Is Thrivecart Worth It? (My Honest Review & Guide)

Thrivecart is an online shopping cart solution that lets you create high-converting checkout pages and collect payments on your website.

Thrivecart is a handy tool for selling physical and digital products, including ebooks and digital courses. You can collect leads as well as design checkout page upsells and bump offers to maximize your sales. It also supports subscription plans and categorizes your customers based on their membership plans.

This Thrivecart review discusses the versatile cart software and its functionality in depth. We want you to know why it is considered one of the best cart solutions out there, so we’ve done all the legwork for you.

Our review is based on a thorough analysis of the Thrivecart software, including its capabilities, its integration support, and the numerous and highly positive user reviews it has so far attracted.

Introducing Thrivecart

If you’re yet to integrate with a shopping cart solution, then Thrivecart may suit you well. It doesn’t require any coding knowledge, which makes it perfect for first-timers looking for something that’s easy to use.

Suppose you’re considering a switch to Thrivecart from your current cart software. In that case, you stand to benefit from A/B testing, support for multiple autoresponders, and visually enticing checkout templates, to mention a few features.

Best of all, Thrivecart is available for a one-time fee, which gives you lifetime access to the tool. It is the first of its kind, and it would be prudent to take advantage of that offer if you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to what you have. We start off our review by studying the Thrivecart platform.

What Does Thrivecart Do?

Thrivecart is designed with two goals in mind:

• To reduce abandoned carts and your checkout page bounce rate, and;
• To maximize every sale you make.

If you’re new to cart platforms, we can also say that it is designed to help you sell products and services on your website. Customers don’t even have to leave the page they’re on to check out.

Apart from selling, Thrivecart helps you convert more leads from the checkout page. This is made possible by its two-step checkout page, which collects customer information like email addresses that you can add to your mailing list.

Even though it’s chock full of features, we can boil down Thrivecart’s main uses into the following:

• Creating high-converting checkout pages
• Capturing leads through two-step shopping carts
• Creating one-click bump offers and upsells
• Creating embeddable and pop-up cart pages
• Managing recurrent subscriptions

High-Converting Checkout Pages

Thrivecart’s checkout pages are designed to minimize cart abandonment rates. They are highly optimized for conversions.

Creating a checkout page is a straightforward process. The platform supplies some optimized templates for your customization. Luckily, that’s all that’s necessary to create high-converting checkout pages. You don’t need any knowledge of code.

The reason why Thrivecart’s checkout pages convert highly can be attributed to the embedded A/B testing feature.

With this feature, it is possible to see each checkout page's analytics and therefore choose the best performing one.

You can request split test variations of every page you create. This insight helps you publish the pages with the highest potential for capturing leads and generating sales.

Two-Step Shopping Carts

Thrivecart turns your website into a powerful e-commerce platform complete with lead capture tools.

Remember, if you can collect valuable customer information AND make a sale, that’s twice as much value. Even if the customer ends up abandoning the cart, you can still retarget them by sending reminders or other offers to their email.

That’s largely why this platform’s multi-step checkout form is so useful. With a single-step shopping cart, the customer simply pays then leaves.

A two-step shopping cart, on the other hand, collects some information before they complete the purchase.

This information may be their name, phone number, shipping address, or email address. Even after they leave your site, you can easily retarget them with recommendations based on their last purchase.

In doing so repeatedly, you can build a sizable subscriber list purely from your checkout pages, even when the cart is abandoned.

Bump Offers And Upsells

Upsells—the oldest sales trick in the book. Once a customer is ready to spend, a good salesman tries to increase the value of the sale.

This can be done by recommending a related product or something of similar value at a lower price.

That’s exactly what Thrivecart allows you to do. On the final checkout page, you can add a one-click bump offer or upsell to increase each sale value.

Clicking on the offer simply adds it to their cart, so they don’t get redirected to the product page. Instead, the focus remains on checking out.

This is an effective way to promote similar or related products after every sale. Your customers may be inclined to buy products that are complementary to their purchase, especially if they can do it in one click.

Upsells and bump offers allow you to maximize revenue from your existing customer base.

Embeddable Cart Pages And Pop-ups

With Thrivecart, you can embed a checkout page anywhere on your site, regardless of your web host. This can be done by pasting a snippet of code provided by Thrivecart on the desired webpage.

You can also have an ever-present checkout page button that hovers over other pages and pops out the shopping cart when clicked. It allows customers to add items to their cart without leaving the page they’re on.

Bloggers will find this feature very valuable since it keeps their viewers on the page even while they’re adding things to their shopping cart. It also allows digital entrepreneurs to advertise and sell products without redirecting customers to external checkout pages.

Recurrent Payments

Support for recurrent payments is one of Thrivecart’s best features. It allows you to sell periodic membership plans to your customers and even helps you classify them by plan.

