Online Sales Pro vs. ClickFunnels vs. SamCart: Which Funnel Builder Should You Use?
“How to grow your online business in just one week!”
“How to start an online business for free!”
We’ve heard these promises from online gurus time and time again.
But there’s a difference between watching a masterclass–where the instructor already knows the ins and outs of everything they’re teaching you–and trying to jump off the deep end and navigate everything yourself.
In fact, according to Hubspot, the top three most difficult things to do in sales include getting responses from prospects, engaging multiple decision makers, and closing deals.
These are things that you can’t just learn in a class and suddenly master them.
Maybe you’re someone in this situation, where you just got out of a masterclass where you learned how to launch your online business and you’re suddenly stuck at a particular part of your process…
OR
Perhaps you’re someone who is a bit more advanced in this whole online business thing and you’re now looking to scale your business and bring it to that next level.
Whichever boat you’re in–or if you fit somewhere in the middle– a sales funnel that works for you is probably the next step in your “journey to financial freedom,” or whatever the online guru of your choice likes to call it.
So What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a series of steps (online or offline) designed to guide visitors toward a buying decision.
So whether you’re selling a high ticket item–like a masterclass or individual coaching–for thousands of dollars, or if your goal is simply to just collect an email and build your email list, you’re using a sales funnel to guide your customers towards that purchase.
And these sales funnels aren’t just what we think of with landing pages, upsells, etc. They are happening right in front of our faces every day, whether we notice them or not.
One example of an offline sales funnel is our experience at a fast food chain like McDonald’s.
When we order our burger, the person at the counter often says the famous line, “Would you like fries with that?” or many of their other upsells they offer in the purchasing process. This is a sales funnel and the point is to get you to add on that order of fries and increase McDonalds’ sales.
But sales funnels aren’t just upsells or cross-sells. They are made up of the entire process from the starting point, where a potential customer is learning about your product, all the way to them making the purchase (and returning for another and another).
And since this process involves so many different things — from marketing, to lead magnets and landing pages, to sales pages, etc– using an online tool that can help you manage your funnels and learn about the process can be a real game changer for you and your online business.
In fact, according to a study by Harvard Business Review, companies who tried to contact a lead within an hour of receiving a query were almost 7 times more likely to close the sale.
Using an online sales funnel tool allows you to get real-time updates on your leads and lets you set up automated emails out to these leads so you’re catching them in these optimal timeframes.
An Overview of Online Sales Pro, ClickFunnels, and SamCart
In this article, I’ll be giving an overview of three popular online sales funnel tools and then I’ll be comparing them and going over their pros and cons. After reading this, you should know exactly where to go next and how to get started with creating a sales funnel today:
Online Sales Pro
Online Sales Pro offers a simple and easy-to-use tool to capture your leads, monitor them, and automate email marketing to them. With Online Sales Pro, you can create a sales funnel and have it up and running in just five minutes.
Online Sales Pro focuses on three pillars with its users:
- Foundation
- Traffic
- Engagement
Your foundation is made up of the lead magnets you are setting up through the tool, which include landing pages and sales pages to attract traffic to your site, offer, etc. Online Sales Pro offers a training video on how to set up your funnel, and as you’ll see in some examples in the next section, it’s really as simple as it gets.
Traffic and engagement are the two goals of your funnel, and Online Sales Pro offers hundreds of training videos on how to drive traffic to your funnel, and then how to engage with the leads and convert them into customers.
Easy-to-use and quick functionality, along with the hundreds of hours of training available for users, make Online Sales Pro the perfect tool for beginners and people who want to just get their sales funnel out there quickly and efficiently.
If this sounds like you, check out Online Sales Pro and sign up here!
ClickFunnels
Image source: markinblog.com
ClickFunnels is similar to OSP in its goals and offerings, but it caters more toward a more advanced entrepreneur.
Like OSP, ClickFunnels is all about automating the sales process so that the hard work is done for you. It offers sales funnels design templates that will help you build optimized landing pages as well as sales pages to sell services or products online.
On top of these design templates, CF also allows you to customize these templates by choosing fonts, colors, the pictures on the page, etc.
