Online Shopping Cart Software: ThriveCart

I wanted to take the time to discuss checkout pages and the terrific online shopping cart software that is Thrivecart. I use this online cart software daily along with the rest of my marketing stack to help me power my business sales and has (of yet) never let me down. 

So every word of this article comes from my experience using it and the problems it has solved for me where making more sales is concerned.

If you're in the business of selling products, services or online courses, there's a pretty good chance that you'll be wanting to accept payments and set up a sales funnel with all manner of order bumps, upsells and downsells. - to boost your revenue per customer.

One of the problems with custom shopping carts for a good number of business owners and entrepreneurs is the technical knowledge and of course the time needed to actually sit down and set up a conversion focused shopping cart which will allow you to sell your wares!

This results in taking the quick route using checkout pages which are not built and designed with conversions in mind which result in a fair few abandonments or simple embeddable PayPal buttons which just redirect customers through to PayPal.

A cart needs to be as clear as possible to avoid adding any friction to the buying process. Some carts are often confusing and pushes the person towards abandoning their initial train of thought and keeping their credit card inside their wallet.

The shopping cart is one of the most crucial (and most overlooked) aspects of a sales funnel, as it's the stage where people are 90% convinced they want to give you their money. Most businesses take the time and effort to produce high-quality landing pages and sales pages which convince a person that your product or service is the solution to their pains.

The shopping cart is one of the most crucial parts of a sales funnel, as it's the stage where people are 90% convinced they want to give you their money. Most businesses take the time and effort to produce high-quality landing pages and sales pages which convince a person that your product or service is the solution to their pains.

So the same effort should really be the same during the checkout process to not only create a pleasant checkout experience, but one that prevents people changing their mind and closing the page (we've all been there...)...thus losing the same!

It's time to ensure your sales process ends with a shopping cart designed to eliminate customer indecisiveness and process more successful sales with ease.

Here's what I am going to cover in this analysis of Thrivecart

What is Thrivecart?

Thrivecart is a point-and-click shopping cart software which allows you to rapidly create and deploy attractive checkout pages which allow you to sell access to your products, services, courses via one time payments, split payments and monthly subscription payments - all without needing to write a single line of code.

For entrepreneurs building sales funnels for their business, it's really a godsend as it means you don't really need to go through the motions of hiring a developer to custom build a checkout page and spend further time optimising it for conversion perfection.

It's actually super simple to set up a checkout page and integrate with email service providers, membership platforms, payment processors, webinar platforms and fulfilment services.

Thrivecart doesn't depend on any other software to work - there are WordPress shopping cart plugins allowing you to create similar checkout experiences, but there is more meddling involved if you're not really too confident with WordPress and then there's the need to constantly update and make sure plugins are playing nicely together (which often times they do, contrary to what you may read elsewhere).

But still...it's one less thing to manage and worry about. So for entrepreneurs working with a stack for their business and on the hunt for a checkout solution, Thrivecart won't interrupt or make you rework your existing setup - it's a beautiful thing!

Who should use Thrivecart?

As mentioned above, for entrepreneurs or business owners who are selling digital products, online courses, physical products or offering consulting services online, they really need to give their customers the best and easiest checkout experience as well as increase the revenue potential of each person who lands on the cart page.

Thrivecart is not a 'traditional shopping cart'  in a sense where you add products to a basket like you would when shopping for clothes or gadgets on Amazon. Instead it initially focuses on offering one core product/solution to your target audience in the checkout (as well as order bumps and upsells; which we'll look at further down the page. 

In principal, you don't even need a website to use Thrivecart. Many entrepreneurs spend more time building tribes using Facebook groups or corresponding through email or via Messenger instead of putting all of their energy into a website and going through the motions of updating it all the time, instead focusing on live streaming...and all that.

You can then simply link your product cart into your group message or embedded in your email to drive traffic to the checkout and make sales.

This software is an essential part of my business practices and allows me to set up full sales pages and checkouts in 30 minutes, something which before would typically take me hours...days to get right.

Anyhoo, let's breakdown how you can use Thrivecart to charge your customers and improve conversions

One-time-payments  

With a one-off payment you can simply setup a product in Thrivecart's intuitive creation area and set the payment type to a one-time-fee. For entrepreneurs who create a lot of bespoke content, this is ideal as within minutes you can set up a cart for your newest offer/s and deliver it to your email list or post in your Facebook group.

Typically, without Thrivecart, you would have to jump through hoops to get something out there which converts well.

If you're worried about GDPR, there is a consent box you can create on every cart to make sure you're compliant while giving your customers peace of mind about how their data storage (etc).

Recurring subscriptions

For entrepreneurs wanting to sell access to an on-going service such as a membership site, Thrivecart allows the set up of a cart which charges customers recurring payments with multiple frequencies such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, every 6 months...

You can easily connect your checkout page with the numerous online course platforms available today such as Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific as well as WordPress based membership solutions such as MemberPress, WishList Member and Member Mouse.

ThriveCart make everything nice and easy with step-by-step processes, so it does a great job at preventing you from putting your fist through the wall. I find for online courses where there is a large financial commitment that has to be made, your checkout page really needs to reiterate and readdress why they are on the checkout page. 