The platform gives you the option of rebilling daily, weekly, monthly, or annually, and it allows you to automate the entire process with email autoresponders.

When you start selling a subscription-based product or service, Thrivecart initiates an automated workflow with the autoresponders of your choosing. All that’s left of you to do is to label the workflow with the relevant tags for better identification.

The customer management section automatically divides customers into segments based on how much they’re billed daily/monthly,/annually. This way, it’s easy to identify customers in different plans.

Thrivecart has a Dunning feature that helps you see all your recurring payments and subscriptions at a glance.

This Dunning feature is vital for managing, increasing, and retaining income from your subscription-based products and services. We will talk about it in greater detail later on.

Who Is Thrivecart For?

How do you know whether you need Thrivecart or not?

It’s simple—do you want to sell products and services via your website? If the answer is yes, then Thrivecart is for you. Thrivecart is for everyone with an online business, whether you’re an e-commerce store, a blogger, or an entrepreneur.

As long as you’re selling something online, Thrivecart can be quite a handy tool. The platform’s primary goal is to make the checkout process quick and painless for online entrepreneurs. The easier it is to check out, the more revenue they can generate.

Thrivecart’s highly converting checkout pages encourage your customers to complete the transaction. That means more income for you, but more importantly, it also means repeat business.

If your customers can easily complete their orders on your website, they’re likely to come back for more products. Aside from reducing the number of abandoned carts, Thrivecart also helps you collect leads for your subscriber list.

The checkout templates make the whole creation process much easier. They’re very easy to customize, which means freedom to design your checkout pages to suit your business needs.

The only downside? Thrivecart doesn’t qualify to be a proper e-commerce store because you can only sell one product or service at a time.

If you’re looking to sell several items or services simultaneously, you’re better off using more defined cart solutions like Shopify.

However, if your products and services fall into either of the following categories, then Thrivecart might prove to be of great value to your business:

Online Courses And E-books

If you’re here because you’re wondering how to start selling your courses or e-books, then you’ve come to the right place.

Thrivecart software seems to be built for this exact purpose. It integrates seamlessly with online course platforms, which makes it among the best ways to start selling your courses and e-books online.

The checkout page can still be customized to collect information from your customers. You can even add a GDPR consent box so that your customers can opt-in or out of sharing specific information.

The best part is that Thrivecart is highly integrative with course platforms like Teachable and Kanjabi. Even if you run your membership site, you can integrate the software with just a few clicks.

Product/Services With Recurring Payments

Do you offer a product or service that requires a monthly subscription?

If yes, then Thrivecart is certainly worth your consideration. It handles one-time payments, split payments, free trials, and recurrent billing.

It automatically coordinates with your email autoresponders to facilitate rebilling and even segments your customers based on their subscription plans.

Therefore, it keeps your one-time payment customers separate from your monthly subscribers, and it’s easy to keep track of your recurrent incomes with its Dunning feature.

Physical Products

Thrivecart is the final piece of the puzzle for anyone looking to start an online business. While your website caters to the promotional side of things, this tool handles the transactional aspects of running your business.

You can use the two-step checkout page to collect shipping information and email addresses for notification and invoicing purposes.

If you already have an e-commerce store up and running, perhaps via the Shopify platform, you’ll be glad to know that Thrivecart can support multiple accounts simultaneously.

That means all the sales that come from your Thrivecart carts are pushed to your Shopify account. This makes for easier sales tracking.

Thrivecart is useful whether you’re selling self-published books and products on platforms like Lulu or pushing dog toys, exercise DVDs, and wellness products on Shopify.

Digital And Consultation Services

Thrivecart is especially useful to online consultants who often have to stick to direct payments via PayPal or Stripe.

It allows you to create professional-looking checkout pages through which you receive payments for your services.

It’s an ideal option if you need a platform that will help you send invoices to your customers. And since you can easily connect it to your PayPal account, payments made on your website checkout page go directly to your personal account.

With Thrivecart, you can turn your services into billable products that appear on your checkout pages. It is also possible to brand your invoices, which goes a long way in securing your customers' trust.

Why Use Thrivecart?

In terms of competition, you have many other shopping cart solutions to choose from, especially options that support the sale of multiple items.

Shopify is a more robust e-commerce software with an advanced cart solution too. And Samcart, which shares many of its features, is one of Thrivecart’s most sought-after alternatives. This begs the question, why should you use Thrivecart? What is it that makes it worthwhile?

Pricing

In my honest opinion, Thrivecart is a fantastic cart solution with all the features you need to sell products online. However, the biggest edge it has over its competition right now is its pricing. In a market that’s dominated by subscription-based carts, Thrivecart stands out as the only option with lifetime access.

