Thrive Apprentice and Cartflows – A Complete Tutorial

John // Uncategorized

4 Comments

March 18  

It is no secret that I am a big fan of both Cartflows and Thrive Apprentice – but there has always been a problem…

They just didn’t work well together!

Thrive selected SendOwl as their preferred method of selling and protecting their courses… kind of leaving the WooCommerce fans out to dry in the process.

Until now. 

Below is a complete walkthrough of how to get these two beautiful tools to work seamlessly together.

Strap in, this is going to be a complete tutorial from a blank website to a fully-functioning online-course selling platform complete with a Sales funnel and full membership protection. Let’s begin

Complete Thrive Apprentice and Cartflows Tutorial


Transcript
if you were a thrive user and are reallyexcited about their new apprenticelearning management system platformyou’re going to want to watch thisentire tutorial hey guys i’m john fromin kamesh comm and in today’s videowe’re gonna do a complete business buildand it’s going to be from starting abrand new website and by the end of thevideo you’re going to have an onlinecourse delivered through thriveapprentice the brand new learningmanagement system plugin but instead ofprotecting it using send owl which isthe integration built out by thrivethemes themself we’re instead going todo something i think is a little bitbetter which is allowing ourselves touse WooCommerce and cart flows to sellupsells down sales bump offerssubscriptions whatever you would likeand we’re gonna protect all of ourcourses using WooCommerce membershipsthis is going to be a slightly moreadvanced video but I think is reallyexciting to show because I’ve seen a lotof comments of people who like thepotential of thrive apprentice but theydon’t think that the sandal integrationis quite there yetpersonally I kind of agree if you wantsimplicity and just you know sell acourse and be done with itthen I think that the send outintegration is good but if you want tobuild a long term business where youwant to be able to have subscriptionproducts you want to maybe link a forumor support area along with your coursesyou’re gonna want a slightly more robustsystem and what I’m going to build foryou here today is going to be thatsystem now this is going to be acompletely free tutorial the only thingI ask is if you haven’t done so alreadyplease hit the subscribe button the likebutton below and let me know if you likethis tutorial and where you’d like me togo next alright let’s go ahead and diveinto it okay so we’re gonna go into ourBluehost account if you don’t havehosting yet for your website which youprobably do if you’re watching thisvideo but if not shameless plug inkamesh comm slash Bluehost that willgive myself a little Commission fordoing it and I’ll sign up I enjoyBluehost allows you to make a lot ofwebsites as you can see here a lot ofthese are test websites that I do I alsodo some client work here which is agreat great thing already so here we arein our website there’s nothing going onhere if we go to the main area there’sjust nothing on this website we’re brandnew and by the end of it it’s going tolook pretty fabulousso what we’re going to do first is headinto our dashboardand then we’ll come down here toappearance let’s first add a theme thatI think is going to be more useful forthis tutorial and we’ll go to themes addnew and we will search in the search barfor Astra it’s a theme that I definitelyrecommend for new people it’s veryintuitive to use very lightweight andhas some good integrations with justabout everything under the Sun so we’llactivate that theme ok good to go andnow we’ll go to plugins and add new andthere’s a number of plugins we’re goingto be adding over time let’s first startwith WooCommerce and we’ll type inWooCommerce in the search bar and thisis right here for us – ready to go freeand it powers I think like 25% of onlinestores I think was a latest statisticthat I had heard so we’ll install andactivate and if it’s the first time thatyou have installed it will commercethey’ll give you a wizard that you cango through and we can just walk throughthe settings and you’ll just be puttingin some information your address whatyou’re planning on selling digitalproducts or physical products I’vealready filled some of this out on thistest website so no need to go back anddo that but once you install WooCommerceyou’ll be able to create products whichwe’ll get to in just a moment let’s goahead and add a couple more plugins herewe’re also going to want to useWooCommerce membership I’ll leave linksfor all of these plugins in thedescription below you can click throughto it WooCommerce membership is apremium pluginthere are ways of for you to get itwithout paying I think let’s go aheadand go to WooCommerce membership andjust show you what the price is for thisso the price of this is a hundred andfifty dollars for a single site for oneyear of updates and support in myopinion that is a little bit pricey it’sa good plugin there are ways for you toget it without support for a cheaperprice and if you’re interested in how todo that you know basically you canGoogle GPL clubs there’s some you knowthere’s some discussion around whetherit’s ethical or not I use it primarilyfor testing purposes to test outdifferent solutions but you know youwant to make sure the developerget their money as well so I dorecommend you but buy from WooCommercetheir direct store but that there areoptions for you if you are on abootstrap budget but we’re not gonnatalk FX in this video we’re going to gostraight into the tutorial so we’regoing to go to the plugins and onceyou’ve purchased will commercemembership you’ll be able to download azip file and I’ll go in to upload myplugin here and I’ll choose the file Ihave it over here on the side so I’lldrag my plug-in directly here on thechoose file button and I’ll be able toinstall it now will Commerce membershipsok well install an activate and we’ll dothe setup for this all togetherthe last plugin we’re gonna need is toget thrive themes this is all aboutthrive apprentice and so we wanted to dois go to we put the search bar in herewanna go to income mesh dot-com slashthrive membership if you don’t have asubscription already I definitelyrecommend you check it out if you arejust getting started it gives you prettymuch all the tools you’ll need and thisis my affiliate link of course and Iappreciate it if you guys choose topurchase through that link and once youare in and you’ve created your accounthere you’ll be able to go to your memberdashboard and the first thing here is toaccess your products and they’ve done agood job of creating this thrive productmanager plug-in which I’ll download andput right here and that allows you tonot have to go through and install abunch of plugins when you get startedwith thrive so let me show you how thatworks we’ll go to plugins add new andwill upload a plug-in one last time andwe’ll down and we’ll drag in the thriveproduct manager here and we’ll installthat okay well I say activate plugin andnow if we click on product manager itwill pull up all of the products in thesuite of products for thrive themes youcan select all of them and install themall at once but for this tutorial we’llselect just a few will do apprenticewill do architect and I think that’senough for this tutorial you can alsoinstall their themes from here but I’dhighly recommend you wait to do thatuntil they release their new themebuilder which hopefully is coming soonthere they’re working hard on thatthey’ve been a little quiet on it butI’m sure they’re getting to itso once you selected the plugins youwant to put on go ahead and clickinstall selected products and it’ll gothrough its process here okay so they’reall ready to go we can go back to thethrive themes dashboard and now we cansee we have thrive apprentice and thrivearchitect installed and ready to go herenow this is all you would need if youjust want to sell your courses andprotect them and deliver them usingthrive apprentice but I also want tospice it up a little bit and be able tooffer upsells and other things to helpthe selling process go better andsmoother so we’re gonna add one moreplug in called cart flows this is onethat I am a big proponent of I thinkthey’re doing