It also allows you to customize your entire funnel based on your goals– so you can create an optimal funnel for your online course, and a totally different type of funnel for your webinar. With these features in mind and the customizability of ClickFunnels, it’s best suited for a business owner with experience who doesn’t need training or any guidance in the sales funnel process.
SamCart
Image source: http://bloggersideas.com
SamCart is a digital shopping cart builder that helps shop owners increase sales. According to a number of studies, somewhere between 65% and 85% of shoppers abandon their cart.
SamCart is here as a solution to this problem. It offers a wide range of templates ready for your online shopping cart. Through its efficient process, you can build your checkout page in less than half an hour.
Like Online Sales Pro and ClickFunnels, SamCart also integrates with a wide range of email marketing tools such as AWeber.
You do not need to be a tech-savvy online shop owner to use SamCart, so anyone from a beginner to someone more advanced can use it to set up and optimize their online shopping cart and sales funnel.
Now Let’s Dive In and Compare:
In order to walk through the comparisons between these tools, I’m going to run through how these each hold up among four features:
- Ease of use
- Automation
- Customization
- Pricing
Let’s get into it:
Ease of use Comparison
Online Sales Pro– Ease of Use
Online Sales Pro is undoubtedly the easiest interface to use out of the three of these tools. Once you join OSP, creating your first sales funnel is as simple as logging in and taking just a three simple steps:
- Click on the “Edit” tab on the homepage:
2. Choose a template:
3. Upload your background image and fill out your headline, subheadline, and button text.
4. You can also customize the page by choosing a page color under Page Settings:
5. And finally, choose a Destination URL and name your page:
And that’s literally it– you have a sales funnel in just a few minutes!
On top of having a desktop interface, Online Sales Pro also offers a mobile app that allows you to track your leads on the go:
ClickFunnels–Ease of Use
While Clickfunnels offers a lot of features that can overall make it an easier experience for the more seasoned marketer, its interface can be a bit confusing for beginners.
I believe that with all its functionality and offerings, ClickFunnels struggles with function bloat that can scare newer entrepreneurs away.
Their main selling point is that you can do virtually anything with ClickFunnels, but in order to get the most out of it, expect to spend a lot of time on the help pages or on YouTube looking up solutions to your problems.
For comparison to the Online Sales Pro experience, let’s walk through how to create a simple funnel with ClickFunnels:
- First, you click “Build a Funnel” on the Dashboard:
2. Then, a pop up comes up asking you to choose your goal:
3. Next, you are prompted to give your funnel a name and a group tag, and then click “Build Funnel”:
4. Then you will be given a choice from templates that fit with your goal:
5. Once you select your template, you will see this page:
6. In order to edit your funnel, click “Edit Page” and the Editor will load:
7. From here, you can edit any of the elements of the page by hovering over them and clicking on them. In this example, I clicked on the button “Join the Waitlist” and this editor opened:
As you can see, you can edit the margin around the button, the action, the button text, the font size, etc. This is true for all elements of the page.
8. Once you’re done editing, click “Save” and this box will come up prompting you to change the title, description, etc to make it more SEO optimized:
As you can see through this step-by-step, there is more to the ClickFunnels process, which can be a positive and a negative, depending on your goals.
If you’re a beginner, it can be a confusing and long process to get all the elements edited and go through everything before it’s ready to be published.
If you’re someone who knows the ins and outs of a sales funnel already, the customization opportunities with ClickFunnels might be worth the effort of how long it takes to get it up and running.
SamCart–Ease of Use
Like ClickFunnels, SamCart’s set up is a bit more involved than Online Sales Pro:
- After signing up, you start by filling out all the necessary information to set up your store:
2. Then you move on to filling out information for your business categorization:
3. Next, you set up your payment processor and then click “Get Started”:
4. This will bring you to the Dashboard which shows live updates on your gross sales, profit, page views, orders, refunds, etc:
5. In order to create your shopping cart, click “Products” and then “+ New Product”:
6. Once you’ve filled this out, click “Create Product” and it’ll take you to “Product Details”:
Here you can upload a product image, create the thank you page URL, include product tags, etc.
7. Next, you can design the checkout by choosing from the many templates SamCart offers:
8. Here is a preview of the layout I chose:
9. After you preview your checkout page and are happy with it, you can move on to set up the payment options:
You can choose from Stripe, Paypal, or Braintree as payment processors.