You can purchase Thrivecart for a one-time fee of $495 or $690 for the pro version for a limited time.

That’s right, Thrivecart offers a lifetime license, so you only need to pay for it once. When the offer period runs out, Thrivecart will switch to regular monthly subscriptions starting from $97/month.

Checkout Pages

Thrivecart isn’t the only software with customizable checkout pages. It is obvious, however, that their modern designs are far better.

It offers four customizable templates with sections such as “Contact Information,” where you collect customer data, “Payment Information,” and a “What You Get” section that previews the product in the customer’s cart.

There’s also a review section at the bottom where you can publish feedback from satisfied customers to further encourage the sale. Thrivecart can fit several conversion tools into a single checkout page, which makes it so versatile.

It’s also the reason why we keep referring to them as “high-converting” checkout pages. They’re full of information that builds a customer’s confidence in the purchase.

You can also add scarcity elements like countdown timers and limited stock posters to your checkout pages. When you make a product’s future availability uncertain, customers tend to act immediately.

Other cart elements you can add are:

• Bullet points
• The “Buy” button
• Video carts
• A field for offer coupon codes

Customization aside, these shopping carts are highly configurable, which is how Thrivecart manages to suit different business models with ease.

We’ve already talked about single-step and two-step checkout pages and A/B testing. Thrivecart offers more in terms of configuration:

• You can create a custom domain name for your checkout page’s URL.
• You can accept multiple payment options, including PayPal and credit card payments (via Stripe).
• You can customize monthly split pay schedules and amounts.
• You can add a sales tax option.

Thrivecart’s checkout pages are better for most people because they can be configured in a lot of different ways. They are also highly customizable and allow you to add brand colors, logos, and custom URLs to improve their look.

Drag-And-Drop Template Builder

Thrivecart introduced a drag-and-drop builder for their checkout templates a few years ago. It made the platform a lot easier to use.

In retrospect, that was a significant update because most of the tools marketers use today have drag-and-drop builders. They eliminate the need for complex code-driven builders.

The feature has secured Thrivecart’s relevance in 2021 and beyond. More importantly, it has unlocked full-page customization for checkout and landing pages for all types of businesses.

You don’t need advanced coding experts to refine your checkout pages any longer. Thrivecart allows you to create high-converting designs quickly, whether you’re a techie or not.

A/B Testing

The importance of testing is not lost on anyone, but we tend to focus all our split testing on sales pages. You know, where all the convincing happens.

But have you considered that what happens after the sales page is just as important? Most online entrepreneurs don’t really think about this until they use Thrivecart. That’s because Thrivecart makes it easy to set up A/B tests for your checkout pages.

And when you finally compare the performance of two checkout page designs, you’ll realize that split testing is just as vital in the final stages of a sale.

It’s nothing complex, but that simple A/B test can have a bigger impact on your bottom line than you think.

Go ahead and start A/B testing your checkout pages. See the difference it makes. You’ll never launch another one without testing first.

1-Click Upsells And Bump Offers

Upsells are pretty old business strategies, and that tells you a lot about their effectiveness. On average, an upsell can add 10% - 30% revenue to your marketing campaign.

That’s a lot of income for simply recommending similar products to customers in the final stage of the sales funnel.

Thrivecart lets you create bump offers and upsells to get as much from each sale as possible. Bump offers appear just above the checkout button, and they allow customers to add a related item to their cart in one click.

Thrivecart offers you its default cart upsell page to use, but you can also use your own upsell page. I recommend the latter because a custom page can be modified to look unique and to match brand colors.

Besides, you have complete control over the design aspects of a custom upsell page. Once you’re done setting up your bump offers and upsells, you can test each step in your checkout process for free and as many times as you need to.

Modal And Embeddable Carts

Thrivecart offers two types of carts, both of which can be useful in different contexts. The embeddable cart is created by pasting a piece of code onto your webpage. It allows you to have your checkout page on your website.

This may suit bloggers who prefer to make sales directly through their WordPress sites. It also suits businesses that want their customers to make purchases directly from their website.

The modal cart will also suit many types of websites, especially those with several products. It is conveniently located inside a clickable hover button that follows the customer around the site.

This allows them to add items to their cart while still shopping, so it may promote more sales from each customer.

Integration Support

Part of the reason Thrivecart comes highly recommended to all types of online entrepreneurs is that it supports many integrations.

The list of integrations it supports includes popular email marketing, membership, and webinar platforms such as the following

• Email marketers: Sendy, AWeber, Drip, HubSpot, ConvertKit, MailChimp, GetResponse, Moosend, ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, MailerLite, and InfusionSoft.
• Membership platforms: Teachable, Thrive, Apprentice, OptimizeMember, MemberMouse, MemberPress, WishList Member, and Digital Access Pass.
• Webinar platforms:  WebinarNinja and Demio.