You can segment your users in your CRM system (Active Campaign, Infusionsoft...) via tags based on their payment type. So you will always know exactly who your customers are, and more importantly how they are paying for access to your products and services.

Split Pay

Split pay allows splitting the total cost into more manageable chunks to access your products. This is extremely powerful as for people in need of your solution, but do not have the means to pay the full price today, gives you another avenue for your customers to go down.

Again, you can tag your customers based on a split-pay purchase to make sure you are segmenting everyone who has purchased into their specific groups for future marketing opportunities, and to also keep track on failed payments and revoke access if need be.

I have personally used split pay on a number of offers, and it has always seemed to go down well with my audience. Most people are always looking to spread payments

Why Thrivecart will help to your increase revenue

I am not a fan of sensationalist claims you so often see bandied about the internet for products which are in actual fact not very good; far too many of them!

But Thrivecart has been a revelation for my businesses and countless other people's business because of the ease and speed of creation and deployment. For many entrepreneurs who are not tech-savvy, there is nothing worse than trying to figure out some newfangled software which requires you to jump through hoops in order to get working and then have to read through countless support forums or search the YouTube archives for answer.

The onboarding is brilliant, and for someone who has never used the software before, they make the process super easy...step-by-step in fact. So you can honestly go from no checkout page through to having a checkout page in as little as 5-minutes. 

Aside from usability, Thrivecart gives any business the much needed shopping cart features to make more online sales, features which your typical payment method will not give you...which results in leaving a lot of money on the table.

Let's breakdown some of the key features of Thrivecart which are going to help you transform your sales prospects.

Order Bumps

"Do you want fries with that?..."

Order bumps allows you to increase your profits per order, and if you're running paid traffic campaigns from Facebook or LinkedIn, the order bump is a nice way to recoup that ad spend back.

Online ads are becoming ever more expensive, particularly if you are a notice in this area and are not advanced in the way you target your audience. So it's imperative that you are maximising the potential revenue with each sales funnel you create.

An order bump should really follow some simple principles:

One-Click-Upsells

This is one of the most powerful features and something a checkout page should be offering all customers. It allows you to offer a a second product/service up from what your new customer has just purchased, without the customer having to input their credit card details for a second time.

Again, a feature like this would involve you hiring a developer to have an upsell product. Here, Thrivecart does it all of the heavy lifting for you. All that you would need to do is actually have an enticing upsell and create the messaging behind it. Super simple!

A/B Testing

If you're driving traffic to your landing pages and sales pages it's of paramount importance you're learning what is working. For example, on landing pages, marketers will have two variants of the same page with one minor tweak on one of them, this tweaks is usually a button colour, a different call to action headline, an alternative image to use.

Testing helps us determine what your customers are responding to the best - which in turn you improve your checkout page over time and increasing conversions.

Why should testing stop at your landing page? As you cart is arguably the most important step in the funnel, why should you not split test the page where somebody is almost committed to purchase?

Thrivecart allows you to run split tests on all of your checkout pages, you can change headlines, button colours, video, bullet points and many other areas of the page.

What different types of checkout pages do Thrivecart provide?

When creating a checkout page, you're not limited to one layout. Thrivecart actually provide you with 4 different layout options to display your checkout page. The options are:

I typically use a one step or two step checkout when using Thrivecart, as for me I just find they convert better (for me). Pop up checkouts are for when you have a longer sales page and you want the button to trigger a lightbox popup which contains your cart.

You can actually embed the checkout on any page of your website or on and custom landing page with the HTML code you can copy and paste. It's very easy. I often use Thrive Architect page builder for WordPress (not related to Thrivecart) to build out my landing pages and sales pages due to the conversion focus of the Thrive Themes plugins. 

It's also worth pointing out that the embeddable checkout can be used in conjunction with any CMS (content management system) - I talk about WordPress because that is the system I use to power all of my websites and landing page. So the embed will work with systems like SquareSpace, Wix, Joomla and even SAAS platforms such as ClickFunnels.

Going back to A/B testing for a moment, you can also split test various cart types against each other which is a particularly nice feature, for those who are constantly looking to increase their conversions. So for example, you can do a one-step checkout vs a two-step checkout!

Affiliate Tracking with Thrivecart

Thrivecart comes with an affiliate friendly affiliate centre which offers affiliates tracking IDs which they can use to append their affiliate links which they use to promote your products/services. Affiliates will typically want to promote YOU via their own affiliate blogs, via YouTube or in their Facebook group and the ability to add IDs allows them to measure which channels are producing the most sales.

With a standard, global affiliate link, affiliates won't be able to get the data they need to better promote you.

Thrivecart integrations

For those who are not tech savvy or worry when it comes to getting to grips with new software designed to grow your business, it can be daunting...in fact, it is daunting! One worry is making sure that whatever it is your are buying will work with your current tech stack! 

I have bought many softwares which have given me nothing but headaches when trying to make it work with my existing setup. But I'm here to tell you that you won't have issues with Thrivecart.

