Thrivecart Review 2021

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January 12  

If you are selling anything online, you'll NEED to read this review.

Today we are going to tear down one of the best shopping cart platforms online, and help you decide if it's right for you.

I'll also give you a FULL walkthrough to help you set up your own online course platform powered by Thrivecart.

And last but not least, I'll also give you an incredible bonus if you decide to sign up for Thrivecart today. More on that later - let's get into the review!

More...

Thrivecart Review 2021

Features

With complex sales funnels, bump offers, embeddable checkouts, built-in affiliate program, and more... Thrivecart gives you the power to sell anything, beautifully.

Price

With their limited lifetime deal, you can save thousands of dollars over time with Thrivecart. It easily compares to other software at $99 per month and MORE.

Ease of Use

Everything you do in Thrivecart is step-by-step, so you never get lost setting up products. There are also helpful video tutorials right in the platform to help you out.

Support

I've submitted a few support tickets (wasn't Thrivecart's fault) and I always got a helpful, thoughtful reply within 24 hours by their team. 

I Like

  • Ease to set up products
  • Flexible payment structures
  • Powerful built-in affiliate program
  • Direct integration with Apple Pay and Google Pay
  • Integrates with the most important platforms
  • Embedding checkout carts directly on your site
  • Awesome support and updates

I Don't Like

  • I wish there were MORE checkout templates
  • More integrations are always nice

Overall rating :  4.8 / 5

If you are already selling online, Thrivecart can instantly improve your profits with their advanced selling features. And if you haven't started selling yet, their lifetime deal price allows you to invest once for this excellent software and not have to worry about a fee every month. I highly recommend Thrivecart.

What is Thrivecart?

Thrivecart is an online shopping cart and sales funnel software.

In other words - it's the tool that helps you sell and deliver your products and services to your customers.

While this may sound like a simple task, the sad truth of the matter is that most solutions that do this are TERRIBLE.?

Most shopping cart platforms available suffer from

  • Clunky user interface
  • Requires coding or custom integrations to work
  • Too many checkout steps for your customers (hurting conversion)
  • Just too pricey for what you get

As you'll find out from this detailed review, Thrivecart has finally provided a full solution to this problem, and the tool is absolutely wonderful to use.

Thrivecart was founded by Josh Bartlett in 2016, and they have developed the platform to be the simplest and most effective shopping cart platform on the market.

Who is Thrivecart For?

Thrivecart is for anyone who has something to sell online, such as:

  • Online Course Creators
  • Ebook Sellers
  • Coaches and Consultants
  • E-Commerce Owners
  • Virtual Assistants
  • Freelancers
  • Agencies
  • And many more...

Whether you have only a single product or a library of dozens of products, you will be able to sell them quickly and beautifully with Thrivecart.

What Are the Benefits of Thrivecart?

I have personally tested a dozen or so selling solutions online, good bad and ugly - and so I know a thing or two about what the best platforms have, and what every platform needs.?

Let's talk about some of Thrivecart's most standout features.

#1: Super Fast Set Up

Ever feel like you are crawling through mud when setting up tech solutions?

You can have your product and sales funnel set up in about 5 minutes with Thrivecart, and everything will just work.

Because Thrivecart follows a step-by-step setup process for everything, you'll never feel like you are lost or confused when setting up your products.

That's a big deal because MOST solutions are complete messes here. Constant clicking back and forward.. having to remember countless steps and where to find the settings...

Thrivecart is a breath of fresh air with the setup process.

#2: Unlimited Products And Subscriptions

Thrivecart is pretty simple. Pay once, and get unlimited access for life.

Unlimited products, affiliates, subscriptions, etc. No nickel and dime, no overage fees.

Most platforms impose restrictions on how much you can sell on your plan, but not Thrivecart.

And if you get their pro plan (discussed below), you can even set up and run funnels for up to 5 clients, which can easily become a side business for growing agencies.

No need to pay for 5 different cart accounts, just use Thrivecart!

#3: Bump Offers

Bump offers are a frictionless way of increasing the value of every customer AND delighting them at the same time.

Selling an ebook? Offer an audiobook version for only $7 more!

Selling a course? How about some additional templates or time saving resources for an additional $37?

Bump offers put the most logical companion offer right on the checkout page and are activated with a simple click of a check box.

Your customer is already in the buying mood, and the right bump offer can convert at 50% or greater!

#4: A/B Split Testing

Thrivecart Review AB Test

Should you sell your ebook for $17 or $37?

What's the best upsell to follow your main offer?

Normally, we just have to guess and go with it, but not anymore with Thrivecart's new A/B testing engine.