a great job they’re gonnabecome like the de-facto way of sellingthings on WordPress and they’redeveloping very rapidly so you can startfor cart flows in your plugins area andinstall and activate this as well andyou don’t need to do cart flows Pro butI am a pro member and I love it so I’mgonna go ahead and also install cartflows Pro and show you what that allowsfor you to do as well if you don’t havecart flows and you’re interested to goyou know all-out you can go to unbeatabletech.comm slash cart flows and that willtake you to my affiliate link for cartflows and you can sign up now thepricing for this plugin here iscurrently 300 hours a year which youmight be like oh my gosh that isexpensive when it comes to WordPressplugins but if you look at what this isreally doing it’s really kind of takingon clickfunnelsand Carter and leadpages and some ofthose that are full-blown solutions it’staking them head-on with with WordPresswhich I think I think is a big task todo but they’ve got a ton of featureshere and it’s not just one website whichis what like thrive cart and some ofthose other systems allow for onewebsite this is actually for I believe30 websites when you get it so if youonly have one website you might be likeah not for me and in that case sure youcan use the free plugin pretty well butif you do clients one client is gonnapay for your subscription so if you doone project a year you’re good to go andthen you’ll have I think 30 licenses touse okay so I’m gonna go ahead and pausethe video I’m just going to downloadcartPro and I’ll come right back when I’mready to install it alreadyso I’ve downloaded it and it’s righthere in my little download bar so I’llgo back to my plugins and I’ll upload aplug-in again and now I’ll put cartflows Pro in and install that bad boy aswell I’ll activate it and now just torecap what we’ve done so far we’veinstalled cart flows cart flows Prothrive apprentice thrive architectthrive product manager WooCommerce andWooCommerce membership if you are scaredof plugins you might be like oh my goshthere’s so many plugins on the sitealready no not really you know these arereally just one plug-in together thrivetheir stuff works really well togetherand then WooCommerce is here so if itgets you know we’re already at 7 and wehaven’t done anything on the web siteyet but don’t worry this is all you’regonna need to do a pretty significantamount of work with your business sothere are really a ton of different waysyou can go about this project at thispoint what I want to do is kind of startfrom the end and work my way backthrough so what we’re gonna do is startby building the course that weeventually want to sell and deliver soto do that lets go to our thrivedashboard go to thrive apprentice and itlooks like it has some previous coursesI was playing with here so I’ll justdelete them real quick and show you whatits gonna look like when you first signin ok so now we have an empty dashboardhere we’re gonna go to add a new courseand now we’ll be able to give the coursea name so let’s call this apprenticetutorial course give it a quickdescription already so we’re getting alittle description here you can add avideo description if you choose to Ithink it’s a pretty cool feature therebut for that we’ll be ok let’s go aheadand give it an image here and we’ll justpick something that was on this medialibrary here like a pretty littlemountainI like that how nice and under advancedsettings we’ll come back to this but wedon’t need anything on this right nowlet’s go ahead and save this course andthen we have to add a couple lessonsright so we want to make sure that ourprotection is working so let’s go aheadand go to add a new lesson and won’tcall this lesson 1give a little title there and we don’tneed a description here let’s go aheadand hit save and now we have our draftcourse we can go to edit with architecthere with a little pencil button andstart to already immediately add in ourcontent for this course it’s alreadylistened course is looking nice it has anice little backdrop your typography allthese things might look a littledifferent for you we can go throughcustomizing your theme but essentiallyyou would just go and adjust thetemplate and that the styling of thecourses itself but this is perfectlyfine as it is we can go to the plusbutton over here on the elements andthen you have all of your buildingblocks here to build a prettycool-looking course you can just do somebasic text add a little intro theremaybe we want to add a download box hereso we can go to the styled boxes I’mjust going to type the style and you’llsee a styled box thrive is doing a greatjob of giving you a lot of buildingblocks already so you don’t need to Detbuild everything from scratch as Iscroll through here they could do abetter job of organizing and honestlybut if you scroll through you’lleventually see things like Quick Linksand skill boxes and step-by-step boxes alot of these are good for courses solet’s for example go to this downloadlist box so I click that this willimport the lesson essentials where youcan link up each one of these buttons toa particular PDF or attachment or videoor whatever you want to do to give someadditional rich content into the lessonok so that’ll work for lesson 1 let’s goahead and save and exit now you can seethis courses here and these don’t goanywhere at the moment but you canimagine how it would and then we can goback to let’s go back up here to thethrive apprentice tutorial course and wecan now see we have edit course is uphere on our admin bar as well so we cango back here and edit the course nowlet’s add one more lesson just for goodmeasuregive it some silly title and this onelet’s make it a video lesson just a showsomething different and I will find avideo URL real quick alrighty so I founda previous tutorial that I did aboutfiveand put the URL here from YouTube andalso I want to mention here you canallow users to comment or not comment onthe lessons I highly recommend youenable comments because that allows youas the course creator to moredynamically and easily improve thecourse over time because they’re gonnaif they have a question and they’reright there on the lesson they’re notgonna want to bounce off and send you anemail they can leave a comment righthere and thrive comments does a greatjob as well of moderating those commentsand allowing you to quickly navigate andrespond to them so I’ve already on someof my courses I have comments enabledand it allows me to very quickly say Ineed to add a lesson about this topicbecause the question keeps coming up sojust a little tip there we’ll hit savehere and then we’ll go into edit withrival architect as well and just do alittle bit of styling on this lessonokay so here is the lesson here onelittle gripe I don’t care for how theYouTube videos are embedded because ithas this very wide aspect ratio and thenit has a full width thumbnail so not ahuge fan I personally use a vu playerwhich does a fantastic job of protectingyour content and it lines up nicely inthis embed area so now your mileage mayvary but you can also use Vimeo which Ithink does a better job and and YouTubeas well if it’s a free course and thingsof that nature obviously if you aredoing a premium course I would recommendnot using a YouTube for your contentprotection or your video deliverybecause you can’t really protect YouTubevideos and you don’t want pirates andall that bad stuff getting in there solet’s go ahead and we have our videolet’s just put a little image in herejust to show a different item classicstock image and you can also add somecolumns so you have full design controlhere using thrive architect where youcan create your content exactly how youwant it to be you know another littletip you can do here you could havetestimonials where they can have like atestimonial capture area at the bottomof the last lesson of your course a lotof things you can do to really increasesome engagement here and you knowconveniently thrive offers thriveovations and which is a testimonialcapturing plug-in and testimonialmanagement plug-in I think they’re theonly people who haveplug-in directly related to that butit’s a huge thing with marketing to makesure your testimonials are on on spot sothat’s an option for you there so I’llsave this lesson and exit so now we