent: 'OMG.' I'm just waiting for the bubble... and it was our biggest day ever."
Here's what made the difference: Nicole built the trust through her teaching, but SamCart's checkout features let her capitalize on that trust. The guarantee displayed prominently at checkout reinforced confidence at the critical moment. Multiple payment options removed barriers. The VIP order bump gave her most enthusiastic students an easy way to go all-in.
You can have the best marketing in the world, but if your checkout creates friction or misses opportunities, you're leaving money on the table.
What This Changes for Gardenary
The half-million-dollar day wasn't just a revenue milestone. It fundamentally changed how Nicole thinks about her business model.
"It's making us rethink the business honestly and how we'll structure it for next year," she shares. "It opens up the ability to focus more and maybe create less, but do more for these people."
Previously, Gardenary relied heavily on lower-ticket products. "We sell $9 products, and you gotta sell a lot of $9 products to keep your business going," Nicole notes. While low-ticket items build audience and create entry points, the real business transformation happens when you nail your core offer and optimize how you sell it.
Now, with a proven system that consistently converts high-ticket sales, Nicole can focus on delivering exceptional results for her students. Like the garden coach who joined the program in 2020, built a six-figure business in her first year, maintained it while her daughter spent eight months in the NICU, and is now on track for $200,000 in annual revenue while her three-year-old daughter comes to work with her.
What Nicole Learned About Checkout
When asked what she'd tell entrepreneurs considering SamCart for their next launch, Nicole's response is direct:
"Absolutely go for it. Don't underestimate the checkout."
She continues: "I made it such a small part in my mind. I was so focused on the marketing and the sales, and I forgot the last step. Put 25, 30, 35% of your efforts on that last step because it's crazy how many people we lose. And not just lose—SamCart offers so many abilities to add on."
Her analogy is perfect: "Think about checking out at the supermarket and all those things you're grabbing when you're standing in the checkout line. Use SamCart to build that for yourself."
Three Takeaways for Your Next Launch:
Checkout deserves strategic attention: Allocate 25-35% of your launch planning to the checkout experience, not just marketing
Expansion revenue is real money: Order bumps, upsells, and payment options can increase AOV by 20-30% immediately
Trust + convenience = conversions: Combine strong trust-building (guarantees, social proof) with frictionless buying options
The Specific Features That Made the Difference
Gardenary's success wasn't luck—it was built on specific checkout features that any creator can implement:
1-Click Upsells
A post-purchase offer that converted at 8% for Gardenary's VIP experience add-on. This represents pure incremental revenue that would have been left on the table with a basic checkout. Nicole notes this also revealed demand: "The 8% conversion tells us there's a lot of opportunity here on the back end of this offer."
Order Bumps
Simple checkbox offers at checkout that let customers add complementary products without leaving the page. Gardenary uses a $57 order bump on their main offer, and when tested across their product line, order bumps contributed significantly to their 20-30% average order value increase.
Multiple Payment Options
Offering both payment plans and pay-in-full options removed the biggest barrier for many buyers. Different customers have different cash flow needs—serve them all.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
SamCart's automated abandoned cart system saved "thousands" of would-be lost sales for Gardenary. Every checkout page creates abandonment; the question is whether you have a system to recover it.
Guarantee Display
Adding trust signals directly at checkout reduced purchase anxiety at the critical moment of decision. Buyers want reassurance right before clicking "buy."
How to Apply This to Your Business
Whether you're selling $9 digital products or $3,000 programs, Nicole's approach provides a blueprint:
Phase 1: Test on smaller offers first
Start with your lower-ticket products to learn the system
Experiment with different order bumps and upsell sequences
Measure the impact on average order value
Phase 2: Optimize your core offer checkout
Apply proven tactics to your flagship product
Add strategic order bumps that serve your best customers
Include guarantees and trust signals prominently
Phase 3: Refine based on data
Monitor conversion rates on each checkout element
Test different payment options and pricing structures
Continuously improve based on what your customers respond to
Remember: Gardenary generated over $300,000 in expansion revenue over a year—that's money that came from existing traffic, existing products, and existing customers. The only thing that changed was giving people more ways to buy.
The Bottom Line: Checkout Optimization Delivers Real Results
Nicole Burke's journey from four years of near-misses to a $500,000 day proves something critical: the checkout page isn't just the final step—it's a revenue amplifier.
When you treat checkout as a strategic part of your customer experience (not an afterthought), you unlock expansion revenue that's hiding in plain sight. For Gardenary, that meant $300,000+ in additional sales without changing their marketing, their product, or their audience.
The question isn't whether checkout optimization works. The question is: how much revenue are you leaving on the table right now?
Ready to Optimize Your Checkout for Your Next Launch?
See how SamCart's conversion-focused features can add 20-30% to your average order value—just like they did for Gardenary.
Start your free trial today and discover why thousands of creators trust SamCart for their highest-converting checkouts.
About Gardenary
Gardenary helps people design, build, and grow thriving kitchen gardens through courses, e-books, and physical garden products. Founder Nicole Burke also runs a professional training program that teaches aspiring consultants how to build garden coaching businesses—with graduates earning anywhere from their first $3,000 to over $200,000 annually helping others create beautiful, productive gardens. Learn more at gardenary.com or follow @heynicoleburke on Instagram.