It's awesome - simply start a test and make any changes you want:

  • Pricing
  • Upsell / Downsell Offers
  • Testimonials or Design
  • or anything else really!

Thrivecart will intelligently alternate between the different versions for your visitors and keep track of how they are performing.

  • Which version made more money?
  • Which version converted higher?
  • What price point is the best?

You can set up your test in minutes, so there it's a complete no brainer to continuously be testing your assumptions and convert higher!

#5: Upsells & Downsells

Thrivecart Review Upsell Downsell

The old way was like this:

Sales Page -> Checkout Page -> Thank You Page

If you're still doing it this way... STOP IT! And buy Thrivecart 😉

Upsells and Downsells allow you to capitalize on your customer's buying mood by offering them relevant and useful offers DIRECTLY after purchasing your main product.

Here's how Thrivecart helps you make more money:

Now as soon as your customer clicks "buy" they are brought to another short page called an "upsell page" which makes an additional offer to them that they can purchase with a single click of a button.

No entering credit card details... no filling in their name again.

It's marvelous.

Oh, and if they say "No thank you" to your offer?

You have the option to put a downsell to that offer as well - call it a watered down version that might fit their budget better.

Through this process, you are able to make logical, sequential offers to your customers at precisely the right time.

When you master this art, you can start to turn $1 into Facebook ads into $3 or $4 on the front end.

Important!

A unique feature that Thrivecart supports is product replacement. So if you sold them on a monthly membership, you can offer a discounted annual plan as an upsell!

If they take you up on it, Thrivecart can intelligently swap out the plans so your customers don't have 2 subscriptions running.

This seems simple, but so many cart platforms fail miserably at great features like this.

#6: Their brand new page builder

In a recent major update, Thrivecart decided to go bonkers and implement their own drag and drop page builder!

This means you can completely create your sales funnel inside Thrivecart - no other tools needed!

This helps you by:

  • Making it quicker and easier to launch your products and start getting market feedback
  • Reduce the chance of any set up error (no embed codes or craziness to integrate)
  • Nice uniform style for your pages
  • Perfect A/B tracking of your performance.

This feature is a game changer.

It's not the best page builder on the market, but it will save you so many hours and headaches that I can't wait to see what it offers over time!

#6: Reliability

Thrivecart is built rock solid. All the techie stuff fires off instantly upon purchase, and customer emails also arrive within seconds.

If you have ever tried to sell online using WooCommerce - you know the importance of reliability.

With Thrivecart, you never have to worry about plugins getting angry with each other...

You never have to worry about your entire website slowing down because of your cart software.

Because Thrivecart runs in the cloud separate from the rest of your business, you are still able to make sales even if your site goes down unexpectedly.

This is extremely important if you want to build a long-term successful business.

Thrivecart Integrations

Thrivecart integrates with most major platforms for digital entrepreneurs. Here is a current list:

Payment Gateways

Email Platforms

Membership Platforms

Webinar Platforms

Fulfillment Services

Notifications and Order Sync

While this is a great list of integrations, it's not complete.

We are only covering the direct integrations built inside of Thrivecart by their team, but tons of popular tools have built their own integrations, like LearnDash, Groundhogg, and Activemember 360.

A great feature with Thrivecart is that you can have as many integrations as you'd like.

Say for example you have 3 websites and they all run off of Memberpress for protecting content.

Thrivecart allows you build out integrations for each website, and use them interchangeably on your products.

Ultimate flexibility - cool!

Thrivecart Pricing

Thrivecart's pricing is very different from most of its competition.

Instead of charging a monthly fee, they are currently offering a limited time lifetime deal to get unlimited access to their platform.

Thrivecart Lifetime Deal

Alright, so this one requires a bit of explaining. In fact, I decided to help you understand the exact differences in this video below:

Insert Video

Feature

Standard

Pro

Unlimited Products

Subscription Products

Upsells, Downsells, Bumps

Integrations

Affiliate Center

Subscription Saver (Dunning)

Automatic Sales Tax Calculation

Intelligent Business Projections

JV Contracts

Advanced User Management

Client Usage Rights

Custom Domain Names

The most important features of the pro version are definitely:

Affiliate Center: You definitely want to include an affiliate program with your products - who doesn't want to build an army of commission-only sales staff? Thrivecart also has advanced features allowing you to instantly and automatically pay your team.

Subscription Saver: What happens when your customer's credit expires? On most platforms - that's it, you lost them as a customer. But Thrivecart will send out several emails over multiple days to your customer reminding them to update their information to keep their account active. That will save thousands if you run a subscription service.

