Thrivecart Review - Why We Believe It's the Best Shopping Cart on the Market

Feb 02, 2021

A shopping cart is one of the most important, yet often most overlooked, components of e-commerce. Even the smallest changes to your shopping cart can turn it into a high-converting beast, positively impacting your sales and creating an easier and more interactive experience for your clients.

Josh Bartlett founded ThriveCart back in 2016.

Fast-forward to now, and it is one of the most popular and fastest-growing pieces of sales cart software out there for e-commerce businesses, online course creators, and consultants.

If you're short on time and looking for the answer to the question — would we recommend buying ThriveCart?

The answer is 100% yes. Continue reading to find out what we believe makes ThriveCart such a special piece of software.

What Is ThriveCart?

In short, ThriveCart is a shopping cart software, which helps users receive payments and promote information for various products, whether digital, physical, subscription-based, or service-based.

However, what makes ThriveCart unique is the fact that it goes far beyond taking payments.

It is an intuitive software that helps users create high-quality checkout pages, which help convert a greater number of clicks into digital sales to dramatically increase your profits.

How can it do this, you ask?

It does so by producing upsells, down-sells, and 'bumps.'

The team at ThriveCart was quite clever in that it made sure to integrate its software into a variety of email marketing platforms, membership platforms, payment processors, and webinar platforms.

That is where we believe the biggest strength lies.

It doesn't matter if you promote products from your personal website, Facebook page, or through a series of email marketing campaigns, ThriveCart can integrate itself within your platform or provider.

We've been using ThriveCart here at courseCREEK for quite some time. It has solidified itself as an ESSENTIAL piece of software and one we often recommend to our clients, as they end up falling in love with it too.

Why Should You Use ThriveCart?

In this day and age, having a single piece of quality software to manage all of your business' online marketing campaigns simply isn't enough. We often call these all-in-one tools 'stacks' — suites of tools/platforms for emails, landing pages, receiving payments, product delivery, etc.

We like to think of ThriveCart as the missing piece of the puzzle in this 'stack' equation, which is the ability to take payments on checkout pages that are high-converting.

Essentially, with ThriveCart, you can still use all of your favorite tools without having to compromise your checkout process.

Who Do We Recommend ThriveCart For?

Online Courses and E-Books

ThriveCart works seamlessly with online course platforms.

For example, you can use ThriveCart to sell e-books from your blog. With ThriveCart's features, you can customize your checkout page to collect a plethora of information from your customers.

Whether you use Kakabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or a membership site, it is straightforward to integrate.

Recurring Subscriptions

If you have a product or service that customers subscribe to, ThriveCart can handle it.

ThriveCart can even set your email platform up with an automated workflow to tag your customers with a label, which you can choose. You'll be able to see an overview of these customers in the ThriveCart customer management section.

Physical Products

With ThriveCart, you have everything you need to sell physical products online. You can use the platform to collect names, shipping information, or phone numbers.

Plenty of people out there use Shopify.

ThriveCart integrates beautifully with multiple Shopify accounts so you can track your sales.

Consultants

At courseCREEK, we love ThriveCart for our consultant services. You can send a PayPal invoice using ThriveCart, and setting up integration between the two is very simple.

Once you have it set up, you can create additional products for your different services and send them to your clients via the checkout pages.

Top ThriveCart Features

Bumps

One incredible feature that allows product creators to increase profits for each order is the 'bump' feature. Even if you create a small bump every time someone purchases one of your products, you can expand your profits tenfold over time.

A bump is a pop-up offer checkbox that comes up when your buyer hits your checkout page. The bump from ThriveCart is hard to miss and makes it easy for your customers to make a quick decision. They simply check the box and continue on without having to go through the checkout process again.

The idea here is to provide your customers with an offer one would consider a no-brainer. That way, when they're getting ready to check out, they can say to themselves,

"Sound like a pretty cool offer. Why not?!" *click*

Upsells

One of the main reasons we signed up with ThriveCart to start was the upsell abilities it possesses.