What if you could add $300,000 to your annual revenue without creating a single new product or getting more traffic?
That's exactly what happened when Nicole Burke, founder of Gardenary, finally gave her checkout page the attention it deserved.
After four years of chasing a million-dollar launch and making "every mistake possible," Nicole's gardening education business achieved its biggest win yet: over $500,000 in a single 24-hour period. The difference? She stopped treating checkout as an afterthought.
Here's the story of how one founder transformed her business by optimizing the last step of her sales process—and what you can learn from her journey.
The Four-Year Journey to a Half-Million Dollar Day
Nicole Burke runs two sides of her business through Gardenary: she teaches gardening enthusiasts how to grow beautiful, productive kitchen gardens, and she also trains aspiring entrepreneurs to become professional garden coaches themselves—helping others design and maintain their gardens for a living.
It's this second program—teaching people to launch garden coaching businesses—that became her game-changer.
But getting to this level of success wasn't straightforward.
"We've been putting in the reps for years," Nicole shares. "It's been on my vision board since 2021. We've made every mistake possible—from gathering the wrong audience with ads, to overspending, to even having a teammate accidentally send an email saying the cart was closing before we even opened it."
Sound familiar? The turning point came when Nicole shifted her focus from just marketing and sales to the complete customer journey—including what happens at checkout.
The Checkout Strategy That Changed Everything
For over a year, Gardenary had been using SamCart for smaller products—$9 guides to $300 courses on topics like seed starting, soil health, and organic pest control. Then, they started testing features like order bumps, upsells, and downsells on these lower-ticket items.
The results stopped Nicole's team in their tracks.
"Our page builder reviewed the numbers at year-end and said, 'Why have we never done this before?'" Nicole recalls. "It was a 20 to 30% bump in average order value."
That's when it hit them: they'd been leaving serious money on the table with their flagship $3,000 program by not using SamCart's checkout features there.
Nicole explains it simply: "Some people are going to buy one thing and they're done. But a lot of people don't just want the red shirt—they want the purple shirt, the green shirt, and that belt too."
The insight: When you give customers the option to buy more at the right moment, they often will.
Through these expansion revenue features, Gardenary generated over $300,000 in additional sales—revenue that came purely from letting customers purchase complementary offers during checkout.
The Last-Minute Launch Day Additions
Even on launch day, Nicole was still optimizing. While preparing her presentation slides, she made three critical additions to her SamCart checkout page:
Dual pricing options: A payment plan and pay-in-full option gave buyers flexibility
Trust-building guarantee: Added social proof and reduced purchase anxiety
Strategic Upsell: A VIP offer that converted at 8%, revealing significant demand for premium support
"We added these to SamCart just hours before cart open," Nicole explains. "The upsell was an offer we'd never tried before—it's converting at 8%, which tells us there's a lot of opportunity here on the back end of this offer."
The Numbers: How Checkout Optimization Compounds Revenue
Let's break down the financial impact of Nicole's checkout strategy:
Before SamCart optimization:
Used their course platform's basic checkout (no thought given to optimization)
Single product offering with no additional options
One price point, one transaction, done
After implementing SamCart features:
20-30% increase in average order value
$300,000+ in expansion revenue over the past year
$500,000+ generated in a single 24-hour period
8% upsell conversion on VIP offer
Thousands of recovered abandoned carts
The math is compelling. If you're doing $1 million in annual revenue and you increase average order value by just 25%, that's an extra $250,000—without acquiring a single new customer or creating any new products.
The Launch Day Moment
Nicole's launch strategy was solid: she taught live classes every day leading up to cart open, building genuine value and trust with 14,000 registered attendees. Her webinar, "How to Make Your First $3,000 As a Garden Coach," outlined seven doable ways to start earning—then introduced her $3,000 program with a bold promise: help students earn back their investment within 30 days.
"By Thursday, I looked at my husband and said, 'I don't want to get my hopes up, but I think this might be the one,'" Nicole shares.
With 1,800 people attending live on day one, the energy was different this time.
When the sales started rolling in, Nicole wasn't watching the dashboard. "I never see the sales when I'm selling because I'm just in the zone," she says. "We have a text thread, and Liz sent: 'OMG.' I'm just waiting for the bubble... and it was our biggest day ever."
Here's what made the difference: Nicole built the trust through her teaching, but SamCart's checkout features let her capitalize on that trust. The guarantee displayed prominently at checkout reinforced confidence at the critical moment. Multiple payment options removed barriers. The VIP order bump gave her most enthusiastic students an easy way to go all-in.
You can have the best marketing in the world, but if your checkout creates friction or misses opportunities, you're leaving money on the table.
What This Changes for Gardenary
The half-million-dollar day wasn't just a revenue milestone. It fundamentally changed how Nicole thinks about her business model.
"It's making us rethink the business honestly and how we'll structure it for next year," she shares. "It opens up the ability to focus more and maybe create less, but do more for these people."