Custsom Domain Names: Instead of selling your stuff at mystore.Thrivecart.com, you'll be able to create your own branded platform like sales.mywebsite.com, which will help you conversions by keeping your customers confident they are in the right place.

Advanced User Management: this doesn't sound like a sexy feature, but I guarantee  you it is! As your business grows, you'll want to add some assistants to your staff to manage the mundane tasks. And with Thrivecart, you can let you VA's log in and issue refunds or do small tasks, while hiding the information and access levels that only you should have! That's very useful control.

Long story short - the Pro Version is 100% worth the small upgrade fee, especially considering that it never expires!

How to set up Thrivecart Step By Step?

Most review posts you'll see will be big on selling you software, but when it comes to actually helping you set it up... things get quiet.

Let's do something radical. I'll prove to you that Thrivecart is an excellent solution, by actually helping you set it up! (Shocker!)

Here are some complete step-by-step guides below that will help you completely set up your Thrivecart system. Completely free.

And if you purchase through my affiliate link, you also get some extra bonuses even better than the training below.

How to Set Up Thrivecart + Thrive Apprentice

This is my preferred setup for MOST solopreneurs. 

The special integration between Thrivecart and Thrive Apprentice allows you to simplify the setup by not needing any fancy and complicated membership plugins.

My hat goes off to the teams behind both Thrive products (not the same company) because this setup is affordable, simple, and scalable.

🔗 Here are some important resources 🔗
Get Webhosting (70% discount): https://unbeatabletech.com/bluehost
Get Thrive Themes (+ Bonus content): https://unbeatabletech.com/thrivethemes
Get Glorify for Graphics: https://unbeatabletech.com/glorify
Get Convertkit (Free): https://unbeatabletech.com/convertkit
Get Thrivecart (Limited Lifetime Deal): https://unbeatabletech.com/thrivecart

Tutorial Timestamps

Timestamps:
Overview
0:00 - Overview & Goals
2:40 - End Result Website

Getting Your Website Started
7:16 - Get Started with Web Hosting
12:30 - Installing WordPress
16:25 - Cleaning up your site first
17:47 - Set up Professional Email Address
21:00 - Installing our WordPress Theme & Plugins

Designing your website
25:10 - Custom Designing our own WordPress Theme (without any code)
26:00 - Branding: Create a Logo and Color Scheme
29:00 - Setting up your Header, Footer, etc
34:30 - Optimizing our new website for speed
35:50 - Customizing your fonts
37:17 - Fixing our website temporary domain URL
39:17 - Launching Your Site
40:08 - Editing Your Home Page with Thrive Architect
43:00 - Basic Photo Editing - Remove Background for Hero Images
46:30 - General Page Editing Skills
48:28 - Updating Page / Post Titles & Settings

Creating Pages & Posts in WordPress
50:00 - Create our Contact Me Page
55:00 - Creating a main navigation menu
57:00 - Writing our first blog post with Thrive Architect

Setting up Analytics & Tweaking our Theme
1:02:00 - Creating a “Smart Site”
1:03:45 - Setting up Google Analytics
1:07:30 - Tweaking the Header to remove social media icons

Email Marketing
1:08:30 - Getting Started with Email Marketing
1:12:06 - Creating Your First Lead Magnet on Convertkit

Building our first sales funnel
1:14:00 - Getting Started with Sales Funnels
1:15:00 - Creating Online Courses On Your Website
1:28:35 - Overview of Mapping out your Sales Process & Flow
1:30:50 - Creating the Thank You Page for Funnel
1:33:43 - Designing your Login Page

Selling your products with Thrivecart
1:36:00 - Creating Your Sales Process in Thrivecart
1:39:00 - Integrating Thrivecart with Thrive Apprentice
1:43:00 - Integrating our Convertkit account with Thrivecart
1:44:00 - Configuring your first product in Thrivecart
1:47:00 - Linking your Apprentice courses to Thrivecart Products
1:50:00 - Designing your Checkout page to increase conversions
1:55:00 - Adding Google Analytics to Thrivecart
1:56:00 - Creating a Coupon Code to Incentive customers
2:02:00 - Building a Squeeze Page to bring leads into your funnel
2:05:00 - Customizing your emails to new customers with Thrive Apprentice

Generating Traffic
2:06:30 - Creating a Pop Up with Thrive Leads
2:09:30 - Updating Website to send traffic into funnel

Testing & Tweaking
2:11:10 - End to End Testing
2:15:00 - Improving deliverability of our emails with SMTP setup
2:19:00 - Removing the black admin bar for customers

Conversion Rate Optimization
2:20:00 - Improving conversions by A/B Testing your Sales Page
2:24:00 - Final End to End Testing
2:29:00 - Measuring tha Analytics of your sales funnel
2:30:00 - Conclusion and Wrap Up

How to set up Thrivecart + Teachable

My wife and my main business runs on this complete stack of Teachable, Thrivecart, and Convertkit.

