The checkout company that bet the whole business on the moment a customer clicks "buy."
In 2013, two brothers running an online baseball-training business hit a wall that anyone selling digital products knows well: the checkout was the weakest link. So Brian and Scott Moran built their own internal payment tool and called it "Userpayment." It worked well enough that they suspected other sellers had the same problem. A year later, that workaround went public as SamCart.
Today SamCart is a software-as-a-service checkout and selling platform aimed squarely at digital creators - course sellers, coaches, and online entrepreneurs who would rather sell than write code. Where a storefront platform asks "what are you selling?", SamCart asks a narrower, sharper question: "what happens the instant someone decides to pay?"
That focus shapes the whole product. SamCart's signature is a customizable one-page checkout, layered with one-click upsells, pre-purchase order bumps, subscription-recovery tools, and A/B testing. The premise is that most sellers don't have a traffic problem - they have a conversion problem. Fixing the checkout, the company argues, is cheaper than buying more clicks.
By its own count, SamCart now serves more than 75,000 creators and businesses and has helped process billions of dollars in sales. It raised an $82 million Series B in 2022, moved its headquarters from Fulton, Maryland to Austin, Texas, and - in a twist not many founders volunteer - watched its co-founder step down as CEO.
In 2025 the company began an AI-first rebrand, folding a 2023 acquisition and a new "Sam AI Assistant" into a platform that now promises to build a product and its sales page from a prompt. The through-line, though, has never changed: remove friction between an idea and a sale.
"I didn't start with venture capital. I started with an eBook. That one PDF funded my next business - which funded SamCart."
SamCart's users are the people the creator economy runs on: someone selling an online course, a coach packaging a program, an author moving ebooks, a small brand shipping a digital download. They are typically not engineers, and they are usually one or two people wearing every hat. Third-party estimates put paying customers around 14,000, inside a broader base of 75,000+ sellers who have used the platform.
A generic checkout leaks money in ways that are easy to miss - a failed card that silently ends a subscription, an abandoned cart, a buyer who would have added one more item if asked. SamCart's answer is a set of features built around that single moment: order bumps the company says lift revenue by roughly a third, one-click upsells it links to meaningfully higher order value, and a "Subscription Saver" that quietly recovers failed recurring payments. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.
Spin up a branded checkout page without touching code. Add an upsell that appears after the first purchase, so the second sale needs no re-entered card. Run an A/B test on the page to see which version converts. Host a course and sell it in the same place buyers pay. Recruit affiliates through a built-in center. Offer pay-what-you-want pricing. And, increasingly, hand a prompt to Sam AI and let it draft the product and page for you.
SamCart sits in a crowded neighborhood. Shopify, Kajabi, Gumroad, ThriveCart, Podia, and ClickFunnels all overlap with parts of what it does. Its positioning comes less from doing more than rivals and more from refusing to. It didn't build a full storefront for physical goods, and it isn't a course-first empire. It picked the checkout page and went deep.
Shopify runs the full storefront for physical goods. SamCart optimizes the checkout and funnel for digital sellers - and many use it alongside another store.
ThriveCart's pitch is a one-time lifetime fee. SamCart is a subscription, betting ongoing features and support justify recurring cost.
Those are course-first, all-in-one platforms. SamCart leads with conversion and checkout, with courses as a feature rather than the core.
Gumroad is instant and simple but takes a higher cut per sale and offers less customization. SamCart trades simplicity for control.
SamCart's marketing centers on revenue lift from the moment of purchase. These are the company's own cited figures, shown for illustration - individual results vary.
Customizable one-page checkout with Checkout Anywhere, stored cards, and mobile-optimized templates.
Post-purchase one-click upsells and pre-purchase bumps that raise average order value.
Automated dunning and failed-payment recovery to reduce involuntary churn on recurring plans.
Native digital course hosting and delivery, sold in the same place buyers pay.
Built-in tools to recruit, track, and pay affiliate partners.
Acquired generative-AI design tool for ebooks, social posts, ads, and webinars.
AI that generates products, sales pages, and checkouts from a prompt.
Flexible pricing that lets buyers name their own price at checkout.
SamCart runs on flat monthly SaaS subscriptions rather than a heavy transaction cut - a deliberate contrast with tools that skim a percentage of every sale. There's a free trial with no card required, native payment processing through SamPay (Stripe-powered) at 2.9% + 30 cents, and optional add-ons for live support and tax handling. Annual billing shaves roughly 25% off. The current public structure looks like this:
Pricing shown reflects SamCart's current public tiers and may change; earlier plans used different names and price points.
The Moran brothers start an online baseball-training business - their entry into digital selling.
An internal checkout tool built to take payments for their own products.
The workaround becomes a standalone checkout product in public beta.
Split testing and post-purchase upsells arrive, cementing the conversion focus.
A $3M seed round after roughly five years of bootstrapping.
SamCart Courses launches; the company raises a $10M Series A.
Eldridge leads a growth round; Justin Smith becomes CEO as Brian Moran shifts to Chief Strategy Officer.
SamCart buys the generative-AI design tool to expand content creation.
An AI Page Builder, a Shopify integration, and physical-product support ship in one year.
SamCart repositions around Sam AI Assistant as a full digital business platform.
SamCart was founded by brothers Brian Moran and Scott Moran. Brian, who bootstrapped his first online venture from his parents' basement while working at a paper-shredding factory, led as CEO before stepping into a Chief Strategy Officer role around 2022. In an unusually candid move, he handed the top job to Justin Smith, who has served as CEO since - a transition Brian frames in plain terms.
"Fired myself as CEO of my own company. I prioritize God, family, then business."
"Focus on what you excel at - the 5 to 20% that only you can do - and empower others to handle the rest."
"Our mission in building SamCart was so we could have fun in life and do the things we really want to do."
SamCart is a checkout and selling platform for digital products, online courses, and services. It helps creators build high-converting checkout pages with upsells, order bumps, and subscriptions - without coding.
Brothers Brian and Scott Moran founded SamCart in 2014. Brian is now Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, and Justin Smith has served as CEO since around 2022.
Shopify is a full storefront platform geared toward physical goods, while SamCart focuses on optimized one-page checkouts and funnels for digital products and creators. Many sellers use SamCart for the checkout even if they use another storefront.
SamCart uses monthly SaaS pricing with a free trial. Current public tiers are roughly Core at $79/mo and Pro at $199/mo, plus custom Enterprise, with discounts for annual billing.
SamCart raised a $3M seed (2019), a $10M Series A (2020), and an $82M Series B (2022) led by Eldridge, after roughly five years of bootstrapping.