Ultimate ThriveCart Review – The Best Checkout Software On The Market

ThriveCart is a simple and effective way to build an online store of your own, rather than relying on digital marketplaces that invariably take a substantial cut of your earnings. Put simply, it’s a sales cart solution that you can integrate into your website to make it possible for customers to pay for your products or services in a secure, professional and easy-to-use way.

ThriveCart is perhaps best suited to online businesses, especially those selling digital products like courses, ebooks and site memberships. Coincidentally, businesses selling digital products are much easier to make into sources of passive (or, at the very least, low-effort) income. However, it can also work with physical product sales and will integrate with your Shopify account if you want to create a dropshipping business. You can even set it up to collect money for consultancy services with professional-looking invoices. In fact, I’ve even seen ‘buskers’ and musical artists using ThriveCart to collect sales and donations.

ThriveCart – A Personal Experience

I started using Thrive Cart for the first time in early 2018 and I remember being so nervous about the purchase, as at the time, the investment of $495 (now $690 for a Lifetime Deal) was a big commitment for me on that particular business, even if was for a Lifetime Deal.

I need not of worried though, as it is easily  the best business decisions that I have ever made. It absolutely transformed my business, doubling my revenue within 6 months of using the platform.

Why?

There almost too many reasons to list, but I’ll try and call out the main ones.

1. Improved Conversion Rates

I’m not a designer in any way shape or form and my checkout pages never really looked that great, or I just relied on the traditional PayPal checkout page.

With ThriveCart I was able to design beautifully designed and conversion optimised pages within minutes. My conversion rates literally went through the roof (hate to think of how many sales I was losing before!)

It basically added instant professionalism to my website.

Add in the awesome upsell and funnel features and my revenue per order also sky rocketed!

2. Affiliate Partnerships

ThriveCart makes it so easy to recruit and manage referral partners and this, coupled with my new found professionally designed pages, meant that I had partners lining up to work with me

3. In-built Joint-Ventures

This lead to me partner up with some of the biggest players in the industry and running big six figured product launches, which I would never have been able to do previously. I would not have even been in the conversation

4. Huge Time Savings

I can now manage all my sales and transactions in one-place and it directly integrates with my PayPal, Stripe and Merchant Accounts

5. Amazing Customer Service

I can honestly say that the customer support and commitment to their product is the best I have seen anywhere, in any industry.

The customer service alone is excellent. On top of that, they are consistently investing time to launch new features and improvements to the platform – there are literally new roll outs every few weeks.

Basically the product just gets better and better every day and it costs me nothing.

6. Great Users

There is an excellent Facebook group for ThriveCart users. TC themselves are active on there but what amazes me is how many ThriveCart customers are also in the group, being so positive and about the platform, helping each other and even promoting each other.

It’s really a fantastic community.

ThriveCart simply gets my highest personal endorsement. If you are selling online, you should use ThriveCart – it’s that simple.

Important features of ThriveCart

ThriveCart has a lot of very helpful additional features, but the most important of all is undoubtedly the checkout page. It looks very neat and is easy to customise to your needs, giving your business an all-important look of professionalism – a must when it comes to getting customers to part with their hard-earned money.

The checkout page is specifically designed to convert well, helping you to close more sales. However, if you think you can do better, there’s a function that allows you to A/B test alternative designs. In case you’re not familiar with the term, A/B testing means sending one version of the checkout page to some customers (version A) and a different version to others (version B) and then showing which version generated more sales. You don’t have to be a technical wizard to set these tests up, nor an analytical expert to read the results – it’s all made very simple.

Another feature that’s very hard to find on other platforms is the easy integration of bump offers. A bump offer is a small and relatively simple little bonus that you might be encouraged to buy just as you reach the checkout page. It’s the equivalent of the sweets at the checkout of a convenience store or supermarket, or the burger-flipper asking if you want fries and a Coke with your order. These are found to be an extremely effective way of increasing overall sales and can be added in a few clicks on ThriveCart, instead of you needing to find a freelancer on Fiverr to write special code to integrate it.

Relatedly, ThriveCart also makes upselling easy. This is the equivalent of that same burger-flipper asking if you want to supersize your meal, increasing the product and price tier. With ThriveCart’s funnel editor, you can slip this upsell offer in at any stage of the sales process, using either in-built templates or customised pages.

There are more features that are unique to ThriveCart, including improved customisation of exactly where the link to the shopping cart appears on your site. The system can be integrated with an impressive number of email marketing systems, membership site platforms, fulfilment services and webinar platforms, as well as major payment processing platforms like Stripe, PayPal and Apple Pay. Naturally, the security for you and your customers is top-notch.