It's a solid combinations of platforms to create an excellent user experience for your customers, as well as an optimized workflow as the creator. Here's the exact steps to set it up for yourself:

Tutorial Timestamps

⏱Timestamps:⏱
00:01:30 - Roadmap of the funnel
00:06:10 - The tools we are using and why
00:07:40 - Setting up your Teachable School
00:11:10 - Building Your First Teachable Course
00:16:00 Customizing lessons (important pdf elements and calls to action )
00:19:00 - Adding thumbnails for your Teachable Courses using RelayThat
00:21:00 Launching your school
00:22:00 Duplicating and building out additional courses
00:24:00 Setting up Pricing and payment options
00:26:30 - Reviewing the complete product catalog (and what to do if you don’t have a ton of products yet)
00:30:00 - Setting up your Convertkit Email System & Landing Page
00:37:00 - Setting up Thrivecart to sell your products in a high-converting sales funnel
00:38:00 - Which Thrivecart level is right for you?
00:39:00 - How to integrate Thrivecart with Teachable
00:42:00 - Setting up your first Product in Thrivecart
00:45:00 - Designing your One Time Offer Page
00:49:00 - Creating Tags to Identify and Segments my Email list (and linking them to Thrivecart)
00:54:00 - Understanding Abandoned Carts to recover money easily!
00:55:00 - Creating Your First Upsell in Thrivecart
00:57:00 - Creating Your First Downsell in Thrivecart
00:58:00 - Configuring every piece of your Sales Funnel in Thrivecart
01:00:00 - Linking your Convertkit Landing Page to Your Sales Funnel
00:01:00 - Running our first end-to-end test with test purchases
00:06:00 - Recapping the benefits of this powerful system

How to set up Thrivecart + MemberPress

This is no longer my preferred setup method, but MemberPress is a very popular membership solution for WordPress users, and it definitely has it's own benefits. 

Tools used in tutorial above:

👇 Resources Used (affiliate links, Thanks for the support!) 👇
Bluehost: https://unbeatabletech.com/bluehost
Thrive Themes: https://unbeatabletech.com/thrivemembership
Thrivecart: https://unbeatabletech.com/thrivecart
Memberpress: https://unbeatabletech.com/memberpress
Mailerlite: https://unbeatabletech.com/mailerlite
Crello: https://unbeatabletech.com/crello

Tutorial Timestamps

⏰ Time stamps for Thrivecart + MemberPress ⏰
1:58 - The website objectives
4:00 - Tools we will use
9:00 - Setting up our brand new website
10:12 - Preparing our site for work!
11:22 - Installing our Theme
12:00 - Installing Plugins Needed
12:45 - Installing Thrive Themes
15:34 - Getting started with Thrivecart
17:50 - Installing MemberPress
19:00 - Building a Conversion Focused Home Page
24:36 - Sourcing High Quality Stock Photos
26:35 - Getting started with Mailerlite to build your email list
28:57 - Integrating Mailerlite with your website's lead capture system
30:00 Setting up a Thank You and download page
34:05 - Configuring Permalink settings for SEO Optimization
36:00 testing our lead magnet funnel
37:00 Setting up an exit-intent pop up to capture leads
44:10 - Configuring our default homepage
45:00 - Building our Online Course
47:00 - Quickly configuring Memberpress
50:00 - Desigining our first lesson in Thrive Apprentice
51:45 - Publishing your courses in Thrive Apprentice
52:20 - Customizing your Thrive Apprentice area
57:00 - Setting up our products in Thrivecart
1:04:00 - Linking our products to our Sales Page
1:06:00 - Testing our first product funnel
1:09:00 - Creating navigation menus and other UX items for the site
1:14:00 - Setting up A/B Split Testing on the Homepage to optimize Leads
1:21:00 - Setting up an A/B Test in Thrive Leads
1:24:00 Setting up an A/B Test on Sales Page to Optimize Sales
1:29:00 Building our funnel: Creating Bump Products, Upsell Products, and Downsell Products in Memberpress
1:33:00 - Protecting Content with Memberpress
1:34:00 - Creating our Upsells and Downsell Courses with Apprentice
1:36:00 - Setting up our Bump, Upsell, and Downsell in Thrivecart
1:42:00 - Testing our entire sales funnel
1:44:00 - Adding Access URLs to Memberpress to easily access your content from your account.
1:45:00 - Wrap Up

Thrivecart Alternatives

As I mentioned earlier, I have used just about every checkout solution under the sun for my own business or clients that I have worked with.