haveour course whoo-hoolooks good so far let’s just go throughand preview it and see what it’s goingto look like here so we have our let mefirst go into the course we’ve createdthe lessons but they are not publishedyet so go back to edit the course andyou can see these are red icons here onthe left hand side means that courselessons are not published so we’ll goahead and publish these okay so thelessons are now published we’re greenand the course itself however is stillnot published so what would mean what wecan do is we’ll publish it for now ifyou have other courses there and youwant to set up protection leave itunpublish at this moment but becausewe’re not really going to allow themaccess into the course area unless theypurchase access into it we’re not gonnaworry too much about this here but whenit is published you should be able tonow preview the course and you’ll beable to see this you know very beautifullooking premium looking the course arealesson 1 lesson 2 you can start thecourse all kinds of good stuff here soalready looking pretty good but we nowneed to create a lot of different thingswe need to make the product that’s goingto link to this course we need to createthe membership level which is going toprotect and we’ll walk through all thistogetherbut we’ll create the membership levelwhich will kind of link the product thatthey’re buying with the course itselfand provide protection options there wealso want to build the sales funnel tosell the course right so we’ve got a lotin store here pretty ambitious videotoday but I’m excited for it so the nextthing we want to do we’re working ourway backwards right so what is the thingthat happens just before just be justbefore they get access to the coursewell we’re gonna do some membership worknow so we’ll go back to our dashboardand under WooCommerce we have amembership area here so we’ll go toWooCommerce memberships and looks like Ihave some test work here let me go aheadand just delete all this so I knowmemberships here let’s go to ourmembership planagain I have some stuff I was playingleft before recording so let’s deletethis okay so we have a blank area herefor our membership plans we’ll go aheadand go to add membership plan and herewe go so memberships with WooCommerce isreally nice one of the reasons why Ilike commerce memberships is because itdoesn’t have its own payment systembuilt in you know it’s writing on top ofWooCommerce which is super powerful butif you go with like a wishlist member ora member press or some of the other onesthat thrive also integrates with itgives you kind of the the problem of ithas its own payment process system hasits own dashboard so you started havingthese fragmented pieces of your websitewhere you have a WooCommerce dashboardbut then you have a membership restdashboard and you have a wishlist memberdashboard and it’s a mess so I likeWooCommerce memberships because it keepsit clean and simple that’s one reasonthe second reason is that it has arules-based protection system there areother plugins like WP fusion which Ilove but it it protects us on apage-by-page basis and what I reallywant to be able to do here is protectthe course as a whole you know thrive aprint thrive apprentice over here itdoesn’t use a standard WordPressdashboard a standard WordPress interfacewhich means that some plugins like WPfusion it has it needs to be on thispage within the WordPress dashboard toenable protection rules and thrivebecause they’re so pretty and they liketo work on their user interface they’vekind of deactivated some of thoseabilities so WooCommerce membership itkind of gets around all of that and it’sa very nice seamless transition so we’llcall this membership plan we’ll give ita name here and we’ll just call itthrive apprentice protection course andgive it a slug as well which can just betea a PC whatever you want to call itdoesn’t really matter and then upongrant access upon will will leave thiswhat we’ll say product purchase but Idon’t think we have the probably builtyet so we’ll go ahead and just saymanuals I’m only for now and then we’llcome back and we might need to adjustthis once we built the product that itlinks toand then membership length if you wantto be for a year for a quarter orunlimited which is probably the mostcommon one you can adjust it there andnow here under restrict content thislittle side panel here this is how we’reactually going to protect the courseitself so we’ll go and make a new ruleand under type instead of post pagesyou’ll see eventually here that you’llhave courses as a taxonomy taxonomy isbasically just a geeky way of saying atype of content so we’ll we want torestrict access to a course and now weshould be able to search for the coursecalled apprentice apprentice tutorialcourse so this is the money right hereso this allows you to protect all thecontent for only people who are enrolledin this membership plan boom okay and sowe’ll say and then we can look at otheroptions herefor example you know this is one of thereasons why this is so powerful hereyou’re able to set up dynamic ruleswhere if you have maybe four courses onyour course area you can actually makeit so that they can only access coursetwo if they purchased and completed ofcourse one and things of that nature soyou get a lot of you need somecreativity to kind of make all that workbut using membership plugins likeWooCommerce membership gives you a lotof flexibility that you don’t haveotherwise using the send out integrationand then we can skip over some of thisstuff but you could customize whatemails are sent to users and everythingelse but what we’re gonna have enoughcontent here as it isso we’ll go ahead and publish thismembership plan all right fantastic sothe membership plan has been savedlet’s go next step in our backwardsprogression here and let’s create theproduct that they’re going to purchasethat’s going to give them access to thecourse so we’re gonna go to products addnew and now here we can we don’t need toworry about designing this product pageat all cuz we’re going to build a salesfunnel to deliver I know we’re gettinglike super geeky here but this is ifyou’re going to put a lot of time intobuilding a premium course you want tomake sure the sale sales process worksnicely so let’s go ahead and call thisthe thrive apprentice course this thisis going to be visible the name of theproducts going to be visible on theirorderedtails and their dashboard so you want toname this a real name here but you don’tneed to worry too much about adding adescription because we’re gonna do withthat with cart flows in a moment thendown here for product data we can justleave it as a simple product it’s goingto be virtual and downloadable you canyou you can make it downloadable I liketo call it a downloadable product eventhough it’s not like an e-book thatyou’re selling which is what is normallyused for here we can give a link to thecourse itself in this way in theirDownloads area of their member dashboardthey’ll have easy access to access thecourse at any time so we can do here iswe’ll say add a file and we’ll name thecourt the file access your course andfor the file URL let’s head back to ourcourse here and we’ll hit the previewbutton and we’re gonna want to take theURL of the course itself and put that into this box here that way when they’reon their dashboard they’ll be able tosay access your course and go straightto the course itself okay and fordownload limit leave it to unlimitedthat’s perfectly fine and downloadexpiration and leave that was neverthere as well for inventory all theother stuff we can pretty much leavealone the one thing we do want to go tothough is well first gonna give it aprice right so let’s say we’re gonnasell it for $97 and you could add a saleprice there if you like but for now wedon’t need to do that now here as youscroll down to memberships area whenthey purchase this product we want togrant access to that membership that wejust created so we’re going to searchhere for our I think it’s a thrive sowhen they make the purchase of thiscourse we want to give access to thecourse right that’s pretty logical thereso that will take care of grantingaccess to the products and that willpublish this product here alrighty rockand roll so now what we could do is viewthe product and we haven’t