How does ThriveCart work?

ThriveCart typically costs $95 per month, though there are alternative pricing models available, including a lifetime membership for a one-time purchase of $495. This offer is generally only available for a limited time, but it reappears from time to time and is worth waiting for.

Once you’ve purchased your membership and logged in, you’ll find an extremely easy interface. Adding your products to the system is kept very simple, with a step-by-step workflow to follow. Once you’ve set the product specifications comes the payment options. These include billing frequency, multiple payments, special offers, trial periods, invoices and more, mostly with dropdown menus. In setting up the more complex options, you will see a summary of exactly what your offer will look like. You can even set up multiple payment options for the same product – especially convenient if it’s a very expensive item. Very conveniently, ThriveCart will help you to calculate how much tax you need to collect.

After this comes the option to add a bump offer – a pretty simple process, but even this is customisable.

Next, you choose which payment processors customers can use to complete their purchase of your product.

The last step, and a very cool and helpful one, is the option to set up an affiliate programme. You can select the pricing option your affiliates will receive, how much they get per sale and who they are paid. Despite the huge amount of customisation available at each step of the set-up process, it’s still kept very quick and easy. You do not need to be a technical genius to set any of this up.

After setting up the product, you will then set up the fulfilment process – again, kept very simple. It’s best suited to digital products, sending your customers a Dropbox link (which will expire after a time you choose, to prevent piracy) so they can download your product, for example. However, you can integrate ThriveCart with physical fulfilment services if you want to sell physical products.

Next, it’s time to build your checkout page. Again, its simple yet highly customisable. There are some excellent templates you can use or you design your own. You don’t need to be an expert web or graphic designer in order to make your own, either.

Other steps include setting up the post checkout page, integrating analytics systems to track sales and set up behaviour rules to set up automatic processes to follow up with different types of customers. In total, it should take you just a matter of minutes to set up your product. There are many more features you can use, including setting up coupon codes and affiliate links. Each walks that line of being simple enough to use without being a technical expert, but customisable enough to make sure that it can be set up to your specific needs.

ThriveCart Pro

ThriveCart Pro offers a range of features designed for those who are a level up in their business dealings than the standard ThriveCart user (basically, exactly what the name suggests). This is for people who own and operate multiple businesses or potentially even outsource their business management services to their clients.

On top of the great features of ThriveCart, the Pro account gives you:

• A powerful affiliate centre
• Joint venture and revenue sharing options
• Business projections
• Multi-user and client use permissions
• Built-in sales tax calculations and reporting
• Custom domain name functionality

As ever, these features are simple to use and highly customisable.

ThriveCart vs SamCart

ThriveCart’s biggest direct competitor is SamCart. The two have many features in common, including the options for adding different payment plans, bump offers and upsells. Where they differ is in the affiliate centre and their cost. ThriveCart’s affiliate centre allows vendors to track where exactly their customers are coming from and which traffic sources are performing well.

Furthermore, several of the features that ThriveCart and SamCart share are only available if you pay for the Pro version of SamCart – the affiliate programme, in particular. This is available with the standard account from ThriveCart, making it better value for money, especially if you’re a solopreneur and don’t need the pro features like multiple user management.

ThriveCart vs Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels is an impressive and powerful sales funnel system. As its name suggests, it covers more of the sales process than ThriveCart, which each product that you set up on the platform following a specific funnel. While this can be quite effective, it can also be more time-consuming to set up. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that their product tiers are a little restrictive and the $99 per month version will only allow you to set up 20 funnels. That’s not an unreasonable number, but it’s still a limit to your growth and one that ThriveCart does not have.

The way in which ThriveCart really stands out from Clickfunnels is, once again, the affiliate programme. In order to get access to Clickfunnels’ affiliate platform, you need to pay $297 per month for one of their top-end product tiers. Even then the platform doesn’t get rave reviews.

Some final thoughts on ThriveCart

If you want to monetise a content-based business, perhaps by selling consultancy and content creation services or by charging for a product like an ebook, audiobook or membership to a site, ThriveCart is an outstanding platform. Its ease-of-use makes it a great choice for those who want to focus on the parts of the business they are most skilled in and get the most enjoyment out of while the degree of customisation available make it useful for a huge range of individual circumstances.

What is especially impressive about ThriveCart is how far above and beyond its simple purpose it goes. I don’t mean their customer support, even though it is excellent. It’s the features like the affiliate platform and the extensive tracking options that allow you to up-level your sales game. These, perhaps more than any other feature, help ThriveCart stand out from its competitors.