Here is my honest comparison of Thrivecart compared to the other popular options:

Thrivecart Vs SendOwl

SendOwl is a monthly service that allows you to get started for only $9 per month.

While that sounds appealing, there are tons of limitations and restrictions with the SendOwl Platform when compared to Thrivecart.

FEATURE

Thrivecart

Sendowl

Customizable Checkout Pages

Checkout Templates

4 templates

3 Templates

Embedded checkout

Popup Checkout Pages

1-Click Upsell

Very Limited

Bump Offers

Very Limited

Downsells

A/B Testing

Cart Abandonment

Requires Premium Plan

Advanced Funnel Builder

# of Products allowed

unlimited

Basic: 10

Premium: 100

# of subscriptions allowed

Unlimited

Basic: 0

Premium: 1

Physical Products Support

Affiliate Platform

On Premium Plan+

Price

$495-$690 (Lifetime Deal)

Basic $9/month

Premium: $24/month

3 Year Cost

$495-$690

$864

I started out with SendOwl and I am very fond of the platform, but ultimately it is too simplistic and limited to compete with Thrivecart.

And when you account for an average 3 year lifespan of product, it even costs more than Thrivecart!

Read More: Thrivecart vs SendOwl

Thrivecart vs Kartra

Kartra is an all-in-one solution, so this comparison will only be looking at the checkout-specific functionality of Kartra.

FEATURE

Thrivecart

Kartra

Customizable Checkout Pages

Checkout Templates

4 templates

Dozens / Customizable

Embedded checkout

Popup Checkout Pages

1-Click Upsell

Bump Offers

Downsells

A/B Testing

Cart Abandonment

Advanced Funnel Builder

# of Products allowed

unlimited

unlimited on Silver plan+

# of subscriptions allowed

Unlimited

unlimited on Silver plan+

Physical Products Support

Affiliate Platform

Price

$495-$690 (Lifetime Deal)

Basic $99/month

Silver: $199/month

3 Year Cost

$495-$690

$7,164

Kartra is a fantastic all-in-one platform that goes neck-and-neck with Thrivecart on checkout functionality.

Obviously the cost comparison isn't completely fair because there is a TON that the Kartra system does that Thrivecart doesn't (read my full Kartra Review).

These are both great platforms, and if you want ultimate simplicity - I am a big fan of Kartra's tightly integrated system.

But if you want more flexibility about the individual tools in your stack, Thrivecart is going to give you everything you need for your checkout solution.

Thrivecart vs WooCommerce and Cartflows

Oh WordPress - I think we all have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. But how does its new funnel builder Cartflows stand up in the competition? Let's find out.

FEATURE

Thrivecart

Cartflows

Customizable Checkout Pages

Checkout Templates

4 templates

4 templates

Embedded checkout

Only on product funnel

Popup Checkout Pages

1-Click Upsell

Bump Offers

Downsells

A/B Testing

Only using Google Optimize

Cart Abandonment

Advanced Funnel Builder

# of Products allowed

unlimited

unlimited

# of subscriptions allowed

Unlimited

Not built in - requires additional plugins

Physical Products Support

Affiliate Platform

Not built in - requires additional plugins

Price

$495-$690 (Lifetime Deal)

$299/year

3 Year Cost

$495-$690

$897

Cartflows is a newcomer on the scene and it sits on top of the WooCommerce system for WordPress selling.

It's a good plugin, but it is much less refined than Thrivecart, and it can tend to complicate your website if you only have a few products to sell.

Adding WooCommerce to a small site can feel like overkill, and you can quickly find yourself in technical overwhelm trying to get all the pieces working.

For simplicity and reliability (fewer pieces to break), I think Thrivecart is a great solution over Cartflows.

Read More: Thrivecart vs Cartflows

My Thrivecart Bonus

I want you to be successful with Thrivecart on day 1, so I've packaged together a list of incredible bonuses to help you become an expert at Thrivecart and sales funnel selling quickly.

When you purchase Thrivecart through my affiliate link, you'll get instant access to:

Conclusion

Thrivecart is one of the greatest solutions for funnel builders on the market today.

It's drop-dead simple to set up, yet it has extremely advanced features like A/B testing and built-in affiliate management.

Combining all this with a beautiful one-time price point, and you've got a recipe for a successful and profitable business.

I have spend thousands of dollars on different software, and Thrivecart is one of the only ones that I didn't feel I had to wrestle with to get it to work.

Thrivecart also has a risk-free 30 day money back guarantee, so you are able to fully kick the tires to see if it is the right platform for you.

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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