added animage or anythingHeather Scott this is just a littletemplate website so here we couldactually go ahead and purchase this andgo through the entire process and bedone at this point we have a protectedwebI protected course that we couldpurchase from you know what there’ssomething going on here where I deletedthe pages going into this tutorial soI’ll need to go into e-commerce andactually set up the pages one last timeyou might not have to do this step ifyou follow the WooCommerce wizard whenyou’re first setting it up but I wastrying to be nice for you guys and Imessed myself up in the process so I’mgonna go ahead and create a few pageshere I’m gonna create an account fit thepage and let’s publish it we’re gonnacreate a cart page publish it and nowlet’s head to WooCommerce settings andlet’s go down under the Advanced tabhere we can set the cart page to cartthe checkout pagewe won’t need to do that right nowaccount page we’ll call it account andturn the conditions we’ll skip for nowthe checkout page will actually be ableto use cart flows to create a globalcheckout page as well we won’t need todo that for this tutorial but you’llyou’ll be able to do that also okay sonow if I go to the product let’s go toproducts all products and if we viewthis course we should be able to add itto the cart and view it in our cartalright so we’ll be able to see thisproduct here in our cartwe could add a picture to it let’s goahead and add a picture to this productreal fast we’ll go to edit product andlet’s scroll down to the featuredproduct image here and let’s look forsomething looks like a course that kindof looks like a course so we’ll go aheadand do thatset product image and we’ll update okayso now just kind of recounting whatwe’ve done so far we’ve created ourcourse we’ve created lessons in it andpublish the course we’ve created amembership level to restrict access tothat course and then we’ve just createdthe product that’s going to bepurchasable to unlock access to themembership level so you can see itstarts to kind of build on each otherbut if you work from backwards/forwardsI think it makes it more intuitive andeasy to go so what happens next wellnext we’re in the sales process so nowwe’re going to create a sales funneland we’ll go ahead and start with just asingle landing page to a checkout pageto a thank-you page and depending on howI feel after I having done that we mightgo through and add some upsells and downcells but want to at least create thebasic funnel hereso now what we’re gonna do is go intocart flows and we’ll go to our flowsarea and let’s delete the flows I’vecreated you know as a little side noteI’m gonna start from a totally freshWordPress install I was trying to cutsome corners and I have to delete andrecreate a website so I’m not gonna dothat againokay so I have no flows here justdeleted all the ones that were there sowe’ll go ahead and add a new flow andfor this one I’m going to use thrivearchitect because if you’re selling withthrive apprentice you’re probably alsousing thrive architect right now there Idon’t think there are any templates herelet me go into the settings of cartflows and see if they have any templatesfor thrive yet not yet which is okay sowe’re gonna go ahead and just save thisand let’s create a flow here we’ll add anew flow and we’ll design it and so herewe are and we’ll name this one thriveapprentice course tutorial flow andlet’s disable test mode up here becausewe’re going to actually tell it whichproduct we’re trying to sell so we’llhit update here just to save thesettings and now we can go I like to dobackwards forwards so we’ll start with athank-you page and we will go ahead andjust create a thank-you page here withthrive architect well we’re startingfrom a blank canvas here since we can’tcan’t start from a an element ortemplate for example so we’re gonna dois go to the template for page buildersand hit update alrighty and I’m gonna goand copy this shortcodecart flows order details this is whatwe’re gonna put into the design itselfbut I’ll actually do the designing inthrive architect here so I’ll click onmy green button to open up thrivearchitect and now we have a white canvaswe get to play around and build a coolpage you could at this point go in andpick a template here which I’ll show youthat on the landing page but for thecheck out page and for theThank You Paige let’s just buildsomething very simple here so we’ll do abackground section and for the widthwe’ll make it 1080 pixels and let’s goahead and add some text into it we’llsay thank you for your purchase andlet’s make this h1 centerline itbackground section let’s go ahead and doa little bit of styling here I’m notgoing to waste your time too much on onstyling or anything like that but Iwanted to show you a little bit ofactually how you would create this flowhere from scratch so I’ll make that adark gray background we’ll go down toour typography settings and change thefont that you know the color inside togray and let’s give it a little bit moreheight than this and centreline it lookspretty good so far and for spacing let’sjust make this a little bigger okay sothank you for your purchase just take aquick peek over here maybe a little bittoo big there okay so now we have thatsections good to go just for fun I’llput a little shadow on it all right sothank you for your purchase now I wantto have a call to action button that’sgoing to send them into the course let’ssay put some text down here and let meactually add a background section soI’ll add a background section againwe’re gonna say 1080 width now let’stake this text put it in here accessyour course below give them some verybrief instructions you’d want to do abetter job of kind of giving them someorientation but you’ll kind of see asI’m building through here how you can dothis let’s make this like an h3 centerline it and now let’s put a button hereand put it here in the middle and we’llsay a friend test courseand you could color this if you’d likeI’ll skip over that and now let’s grabthis URL one more time and in our designwe can go to the action or just mainoptions it’s fine and the button link Ithink if I search for a Prentice coursethere you go so it can actually just bysearching I can see is going to link meto the course itself which is correctlytaking me to that lesson okay so we haveour action here let’s just make this alittle bigger no that’s too big allright that’ll work and then finally letus put the order details of what we didso do below the button let’s say andhere are your order details and beneaththis to add short codes you want to useWordPress content so I’ll search forWordPress content and drag it right hereunderneath it and I think I got rid ofmy clipboard so we’ll grab that shortcode again and paste it in and hit saveand you’re probably not going to getanything at first because we don’t wehaven’t actually had an order yet but wecan go ahead and save this you know youcould do some more design obviously allday long but now we have what should bea functional order page or a functionalThank You page and we have a button herethat should take us to the course onceit’s fully protected alright so we’llcall that a check in the box for theThank You page now let’s work our wayback by going back to our flow you knowto mention here is they’ve done someadditional updates where you can addcustom scripts so if you’re running adsto your flow to your funnel you can putyour face with pixels script here whichis a fantastic addition and also you canyou know adjust the design the font typeand all sorts of cool things here whichwill skip over for the sake of timelet’s go back to our flow and go to thestep before which is the checkout pageand let’s edit this guy as well and hereof course it’ll is going to create itsown slug so it just says checkout pagemight want to name the something alittle better so thrive apprenticecourse checkout something of that natureyou’re gonna create multiple flows overtime so you don’t want to get stuck onthe same the same URL so change it tothe template for page builders off onthe right here and hit update and beforewe do any design work let’s go ahead andwalk through these options here for thecheckout layout so first of all theproduct we want to select the product wewant to sell which is the apprenticecourse