For content creators like bloggers and e-book authors, Thrivecart is an excellent cart solution because it integrates with multiple payment gateways as well as several fulfillment services:

• Payment gateways:  PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Authorize.net.
• Fulfillment services: Lulu, Disk.com, Zapier, Vervante, Printful, Shopify, Shippo, ShipStation, Google Sheets, and Kunaki.

Thrivecart continues to add more integrations with each update. It’s a decent cart solution, especially for freelancers using fulfillment services and businesses using multiple email autoresponders.

Affiliate Tracking

It’s not uncommon for vendors to use third-party cart solutions to manage their affiliate marketers.

The problem is that most affiliate programs restrict marketers to a single, global URL, which cannot be appended with a custom tracking ID.

If you intend to sell products through affiliates, then you should consider Thrivecart, which creates unique tracking IDs for each affiliate.

This gives them the freedom to sell your products on multiple platforms while retaining their unique affiliate IDs. They can create as many of these as they need.

It also makes it easier for you to measure the traffic brought in by each affiliate and traffic by channel.

Sales Tax Calculation

It’s admirable that Thrivecart has an option to indicate sales tax as well as your price point. It goes further to calculate the sales and tax amounts for each product, thereby saving you lots of time and money you’d have spent on tax calculation services.

It calculates the appropriate amount of tax on each sale, basing its results on your business's location and other variables that affect tax rates. It does all of this automatically, meaning you only need to input your price points to get the right tax amounts.

Automation

Thrivecart has enough automation to work on autopilot. You can set workflows to manage your customers and affiliates automatically. For instance, you can set a workflow that rewards affiliates with a commission increase when they reach a specific sales threshold.

You can also set automatic commission cuts based on the number of refunds coming from your affiliates’ traffic. This automation can also be used in tandem with Thrivecart’s subscription payment plans.

You can set it to chase customers when their payments are overdue by a specific number of days.

Automation will allow you to get much more done using little more than the platform's intelligence.

That’s one of the reasons why Thrivecart is such an effective resource and customer management tool.

Supports Multiple Payment Types

This is another area where this platform’s versatility truly shines. Thrivecart allows you to collect different types of payments without the need for any other software or integrations.

Aside from one-time sales, you can create:

• Free trials – Free trials allow your customers to test out your product before subscribing to it.
• Tripwires – A tripwire funnel turns cold traffic into paying customers by enticing them with a low-cost introductory offer, then later upselling them to other products.
• Split payments – Split payments let your customers create their payment plan, giving them more confidence in their ability to complete the purchase.
• Recurring sales – Recurring sales may come from products that consistently get newer versions and therefore require to be purchased all over again.
• Pay What You Want (PWYW) – Participatory co-pricing, especially if it is centered around the buyer’s valuation, can attract more sales. Buyers feel more in control when they’re allowed to choose their price.
• Discounts – Discounted prices will attract more sales, especially when you pair them with scarcity elements like countdown timers.
• Flexible subscriptions – You can get daily, weekly, monthly, or annual subscribers, and the more freedom they have to choose, the more they’ll renew their subscription.

Built-In Dunning

Chasing subscribers can be difficult if it’s manual work, but Thrivecart’s built-in Dunning feature makes it easy. It automatically notifies your customers that their payments are due. It achieves this through its automated coordination with your email autoresponders.

It also sends notifications to customers whose credit cards are about to expire and whose payments are overdue. This Dunning feature centralizes all your recurrent incomes, giving you enough insight to know when to increase or reduce your rates.

It generates very detailed recurring revenue reports that you can study to learn about your churn rate and revenue recovery.

Thrivecart: Standard Vs. Pro

Thrivecart is currently available in two flavors: Thrivecart Standard and Thrivecart Pro.  You can purchase a lifetime license for either version, only that you’ll need to shell out $195 more for the Pro version.

They share many features, but as expected, Thrivecart Pro offers some advanced features that are exclusive to the plan.

Here is how Thrivecart Standard and Pro compare to each other.

Some features like sales tax calculation and automated Dunning are not available in the Standard version. You also don’t have access to affiliate tracking and custom domains for checkout pages.

The Pro version also offers advanced user management, where you can delegate administrative access to your team members. Alternatively, you can give user rights to non-members of your company, for instance, if you’re working with a digital marketing agency.

The platform also allows you to have JV contracts, whereby the revenue is split equally between two or more business partners. The Standard version comes with nearly all the features that Thrivecart has to offer. But for an extra $195, which is still a one-time fee, you can upgrade to the Pro version for features like sales tax calculation and JV contracts.

Overall, both Thrivecart Standard and Thrivecart Pro offer excellent value for money. This is an investment that gradually pays for itself many times over.