10. Next, you can create an upsell funnel by clicking “Upsells”:
11. SamCart also offers email customization where you can customize the emails you send for each of your products instead of using the default setting emails provided by SamCart:
12. It’s also easy to optimize your shopping cart’s SEO with SamCart’s SEO tab:
Once you’re done going through all these steps, your shopping cart and upsell funnels are ready to go! In terms of time needed to get your shopping cart and funnel up and running,
SamCart is more on par with ClickFunnels in that it offers a lot of features and customization, and with that, it will take a little longer to get it published than it would if you chose to go with the Online Sales Pro.
Automation Comparison
Online Sales Pro — Automation
Online Sales Pro offers automation for both lead generation tracking and email marketing. Online Sales Pro has the capacity to integrate with email marketing tools such as AWeber or MailChimp, which means that once your funnel is set up, you can kick back and let Online Sales Pro do the work for you in warming up your leads and keeping them warm:
Online Sales Pro also tracks your leads real-time so that you always know how well a funnel is doing and where you stand as far as reaching your goals:
Image source: https://james1info4success.wordpress.com/
So if you’re looking for a tool that not only offers you a quick solution but also an efficient one, sign up for Online Sales pro here!
ClickFunnels — Automation
ClickFunnels offers lead generation and response automation that goes beyond what Online Sales Pro can do. For example, you can automate your leads into different tags and categories:
You can also automate outgoing emails–either through ClickFunnels directly or through a third party email marketing tool.
On top of that, you can automate SMS texts as well. This is super helpful to keep leads warm, since on average, the average open rate for text message marketing campaigns is 98% of text messages are opened for marketing campaigns, as opposed to just 20% of emails.
SamCart — Automation
Similar to ClickFunnels, SamCart offers a bit more automation when it comes to the types of responses and actions that occur. Below is an example of triggers you can create actioned responses for:
And like with ClickFunnels and Online Sales Pro, you can integrate an email marketing tool to totally automate the emails you send out to customers. And on top of that, you can edit the most used templates directly in SamCart–the order receipt, refund order, and update payment info emails:
Customization Comparison
Online Sales Pro — Customization
Since Online Sales Pro was created with the beginner in mind, there is not a whole lot of customization you can do with it. When you’re just starting out, too much customization can just confuse you and deter you from ever getting that sales funnel published.
The things that you can customize with Online Sales Pro are the meat and potatoes of the landing page:
So you can upload an image that matches with what you’re trying to sell on the landing page, you can customize the headline and subheadline, and you can make the button text whatever you’d like. You can also choose from a variety of page color settings.
ClickFunnels — Customization
ClickFunnels’ power is in its customization abilities.
Like I’ve said, you can do pretty much anything with ClickFunnels–you just need to know how to do those things already.
Customization of this product starts at the very beginning, where you choose your goal of your funnel:
Once you choose your goal, ClickFunnels offers your templates that are customized to that goal:
You can also customize just about anything on the page itself, such as the font of the headline and subheadline.
You can even choose colors for each individual part of the page from a spectrum, so you can really pinpoint exactly which color you want:
You can also customize what pages are included in your funnel. For example, you can add a sales page at the end that plays a preview of a free webinar you are offering to your leads.
On that sales page, you can change the size of the video and customize that page to your full liking:
While Online Sales Pro offers a sales page as well, you can’t customize it or change the video size, so you can only use the default format.
Overall, ClickFunnels has the best capabilities in terms of customization and therefore, it offers a lot to the online business owner who knows exactly what she wants and exactly how to do it.
SamCart — Customization
SamCart falls somewhere in the middle of Online Sales Pro and ClickFunnels in terms of customization capabilities. Since the whole purpose of the tool is to create an optimized shopping cart page (and an upsell page), there is no customization based on your goals, like ClickFunnels offers.
You can, however, fully customize your shopping cart and upsell page– meaning you can drag and drop content, change the text, add in images, buttons, videos, etc:
You can add in a Guarantee section or testimonials to create trust between you and your customers as well:
Anything you want to do with your shopping cart page to make it fit into your businesses’ style, you can do that with SamCart.