so I’ll just search forapprentice here we are and you can applya coupon automatically if they gothrough here so for example if it’s likea limited time offer you can pre applythe coupon and you can also doadditional options here we’ll keep thisone pretty simple though you can add anorder bump here which allows you tomaybe attach some additional bonuses andgoodies or some shortcuts to the coursehere and you can add that all in andgive customized discounts along the waywhich will skip over for for this onehere but you can that would be an verynice thing to do as well that’s nicelyimplemented in cart flows for the designyou can do a two column or a one columnlayout I’ll show you what each of thoselook like let’s go and give it a primarycolor of not this orange but let’s saymaybe I like that looks pretty goodand font-family let’s just go likepoppinsfor example all right so we have somedesign here and you could also go nutswith individual all sorts of designoptions here but we’ll just keep itsimple for for now you can allow couponfilled or not let’s take the couponfield off additional field that’s likeorder details we can take that off shipto different address we can take thatoffand a custom field editor here we go sonow this is one of the big powerfulthings for kart flows but before I showwe start adjusting this let me show youwhat this looks like as it is so let’sgo ahead and start building a very basiccheckout page and then you can you cansee the benefits of cart flows here okayso start designing this by going tolaunch thrive architect and I’ll hidemyself all right so once again we haveour blank page let’s go ahead and addthat background section just kind ofkeep a similar design from the previouspage let’s give it some height and let’sadd some text into it that’s I think Iwas on heading one if I was smart Iwould have just saved it as a templatebut I wasn’t thinking about thatso we’ll say you are moments away fromstarting your course and let’s do aquick little transform make it all capscenterline and on the background sectionlet’s add that color that gray color notthe prettiest color but it’s what Ichose and we’re gonna go with it andthen for typography let’s go for whitethen I have a very basic header here andagain I like shadows really been feelingthe box shadows recently so we have thatwhat I want to do is let’s do anotherbackground section here which will bewhere we put the check out field gocheck out forum our standard width butwhat I want to do instead of just addingit directly below let’s have a littlebit of overlap with some negativepadding so we’ll add a content boxinside of this and let’s make thebackground style white and what we’regonna do is let’s add our shortcode intothis with the WordPress content so I’lldrag this into the middle and I think Ikept order details that’s not what Iwant I want to get my shortcode karflet’s check out so that’s what we’regoing to pull in to dynamically pull allthe details of the orderso karf let’s check out put that guyhere and then let’s do a couple ofthings I want to add some additionalpadding to this background section herelet’s pull this down a little bit andthen on this content box this check outideas in I don’t know it actually puts anegative margin which is gonna have itoverlap a little bit of that previoussection and then I’ll also yeah you knowput shadow on it for fun and now let’sgive a little bit of padding on theinside so this check out field looksnicerlet’s just put maybe 15 pixels ofpadding so we have a nice little borderthere between the content box and thecheck out and let’s add a little bit ofa rounded corner by going to borders andcorners and just sliding this guy up tomaybe about seven so now we have anice-looking area to to place our checkout information and finally underneathall this let’s put a little warrantyalright sorry I guarantee box whichthrive gives us a lot of options forhere we’ll put this below the contentbox and let’s just do this guy here nofree delivery doesn’t make any sensethis is a digital product let’s do aflat nice hundred money-back guaranteeyada yada that looks pretty good thereso let’s go ahead and save this andlet’s see if we can preview it okay sonow we have your moments away fromstarting your course and all of thedetails here like already this is apretty good-looking checkout page rightlike maybe that orange and that reddoesn’t work too well together but allin all this is a nice-looking forum achallenge with this forum here is thatfirst of all there’s too many fields Idon’t need to know where you live if I’mtrying to sell you a digital courseright so let’s go ahead and now thatwe’ve seen how this looks by defaultlet’s go into the checkout fields optionhere for the for that cart flow step andthese little eyeballs here we can makevisible or not make visible eachcheckout field and really you can getrid of as many fields as you want to forexample maybe I don’t want to feefor the name I don’t need another lastname let’s instead of you know tellingthem this is the first name let’s justcall it name they want to give me thefirst name give me the first Anglinwhile you last name getting the lastname and then under field width itdoesn’t have to be 50% because I wouldmake any more sense anymore so I’ll makeit a hundred percent of the width andwe’ll call it a name let me just showyou what that looks like when we hit theUpdate button so here we have first namelast name and then company and once thisis done loading I will refresh this pageso now we just have a name field andthen the rest the fields so let’s goahead and gut this as much as we can tomake the purchasing friction as littleas possible so we’ll take off companyname country street address apartmenttown state zip you may want to leavephone number on there or you might wantto add something like a Skype ID orsomething if there’s some a communityaspect to what you’re doing you probablywant to leave email address on the rightbecause that’s how they’re going tocreate their account if they don’talready have one okay and then we’ll goahead and what I found this is apersonal preference I prefer the onecolumn layout over the two column layoutbecause I feel like it’s an easierprocess of walking through the checkoutexperience of kind of going line by lineinstead of having to dart your eyes leftand right I would rather just have themgo from top to bottom so we’ll updatethis with those new configurations andlet’s come back to our checkout page andsee what it does to our checkoutexperience so we’ll hit the refreshbutton now and you can see is adjustedthings now where it’s the name emailaddress and then the product the orderand you can place the order right now Idon’t have stripe setup to actuallyaccept payments so we’re gonna go aheadand do that momentarily and once we’redone designing the sales flow here okayso so far this looks good another thingwe can do and I’ll do just as way ademonstration here because we have thisas a single column you could either dotwo things one you can make thisskinnier because you don’t need all thiswidth to put your name field or you canput some testimonials on the one handside so let’s just play around someoptions here and see what would lookbest okay so we have this this WordPresscontent withthe content box what we could do let’sactually instead of making this smallerlet’s make the content box a little bitbigger here let’s go to maybe 1200 andmaybe the content box fill up the entireamount but then let’s put some columnshere instead let’s do a two columnlayout maybe do like I got two-thirdsone-third em apart check out details onone part of the column and then here wehave to do some testimonials so we couldgo into the they have testimoniallayouts already here for you where maybelet’s just look for one that wouldprobably look good you have to bethoughtful because we are working with avery small amount of space here so maybesomething like this could workwhere it has a nice image of thecustomer their information and theircontent here gosh I’m not a big fan ofthese different colors so let’s just goahead I think these Reds are verysimilar let’s just make that that buttonright as well we’ll do that in a minutelet me just pick the red that I wantokay so now we have a testimonial on theone side the billing details and thenthe money