An upsell is a second offer that presents itself to customers immediately after they successfully purchase something from you. With a one-click upsell like the one above, a customer can easily add a product or service to an existing order without the pain of going through the checkout process again.

The easier it is for a consumer to accept a second offer you provide,, the more likely they will do so.

The psychology here is that consumers get a dopamine hit when they purchase something, giving you a small window to ride that dopamine train and sell more.

However, we don't like to consider it as a "trick," but instead a unique opportunity to provide your customers with more of the thing they are searching for. They're quite lucky, as they have been given the opportunity to take advantage of some pretty incredible discounts on additional products thanks to your offer.

Intuitive Templates

Not everyone is a designer, and that's okay.

One reason ThriveCart truly excels is the fact that the software provides attractive and easy-to-use design tools right off the bat. There are plenty of high-quality checkout templates that are well-designed, minimalistic, and very mobile-friendly.

Beyond that, they convert like no other.

The goal here is for your checkout process to be seamless without any subconscious friction. There are a few different styles of checkout that you can choose from depending on your preferences:

One-Step Checkout (Every checkout element pops up on a single page)
Two-Step Checkout (The checkout process is split into two sections)
Embedded Checkout (The checkout box is placed within a page)
Pop-up Checkout (The checkout loads in a pop-up window whenever a customer clicks the button to check out)

There are a few styles you can pick from as well, which we recommend testing out across different campaigns to gauge what is most effective.

Integrations

One consideration product creators often make when choosing pieces of software for their business is how well they integrate with the systems they already use.

When it comes to a shopping cart, it must first integrate with your payment processor. Luckily, ThriveCart integrates with PayPal, Stripe, ApplePay, Google Pay, and many more.

After your payment processor comes your email system provider.

At the most fundamental level, you must be able to add new customers to your email list. However, you probably want a bit more.

If you use advanced email systems like Drip, Infusionsoft, or Mailerlite, you'll probably want the ability to add customer tags or automation rather than simply adding them to an email list.

One of the big advantages of ThriveCart is that the range of things you can do with your integrations seems endless. With Active Campaign integration, for example, you can add tags or automation dependent on a customer's actions to trigger activities like upsells, abandoned cart reminders, bump offers, etc.

Affiliate Program

As you continue to grow your business, you'll probably want to begin using affiliates to promote the products and services you offer. One thing about ThriveCart that absolutely blew us away when we first signed up was the advanced affiliate system.

Think of this system as a two-tier MLM. Master affiliates can recruit more affiliates and make money on the products or services they sell. You can also take control of which affiliates can promote certain products and set unique payment levels per product for each of your affiliates.

Like normal affiliate links, you can create coupon codes that link each coupon user to the affiliate.

As you might expect, you get the typical reporting for affiliates on your administration center. However, you can uniquely set your system up to provide your affiliates with instant payments once a sale is made instead of having to wait 30 days or more.

This is a HUGE benefit for your affiliate team.

JV/Partner Contracts

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ThriveCart recently rolled out its JV feature, which allows you to automatically share revenue from your sales with JF partners. We've never seen anything this powerful from a shopping cart platform. To do something like this before, you would have needed to purchase an entirely separate management system.

The JV feature allows ThriveCart users to partner with others to sell a product and share earnings with that partner. It links to the affiliate engine, allowing you to create effective enterprise deals.

With this JV feature, you can:

Include a variety of products in a single contract
Automatically trigger rules
Set start and finish dates for your contracts
Set up contracts with multiple partners
Set up contracts based on numerous pricing options

Integrate Your E-Commerce Business With ThriveCart

If you're looking to sell physical products, digital products, or services, or you just want to explore one of the most innovative shopping cart systems on the market today, we couldn't recommend ThriveCart anymore.

It is one of the most powerful pieces of software in our arsenal here at coureCREEK and one we proudly stand behind. With beautiful, high-converting checkout pages, customizable features, versatile integrations, and an affiliate program like no other, it's a no-brainer if you're looking for the best of the best.