Pricing
Online Sales Pro — Pricing
Since Online Sales Pro caters to beginner entrepreneurs, the price point reflects that. You don’t have to hold your breath while clicking “sign up” for Online Sales Pro, because it’s so reasonably priced with a month-to-month package of $37 per month and an annual plan at $25 per month:
The real value in Online Sales Pro is the efficiency and ease of using it, and the huge library of marketing training. With both plans, you have access to hundreds of training videos that cover everything you would want to know on not just sales funnels but also social media marketing, how to network, etc:
The only big difference between the two plans is the price structure, and with the annual plan, you get a few more bonus trainings and priority live chat support.
If you have the money to pay for the whole year, you’re still only paying $300, which amounts to just around what you would pay for one month of other sales funnel tools out there.
YES! I AM READY TO GET STARTED TODAYClickFunnels — Pricing
ClickFunnels is the priciest tool out of the three in this article, with the lowest monthly plan starting at $97 per month. The Enterprise plan then jumps to $297 per month.
The big difference between the two plans is the number of funnels and pages you can create, the number of unique visitors you can have and the number of custom domains you can have.
If you’re just starting out, $97 or $297 is a lot to shell out per month, especially when you haven’t brought in any revenue yet. However, if you’re looking for a powerhouse tool that will let you do what you want with the funnel, this price tag might be worth it for you.
SamCart — Pricing
SamCart’s pricing also falls between Online Sales Pro and ClickFunnels. Its lowest offering is the “Launch” plan at $49 per month, followed by the “Grow” plan at $99 per month and “Scale” at $199 per month. There is also an “Enterprise” Plan that is $399 per month.
The Launch Plan is best for beginner entrepreneurs who are launching their first digital product or physical product.
It’s not a great option for subscription business owners or those who want to be able to use the one click upsell or payment plan features. These features are available in the Grow and Scale plans.
The Grow Plan includes everything the Launch Plan includes, plus features like customer management, subscription charge reminders, advanced subscription cancellations, etc.
The Scale Plan includes the more advanced SamCart’s features. This includes all the features available in the Launch and Grow plan, along with the built-in dunning tool, the Affiliate Center, cart abandonment, built-in A/B testing, CRM integrations, priority email & chat support, etc.
The Enterprise Plan is for large, established companies. This plan gives you all of the features from the other plans, plus a dedicated account manager, integration setup, and everything you need to get started quickly.
The Pros and Cons
Now that we’ve gone over the basics of Online Sales Pro, ClickFunnels, and SamCart, and compared them based on their major features, let’s sum all of this fun stuff up with pros and cons of each tool:
Online Sales Pro
Pros:
- Ease of Use
- Set Up Funnel in Under 3 Minutes
- Offers a Mobile App
- Provides hundreds of hours of training
- Keeps lead history on dashboard in real-time for up-to-date analytics
- Allows for automation and integration
- Has an Affiliate program
- Very affordable
Cons:
- Not very customizable
- Doesn’t have as many extra features as competitors
ClickFunnels
Pros:
- Very customizable at all levels
- Allows for automation and integration
- Has an Affiliate program
- Allows for A/B testing
- Offers email marketing in ClickFunnels directly in the Enterprise Plan
Cons:
- Expensive
- Not very easy to use
- Not great training or support for beginners
Sam Cart
Pros:
- Has customization capabilities
- Allows for email automation and integration
- Allows for A/B testing
- Has advanced cart abandonment and management
Cons:
- A little pricey
- Can be difficult to navigate the automation and integration section
- Only for those who are selling products
- Affiliate program is only available to the Scale plan members or higher
The Final Word
So what’s the best funnel builder for you? If you’re a beginner or don’t have much experience with sales funnels yet, then Online Sales Pro is your best option. It’s affordable, easy to use, and offers tons of training to help you build your business.
If you’re a seasoned entrepreneur who wants to build funnels for webinars, memberships, or masterclasses, then ClickFunnels might be the option for you.
If you have a product you’re trying to sell and struggle with cart abandonment issues and need a solution to that problem, consider getting SamCart.
If you’re still unsure, go for the least expensive option, which in this case is Online Sales Pro.