back guarantee so a lot ofdifferent things to help reduce thatbuyers friction when they’re goingthrough the checkout process all goodstuffokay so now we’re done with our checkout box we’ll go ahead and save and exitgive it one last look over I think itlooks really good I didn’t really checkmobile responsiveness but it should benicely mobile responsive so it as soonas it gets too small it’s gonna gosingle column put the testimonial belowand the guarantee below that very nicelet’s go back into the steps and this isme simply being OCD when I go to thecheckout design and put in it betterread so it’s going to all kind of matchup with that with what was selected herefor us okay much better I feel I feelgood now we have our read alright solast step you let’s go back to our flowand we’ll edit the landing page here andthis is where all the money is rightlike this is your sales page so let’stake a little bit time on this one herecall it thrive apprentice course andwe’ll call this thrive apprentice ofcourse sales page okay and we’ll goahead and give it the template for pagebuilders and hit update so now as wescroll down we’ll see there’s reallyonly options for this little link hereand this is going to be the button thatyou put anywhere on the page in order todirect them to the next part of the flowso whether that’s a second landing pageor checkout page whatever is next youjust put this a link into whatever thebutton is and you’ll be good to goI’m gonna go ahead and copy that and putit on a little notepad here on the sidejust in case and then also you’d be ableto put your custom scripts here in caseyou’re running a pixel traffic forexample to see how many people convertedfrom your ad to your landing page okayso now let’s go ahead and do a littlebit of design here and so far we’vebuilt the pages from scratch but on thisit makes no sense to start from scratchwhen Thrive gives you so many goodlanding pages so i’ll go to theirlanding page template with that littlecloud button and then when i filtertemplates by tags i can actually scrolldown and look for a couple differentoptions here like sales page or let’sjust go with that so now we have a bunchof different templates of pre-builtsales pages and what’s awesome aboutthrive is let me just find one that Ireally like I like this one here guy’sface is so cheesy it’s that unlike whata lot of page builders will do there’snot lorem ipsum text anywhere on thisspot here so they’re actually going toteach you a little bit about copywritingon the sales page itself which isfantastic so they’re gonna show you likethis subheading is one job make yourbezel want to keep reading so this is agreat place to startthe process and honestly like they’remaking money and they know what they’redoing so use their templates and thenuse what they use what they have here sowe’re gonna kind of look through hereI’m not gonna edit this obviously buteverything you can you can adjusthowever you want to what we do want todo is on this Buy button go to thebutton link over here and let’s simplypaste inthe link that we got from these settingsthere which is the cart flows next stepokay and we’ll save our work okay I’mgonna look for if there’s any otherplace where there’s a Buy button therewe gothere’s another buy button so let’s putthat on the second buy button as welland then finally they even have a linkhere so we’ll take that link and putthat to the next step as well okay sonow this is your sales page you canscroll through and take a look at it andideally when they get so convinced theyclick Buy It Now it’s gonna take them totheir checkout pageyou know you’d want to make sure you’rehaving all the design flex build in theworld it means that you really shouldmake sure that your sales page kind oflooks similar to your checkout page theydon’t feel like they’re going to adifferent experience but this still youknow it works for the sake of thisdemonstration here so before we actuallytest and run through the entire processtogether let’s go ahead and make surethere are we can accept payments rightif we can get the money so we’ll go backto our dashboard and go to WooCommerceand go to settings and under paymentslooks like I’m gonna need to add mystripe a payment processor normally I dothat when it first logs in but this hasbeen a little slightly unnormal sinceI’ve already kind of built this beforethis tutorial so I’ll go to plugins andadd new if you’re going through thewizard you’ve probably added stripe asyou were going so stripe blue commerceperfect WooCommerce stripe gateway willinstall this and activate it and if youdon’t have a stripe account it’s freeit’s an excellent way to accept creditcard payments securely online and whatyou do once you have your stripe accountsetup at stripe comm you can go topayments here and WooCommerce and nowyou’ll have a stripe credit card andwill be able to go to manage and thenI have my test mode already enabled Ithink that should be good to goso we’ll go ahead and save this and nowlet me hit refresh on the checkout pageand boom okayso now we have the ability for us toactually purchase this in a testenvironment and make sure everything’sworking properly so let’s go ahead anddo that what I’m gonna do is go to ourso now we’re just about ready for thisall to tie together and work and as I’mthinking through before we run throughthe test I want to check one thing inour WooCommerce settings that it’s kindof important and that is that we want tomake sure that people cannot purchase asa guest they need to have an accountbecause if they purchase as a guestthey’re not going to be able to accessthe course because it won’t know thatthey purchased it right so under hereyou can go to your WooCommerce settingsand head over to accounts and privacyand you’ll be able to go to the guestcheckout make sure that customers cannotplace an order without an account butwill allow them to log into an existingaccount during the checkout process orthey can create an account during thecheckout process which is pretty coolyou also you know a lot of differencehere allow them to make it an account onaccount page Yatta Yatta yeah let themdo it what you want you can make themcreate their own password or generate apassword for them totally up to you onhow you want to do that but now I thinkwe’re in a good spot will it save hereand then let’s just review since we’reon this tab here let’s go to thememberships area and take a look at whatour at what our settings are for themembership area so content restrictionmode redirect page so here on ourmemberships tab we want to go ahead andenable a content restriction mode andwhat that means is if somebody happensto fall look a foot you know if somebodyshares a link let’s say to your courseand the person person does not have anaccount with your website if they try toaccess your course what do you want tohappen do you want to hide the coursecompletely I don’t recommend you do thatif you wanna hide the content only Idon’t recommend you do that and for anumber of different reasons but the bestthing to do here is to say redirect apage and basically going to happens whenthey click on startingcourse is gonna take them to arestricted content page which will thenlead them into your sales process let’ssee I don’t think I have a page here touse so let’s go ahead and make a newpage real fast we’ll just do a new pageand let’s design this page is kind oflike the bridge that’s going to be whatthey see if they try to access thecourse that they can’t get to so we’llcall this content restricted and let’sdo a little bit of work here and thrivearchitect okay so here we are on thecontent restricted page let’s go aheadjust make this a very simple templatehere let’s do like this nice littletemplate and we basically want to tellthem you don’t have access to theproduct and click below to get access tothe product okay so let’s say you don’thave access the product click below tolearn more and let’s remove this forright now just follow along with me I’llshow you why we’re doing that we’ll saveand exit this page and head back to ourWooCommerce memberships settings let’sjust save this and refresh it so I wantto select that page now so under selectpage I should have that contentrestricted page here and we’ll save thechanges one last time okay let’s do aquick test to make