Previously, Gardenary relied heavily on lower-ticket products. "We sell $9 products, and you gotta sell a lot of $9 products to keep your business going," Nicole notes. While low-ticket items build audience and create entry points, the real business transformation happens when you nail your core offer and optimize how you sell it.
Now, with a proven system that consistently converts high-ticket sales, Nicole can focus on delivering exceptional results for her students. Like the garden coach who joined the program in 2020, built a six-figure business in her first year, maintained it while her daughter spent eight months in the NICU, and is now on track for $200,000 in annual revenue while her three-year-old daughter comes to work with her.
What Nicole Learned About Checkout
When asked what she'd tell entrepreneurs considering SamCart for their next launch, Nicole's response is direct:
"Absolutely go for it. Don't underestimate the checkout."
She continues: "I made it such a small part in my mind. I was so focused on the marketing and the sales, and I forgot the last step. Put 25, 30, 35% of your efforts on that last step because it's crazy how many people we lose. And not just lose—SamCart offers so many abilities to add on."
Her analogy is perfect: "Think about checking out at the supermarket and all those things you're grabbing when you're standing in the checkout line. Use SamCart to build that for yourself."
Three Takeaways for Your Next Launch:
Checkout deserves strategic attention: Allocate 25-35% of your launch planning to the checkout experience, not just marketing
Expansion revenue is real money: Order bumps, upsells, and payment options can increase AOV by 20-30% immediately
Trust + convenience = conversions: Combine strong trust-building (guarantees, social proof) with frictionless buying options
The Specific Features That Made the Difference
Gardenary's success wasn't luck—it was built on specific checkout features that any creator can implement:
1-Click Upsells
A post-purchase offer that converted at 8% for Gardenary's VIP experience add-on. This represents pure incremental revenue that would have been left on the table with a basic checkout. Nicole notes this also revealed demand: "The 8% conversion tells us there's a lot of opportunity here on the back end of this offer."
Order Bumps
Simple checkbox offers at checkout that let customers add complementary products without leaving the page. Gardenary uses a $57 order bump on their main offer, and when tested across their product line, order bumps contributed significantly to their 20-30% average order value increase.
Multiple Payment Options
Offering both payment plans and pay-in-full options removed the biggest barrier for many buyers. Different customers have different cash flow needs—serve them all.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
SamCart's automated abandoned cart system saved "thousands" of would-be lost sales for Gardenary. Every checkout page creates abandonment; the question is whether you have a system to recover it.
Guarantee Display
Adding trust signals directly at checkout reduced purchase anxiety at the critical moment of decision. Buyers want reassurance right before clicking "buy."
How to Apply This to Your Business
Whether you're selling $9 digital products or $3,000 programs, Nicole's approach provides a blueprint:
Phase 1: Test on smaller offers first
Start with your lower-ticket products to learn the system
Experiment with different order bumps and upsell sequences
Measure the impact on average order value
Phase 2: Optimize your core offer checkout
Apply proven tactics to your flagship product
Add strategic order bumps that serve your best customers
Include guarantees and trust signals prominently
Phase 3: Refine based on data
Monitor conversion rates on each checkout element
Test different payment options and pricing structures
Continuously improve based on what your customers respond to
Remember: Gardenary generated over $300,000 in expansion revenue over a year—that's money that came from existing traffic, existing products, and existing customers. The only thing that changed was giving people more ways to buy.
The Bottom Line: Checkout Optimization Delivers Real Results
Nicole Burke's journey from four years of near-misses to a $500,000 day proves something critical: the checkout page isn't just the final step—it's a revenue amplifier.
When you treat checkout as a strategic part of your customer experience (not an afterthought), you unlock expansion revenue that's hiding in plain sight. For Gardenary, that meant $300,000+ in additional sales without changing their marketing, their product, or their audience.
The question isn't whether checkout optimization works. The question is: how much revenue are you leaving on the table right now?
Ready to Optimize Your Checkout for Your Next Launch?
See how SamCart's conversion-focused features can add 20-30% to your average order value—just like they did for Gardenary.
Start your free trial today and discover why thousands of creators trust SamCart for their highest-converting checkouts.
About Gardenary
Gardenary helps people design, build, and grow thriving kitchen gardens through courses, e-books, and physical garden products. Founder Nicole Burke also runs a professional training program that teaches aspiring consultants how to build garden coaching businesses—with graduates earning anywhere from their first $3,000 to over $200,000 annually helping others create beautiful, productive gardens. Learn more at gardenary.com or follow @heynicoleburke on Instagram.
If you're selling digital products online, you need more than a pretty way to deliver your content. You need an easy way to boost conversions, maximize customer value, and run your business without worrying about technology. That's why we built SamCart.
Features
© 2026 SamCart Inc.
If you're selling digital products online, you need more than a pretty way to deliver your content. You need an easy way to boost conversions, maximize customer value, and run your business without worrying about technology. That's why we built SamCart.
Features
© 2026 SamCart Inc.
If you're selling digital products online, you need more than a pretty way to deliver your content. You need an easy way to boost conversions, maximize customer value, and run your business without worrying about technology. That's why we built SamCart.
Features
© 2026 SamCart Inc.