Of all the tools I've bought in my 15 year Online Marketing Career one stands head and shoulders above the rest as my best investment.
Thrivecart.
Thrivecart allows me to run my business in a smooth and efficient manner, get the stats and data I need when I need it and continue to scale.
I purchased Thrivecart originally just to process payments, however over time it has become a full fledged business hub.
It triggers automations, it tells me all my important stats at a glance, it helps recovered missed payments and if I was selling a physical product it would tell my fulfilment center where to send my products in real time.
Please don't think of Thrivecart as just another Shopping Cart
It's amazingly flexible allowing you to run your affiliate program as well as allowing you to use coupons and take payments via different processors and run your own dunning (recovering and preventing missed payments).
In the past I've paid $70 a month for just affiliate management software and dunning now it's all included in Thrivecart. (currently a one time payment)
For example with a single shopping cart I can:
- Embed it on a landing page
- Place the link in an email
- Use it as a pop up
- Use it to add buyers to a list or a membership site
- Use it to launch a cart abandonment sequence
- Add a bump offer
- Create a funnel upsells and downsells
- Tag customers on my ESP
- Pay affiliates or JV's
- Set up subscriptions, split pay, pay what you want or onetime payments
- A/B test your carts
That is just some of the flexibility of Thrivecart.
In this review I am going to delve deep and highlight many of the main features. I'll also take you through setting up a cart to highlight how easy it is.
Thrivecart is regularly updated (over 300 updates last year alone) so be sure to check back occasionally to see what's new.
Overview Of Thrive Cart
Thrivecart started out as simply a piece of cart software allowing you to take payments since then it's been in constant development.
Over the past few years there has been upgrade after upgrade bring not only new features but updates that ensure you comply with local laws such as digital VAT or GDPR.
Who Is behind Thrivecart?
The developers of Thrivecart are Webactix run by Josh Bartlett. In the past Josh has developed Easy Video Suite which is still supported today.
I always recommend that you check that all software vendors have a history of well supported software and are actual developers not just Marketers who outsource the development.
Josh's long history is a big positive and one of the reasons i jumped on thrivecart when I launched.
Support
Support for Thrivecart is superb with a very helpful and responsive Helpdesk and a Facebook group where you can often get "first aid" support.
I've rarely had to wait long for an answer to any ticket and they often go above and beyond by creating videos and step by step guides to help you fix any issues you have.
Value For Money
Thrivecart is excellent value for money.
Currently you can get it for $595 for lifetime access. This might seem a bit high but if you went with it's closest rival Samcart you would need to pay $199 a month for the same features.
(Affiliate centre and dunning aren't included in the standard Samcart package.)
To put that in context in the first year of using Thrivecart you'll save $590 over using Samcart, in the following years you'll save $1200 per year.
One final reason I would choose Thrivecart over Samcart is that when i was with Samcart the subscriptions I set up were integrated with Samcart meaning if I left the subscriptions stopped. (this may have changed as it was totally stupid!)
With thrivecart your subscriptions are integrated with Stripe or Paypal directly so they aren't linked to Thrivecart.
Soon Thrivecart will also be moving to a Two-tier model and then to a monthly model so now is the time to get in.
Under The Hood
What matters with Cart software is that it is fast, it converts well and it's reliable. Once again thrivecart ticks all 3 boxes.
Your cart pages are fast to load, the inbuilt cart templates are designed to convert and in all the time I've been with Thrivecart I've never seen it fail.
The cart's look great on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Digital & Physical Products.
When you go to set up a new cart the first thing you do is choose if you are selling a Physical Or Digital Product.
Yes you can do both with Thrivecart and integrate with multiple fulfilment options.
Next up you get the option to name your product and give it a label . You checkout URL is then generated based on the name of you product.
You'll also notice from the screenshot below all the sections you need are available from this one screen along with the 3 different modes each cart can have.
Next you'll be able to set the currency and the price of you product. It's in this next section that you can calculate sales tax and customise your customers invoices.
Once you click on the button to set the price you get lot's of options to set the type of pricing you need. As you see there are lots of options available
In this demo I'll be going for a subscription of $99 per month with no trial period and no set limits to either number of subscriptions or number available.
The next option we come to is if we want to add a bump offer to the cart , I've found that there convert pretty well often in the 30%+ range but for this offer we won't add it.
The next step is to choose our payment processors. While there are 5 available I usually just stick to paypal and stripe.
Finally before we move onto the fulfilment of our product we can set up commissions for our affiliates.
These come with may options
-Auto approve or manually approve
-First Cookie or Last Cookie
-Lifetime cookie or 7 day, 14 day, 30 day, 60 day, 3months, 6 months or a year
On top of that affiliates can send traffic to articles or posts and still get paid when people sign up.
Fulfilment
The next step is fulfilment if you are setting up a physical product you will now have the option of choosing your fulfilment partners, we'll cover these in the integrations section.
For now we are going to add out support details and choose how we are going to fulfil the purchase.
- Show an invoice and send details via email
-Send them to a specific url
-Add them to a membership site
Thrivecart integrates with several membership sites and we'll look at these in the integration section.
If you choose the URL option you can set the URL to expire after a specific period of time.