sure all this isworking so what we’re going to try to dois access this course from an incognitowindow okay so when I go to the courseitself from an incognito window it’s notgonna let me get there it’s going tosend me to this you don’t have access tothis product page so now what I want todo is on the button here let’s send theminto our sales flow so we’ll go to ourflows one last time and like we can justclick the View button here copy linkaddress and in what page right here okaywell edit this page with thrivearchitect againand we’ll say add a button learn moreabout this course and that will takethem into the sales page for the courseokay looking good so far so before we gothrough and test all this everythingshould be working at this point butlet’s go ahead and just take a look atwhat the users gonna see they don’t havea homepage here so let’s quickly add ahome page there’s going to give them twocalls to action one is access yourcourse and two is to learn more it is tobasically go to the sales page so we’llgo to a new page and let’s grab a nicetemplate from thrive we’ll publish thispage real quick and let’s launch thrivearchitect to edit it okay so now here weare let’s go to our cloud and get a nicehome page let’s see does this have ahome page let’s just make a kind of alanding page as our home page heremm-hmm this will work all right so we’veset this up so that when they go to thehome page is going to basically just bea landing page here and we’ll addanother button let’s just duplicate thisand we’ll say already a member accessyour course let’s make this one asmaller button and let’s finally belowhere they’re not gonna have a really away to log in at the point at this pointso let’s give them a quick little buttondown here at the bottom less instead ofbeing contact let’s call this login orlet’s say my dashboard and let’s linkthat with our account page this is wherethey’ll be able to see their orderhistory all that other stuff and they’llalso be able to log in if they are notlogged in at the timeokay so let’s save this an exit I knowI’m kind of zipping dudes pretty quicklyhere you know as an example I didn’tactually link these up with the correctbuttons so sorry let me go back intoedit these and link these buttons intothe correct areas so I want to startwriting awesome copy now let’s insteadsay well yeah actually this will begreat so that’s a good link to go to thesales page so we’ll let’s grab the flowand we’ll grab this link one more timeand let’s put this as the button linkthere’s going to take them to if theylay them on here and and want to getinto it and then already a member actsas your course let’s link this directlyto the course page so yes I want tostart writing awesome copy or alreadymember acts use your course and thenotherwise they can get to theirdashboard there so now let’s save andexit this okay and let’s just doublecheck these buttons are working so wecan get to our sales page here or we canaccess our course which takes them tothe course or they can go to theirdashboard which opens up the accountpage which I need to add a shortcode onto real fast let me go to edit this pagehere again this is because I didn’t Idid things a little bit non-standardokay so I’m just adding the my accountshortcode onto this page to make surethat shows up properly so now if we viewthe page we’ll get our account detailswe’ll be able to see our orders andeverything else along the way let’squickly set that page with that landingpage we designed as the the home pagethey see when they get in so our homepage under settings and reading is goingto be set to a static page and we’llcall it this apprentice course home pagewhich is built and will Save Changes sothis point we should be ready to test solet’s go ahead and go to an incognitowindow and I’ll go to the website so nowhere is our home page here on convert –column slash thrive and now we have afew buttons we should be able to clickif we go to the dashboard it should takeus to login or register an account againyou can enable or disable registrationif you’d like heading back to the homepage if we try to access the course andwe’re not logged in we’re not a memberyet it should take us – you don’t haveaccess to this product click below tolearn more learn more about this courseand now we’re back at the sales page andwe can also go straight here to see thesales process the sales page andeverything’s looking good so let’s goahead and try to buy this course and seewhat happens I’ll say Buy It Now now I’mhere on the checkout page that we justcreated because I’m not logged in itgives me this option here if you’re areturning customer you can click to login otherwise I’ll be creating an accountusing this email address here let’s sayJohn put an email address in that I canuse for testing and because I’m usingstripes tests test mode I can put injust for twos and that will be anacceptable a payment process you caneven save it to your account if you wantto got our guarantee down the bottomlet’s go and place our order oh goodnessalready uses email address and we’llplace the order again with a differentemail address and my phone in a lab theorder being completedso now we’ll say thank you for yourpurchase you can access your coursebelow and here’s the course as well asour order details using that using thatshort code there so if we click on theThrive apprentice course now it does notdo a redirect it gives us access to itand now we can start a course and here’severything we designed at the early atthe beginning of this lesson we can goto the next lessonand as you should be able to see here wehave our YouTube video hey guys in thisvideo you’re gonna and you can even goback to leave comments if you like or goto the course page and now you can seeit’s also tracking our progress usingour thrive apprentice plug-in here so wecan see which lessons we’ve completedbut we can also see let me go back toour home page if we go to our dashboardnow we should be able to see a couple ofadditional things on our orders weshould see the order that we placed andon our downloads we should be able tosee our thrive apprentice course andthis is what we did when I was making ita downloadable product versus simply avirtual product now we have a buttonhere as well or you can access ourcourse so this is a nice thing to dobecause sometimes people don’t want youto be able to see all your coursesupfront maybe you want to create yourown little marketing channel or funnelwhere they only see the courses that youwant them to have access to or to evenbe able to purchase at that point soit’s nice to be able to have a quick andeasy way to allow them access yourcourse there so at this point we have afully working funnel using thrivearchitect using thrive apprentice usingcart flows and cart flows Pro andWooCommerce memberships to tie it alltogetherthis in my opinion is a slightly morecomplicated way of solving the thepuzzle I think the send owl aloneapproach is a nice and simple way ofdoing the job but what does this nowallow us to do so what we can do withthis setup now because we have access inour dashboard – I don’t have thememberships area here displayed but theyhave access to an entire membership herewe could have a support forum we couldhave a ticket system with a lot ofdifferent things you can do now thatthey have user accounts and accesses andall sorts of different things with theWooCommerce ecosystem additionally youcan now do subscriptions much betterwith WooCommerce subscriptions a lot ofdifferent coupon code opportunities andand different things that are veryhelpful when everything is all done onyour website so at this point we can gointo a lot of additionallittle extensions of this add some bumpsadd some up cells and down cells and letme know in the comments below if this isa helpful tutorial and where you’d likeme to extend it or there’s anything thatwasn’t quite clear along the way becauseI did start from a website that I had tokind of add some short codes in as I wasgoing so let me know there’s anythingthat’s not clear and I’m happy to helpyou and you know hopefully if youenjoyed this you’ll sign up for cartflows and sign up for thrive and use myaffiliate links and if nothing else besure to subscribe to the channel hit thelike button and I’ll see you guys in thenext videotake care