For those who are unsure, integrations are basically when 2 different communicate with one another to basically allow you to have smooth running business automations which run without you having to do any of the manual processes, which is one huge hurdle to over come. The last thing you want to be doing is solving tech instead of talking to your audience.

For those who are unsure, integrations are basically when 2 different communicate with one another to basically allow you to have smooth running business automations which run without you having to do any of the manual processes, which is one huge hurdle to over come. The last thing you want to be doing is solving tech instead of talking to your audience.

Luckily, Thrivecart has many native integrations which are a breeze to set up.

So for arguments sake, here is an basic example tech stack for an online course business...

When we introduce Thrivecart to this stack, your automated workflow would go along the lines of this:

You can actually do all of this in super quick time without any tech skills needed! I'll say it again, Thrivecart do a wonderful job of keeping the tech speak to an absolute minimum and focus on allowing you to realise the full potential of your business without needing to be gifted at setting up payment systems and simple automations.

You can actually do all of this in super quick time without any tech skills needed! I'll say it again, Thrivecart do a wonderful job of keeping the tech speak to an absolute minimum and focus on allowing you to realise the full potential of your business without needing to be gifted at setting up payment systems and simple automations.

So, how much does Thrivecart cost?

One of the amazing things about this question is the fact you are able to purchase today for a one-time price of $495.00. For an online shopping cart which does so much, the price is ludicrously cheap. 

If you're looking for an online shopping cart solution, there is literally no better time to jump in and invest in a solution for a one-off, heavily discounted fee. Thrivecart will revert to a monthly fee structure soon, so this amazingly awesome "pilot programme" introductory offer will end.

This special one time deal for Thrivecart at this special offer can only be offered by recommended partners (which we are), and by clicking any of the links you see in this write up, you will be able to purchase at the one-time fee instead of having to fork out monthly payments when the pilot programme ends.

In fact only recently, the creator of Thrivecart (Josh Bartlett) announced the lifetime deal would be ending shortly and that they will be introducing monthly payments as a way to get access to his cart software.

So, should you buy Thrivecart?

Well, I would say to you, that you don't typically buy software like this for low cost and expect high-quality. I've bought a lot of junk over the years which looked promising but I would always end up disappointed! Thrivecart is an absolute steal while the lifetime deal is still on offer; I would probably still buy it on a monthly - it's that good!

If you're looking for a reliable product which is going to help you increase your conversions all while having access to a valuable customer support team and private Facebook community full of digital marketers always pitching in to the community, solving any Thrivecart related queries and helping you grow your skills. I've found the group of immense value when wanting to do specific things with my checkout pages!

So yeah, for $495...you get full access to all of Thrivecarts features without having to pay a single penny, dime, rouble, franc again. 

​Thrivecart Update 2020

Thrivecart has undergone a massive transformation for 2020. The carts are now 100% customisable and you can really create some absolutely stunning cart designs via the new drag and drop cart editor! Just like the one in the image below. 

Honestly...Thrivecart is THE best investment I have made for my business. It continues to surpass all  expectations and the features they have for the rest of the year; such as landing pages leave me with so much excitement in terms of the possibilities. 

For $495.00 on a lifetime deal with unlimited updates, its an absolute steal being perfectly honest! 

What about the other Thrivecart competitors?

Thrivecart vs Samcart

Samcart has been around longer than Thrivecart, the core features you need are pretty much the same as they both give you the ability to offer order bumps, one-click upsells and all of the other points I have discussed in this article. 

Thrivecart has way more software integrations. Samcart has 25 native integrations, while Thrivecart has well over 40, which include services like Shopify and Printful (for print on demand businesses)

While I like CartFlows and the creator/s behind it, I will say Thrivecart is a far better and easy platform to use for making sales online. I do not like relying on WordPress to run absolutely everything in my business. You need to create all your products in WooCommerce and it can get messy pretty quickly!

You can quickly build a cart in Thrivecart and get it out to your email list in as little as 5 minutes, with CartFlows, you really need to spend the time configuring it all, creating your products and so on and so forth.

I confess, I do own both Thrivecart and CartFlows, but I exclusively use Thrivecart for everything now; and i don't even have to pay monthly for it as I got it on the lifetime licence.

So there you have it, I do hope you found this review useful when it comes to choosing a product to best serve your business interests. I use this cart software myself, so I have experienced the value it has brought to my business.

You may wish to continue using PayPal buttons to drive and power your online sales (which I did many years ago using their embeds). However, I hope you would see the value Thrivecart could bring your business with a tiny investment in relation to how it can transform your sales

I'm not in the habit of promoting software I do not use and certainly one which wouldn't be of benefit to anyone reading.

Again, I use the software on a daily basis, so I have no issues promoting this software to you...and in all honesty, you can't beat the lifetime payment offer.

If you're still on the fence about Thrivecart and want to test it out, drop me a message below and I can arrange to give you access to a test account so you can witness first hand how straight-forward it is!

If you buy through the button below I will give you 3 cart templates you can instantly use in your business which have generated 5-figures for my clients. You'll get all the sequencing for the upsells and downsells and get your funnel ready in minutes