Checkout
The next step is to choose the checkout template that you require, as mentioned above you currently have a choice of 4 . You also have ability to A/B test your carts
The next big update should bring several more carts for you to test.
- One Step Checkout
- Two Step Checkout
- Embeddable Checkout
- Popup Checkout
Once you choose the template you want you have multiple customisation options. You can add logos, testimonials, videos, box shots, bullet points and guarantees.
I've seen several of these carts used as standalone landing pages and perform well.
Success Page
Your next task is to set up a success page where your customer lands after the purchase. Here, as ever Thrivecart is flexible and gives you choices.
You can choose a Thrivecart landing page that you edit yourself or you can redirect to you own custom landing page.
Tracking Codes
The final step with your Cart is to add the tracking codes where you need them. Once again flexibility is the order of the day.
- Add tracking codes to all pages
- Add tracking codes to just the cart
- Add tracking codes if the main product is purchased
Using these options you can easily track successful purchases and cart abandonments .
In the next section we'll look at one of the most important features of Thrivecart... Behaviour Rules.
Behaviour Rules
The behaviour rules section of Thrivecart is excellent as you can see below, you can set up rules that kick in on a whole host of occasions.
These rules are broken down into 3 areas
- Main product
- Subscriptions
- Dunning (Preventing or recovering missed payments)
Once the rules are triggered they can instigate email sequences via your Email Service Provider, add details to a spreadsheet or use custom HTML.
If you use membership software like ActiveMember 360 you can use a rule to set up the membership and send the details to your new subscriber.
Do not underestimate the power of Thrivecart's behaviour Rules!
Sales Funnel?
That's it , your cart is almost ready, on the next screen you'll be presented with your cart url that you can add to a button or use as a link in an email.
You'll also have the options to add Upsells and Downsells via the Customise Sales Funnel button and add a tracking id if you are using the cart in multiple locations.
ThriveCart Affiliate Option
The final decision you have to make is do you want affiliates to promote your product?
If you do Thrivecart now provides with the links to allow for new and existing affiliates to sign up. for your new product.
You have the option for a link or an embeddable button.
That's your cart setup and ready to rollout as you can see it's a pretty quick and simple process to set up Thrivecart but the cart is only the start.
There are a whole load of goodies hidden in the backend of thrive cart.
Thrivecart Features
The backend of Thrivecart holds some amazing features that will help take your business to the next level.
- Dashboard - get a daily snapshot and a full overview of your business covering multiple areas.
- Product lists including Upsells, Downsells , A/B tests and Coupons.
- Transactions - search by customer or date range and see all the transactions
- Subscriptions - view all your subscriptions just like you can view your transactions.
- Affiliates, see how your affiliates are performing.
- JV Partners - split payments with JV partners.
- Settings manage you account and integrations
Thrivecart Dashboard
The Dashboard is well worth looking at in more details since a recent update it gives you stats on 32 different areas on your business in an easy to view grid.
For anyone who is serious about their business this should be a top priority, if you are on the fence about Thrivecart consider the impact this level of data could have on your business!
Each section of the grid comes with a description of what each section means.
This really is a useful tool to track your business and ensure it's growing , stats like these usually require additional software .
The dashboard is fully customisable so you can add or remove various stats as per your requirements. You can also drag and drop them so the display with your most important stats at the top.
Thrivecart Integrations
The first thing to say about Thrivecart's Integrations is that you can integrate with almost any other service using Zapier and webhooks.
Having said that there are plenty of native options available. In this section we'll look at four of the main options in a little more depth
Payment Gateways
We covered this briefly before but Thrivecart has 3 main payment processors integrated
- Authoriznet
- Paypal
- Stripe
Via those you can also use Applepay and Googlepay
Autoresponders
Thrivecart integrate with most good email service providers.
Hook up your ESP and you can then use the rules section to keep your business on track.
Membership Platform Integration
Thrivecart integrates with 6 different membership platforms, one you hook up Thrivecart you can add each customer to the level related to the product they purchased.
If like me you use ActiveMember 360 you don't need to integrate Thrivecart with it as you can set up the purchase to assign the relevant tags via the rules section of the cart.
Fulfilment Services
Over the past few months Thrivecart have added several fulfilment services to help you sell physical products.
Included in that is an option to use google spreadsheets, this will add all the orders to a spread sheet that you can share with any services not listed .
So for example if you were selling a monthly physical newsletter the spreadsheet could be shared with your printer.
Additionally you could use Zapier to connect with any services you required.
You'll even find a slack integration that you can use to share orders with your team.
Summary
As I said at the start Thrivecart is not just a shopping cart it is so much more than that, since it was launched it has become a business center.
Sure you can sell physical or digital products with high converting carts, but the addition of the dashboard and dunning has taken it to a new level.
As an online business knowing you stats has never been so important and Thrivecart helps you to do that in a simple and effective way.
Thrivecart is a must have if you are serious about selling products and growing your business.
he moment you can get Thrivecart for a $595 LIFETIME Cost.
Shortly that will be changing into a Standard and Pro pricing model and then into a Monthly paymentonce all the new features are added.
Don't miss out
Find Out More About The Thrivecart Pilot Program