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First off, why would we want to do this?

Thrive Apprentice has been built from the ground up to integrate with SendOwl, and it does that pretty well. But it is not the perfect solution for everyone.

SendOwl introduces a few limitations to your stack:

  • SendOwl doesn’t allow your users to have a “My Dashboard” area on your website, so they will have to dig to find any record of their purchases
  • SendOwl doesn’t currently support subscriptions for your courses, so monthly/annual memberships will need a different solution
  • SendOwl doesn’t give you maximum control over the user experience when going through the checkout process. Limited upsells / downsells / bumps

When you are first starting out, these may not be deal breakers. And I have to admit – the SendOwl option makes things easy to implement.

But WooCommerce is a powerful platform that can’t be ignored, and I was determined to find the best way to make these tools work together. If you already use WooCommerce, or if you want to be able to do more advanced things with your site over time (think Memberships, bookings, etc), then stick around till the end of this guide!

The Tools we will use

To build out a WooCommerce-powered Thrive Apprentice website, we will use the following tools:

You may wonder why WooCommerce Memberships is on the list. Thrive official integrates with Memberpress, Membermouse, and Wishlist Member, but I think WooCommerce Memberships gives the best integration for Apprentice users.

What’s special about WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce Memberships wins for 2 reasons:

  1. It gives you everything you need and nothing you don’t
  2. It is a rules-based membership plugin

Options like Memberpress and Membermouse have their own checkout system in place, and it isn’t designed to be conversion-focused like Cartflows is. Adding both WooCommerce and a MemberMouse is just overkill and confusing. WooCommerce Memberships was made to tie to the hip of the WooCommerce checkout experience, so that’s a win.

And because you can set membership rules in WooCommerce Memberships, we can get around the pesky fact that there isn’t a native Thrive Apprentice integration. More on that later on.

Always look for the simple solution
The solution here tries to use the fewest pieces necessary to achieve the goal. Always keep it simple 🙂

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Get Thrive Apprentice Today

And build the most beautiful online courses available today

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So what do you think? Will you be trying to tie WooCommerce together with Cartflows? Let me know in the comments below!

About the Author

John Whitford is an entrepreneur who has built over 12 profitable online blogs and businesses. He's also the founder of Unbeatable Tech, a data-driven digital marketing company that specializes in sales funnel implementation for both his own businesses and clients alike. John loves to be a beach bum while brainstorming new ideas for marketing strategies, but he's always excited to take on another project!

John

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