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ThriveCart Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons, Lifetime Price Offer
On the surfacte, ThriveCart is a shopping cart platform. But as I’ll explain in my Thrivecart review below, the platform has a whole lot more to offer, including an online course builder, membership management, funnels, affiliate campaigns, and more.
With so many capabilities, there’s a lot of hype on the internet about ThriveCart among digital entrepreneurs. And there’s another good reason: ThriveCart is offering a one-off lifetime deal, where for just one payment of $495, people can access all of its features without ever having to pay any additional fees.
This is a pretty sweet deal, but is this ecommerce software worth the money you’ll pay for it? Or are you better off using another shopping cart software?
Before I answer that question, read my full 2024 ThriveCart review first. I just updated this review, so the information contained here is current. And, as I only ever review products that I have personally experienced, this review is also thorough, analytical and honest.
Table of Contents
What Will I Cover In This ThriveCart Review?
In this review, I will walk you through the following:
- What is ThriveCart? Is it for you?
- ThriveCart’s features: Templates, payment processors, sales support features, integrations, customer support,
- User experience. Is it easy to use?
- Pros and cons of ThriveCart
What Is ThriveCart?
On the surface, ThriveCart is a shopping cart platform, but to call it that is really selling it short. It’s a powerhouse tool designed to revolutionize the way online entrepreneurs, course creators, and digital marketers manage their sales processes.
At its core, ThriveCart is designed to ensure smooth handling of transactions, but it goes way beyond that by offering a suite of features aimed at maximizing conversions and enhancing the customer experience.
From detailed analytics that help you understand your audience better to high-converting checkout pages, upsells, funnels, and affiliate management systems, Thrivecart is built to boost your bottom line.
It even has a built-in online course platform, Thrivecart Learn, where creators can build and sell online courses.
ThriveCart is the kind of tool that not only simplifies the buying process for your customers but also turns every sale into an opportunity to further grow your business.
ThriveCart is usually viewed as a competitor to ecommerce platforms such as SamCart and Shopify.
Pros And Cons Of ThriveCart
Pros
- Easy to use platform that requires no coding or technical knowhow
- Supports integrations with major payment processors. These include PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, GooglePay and Apple Pay
- Integrates with multiple software through Zapier
- Supports multiple payment models. E.g., subscription
- Has detailed reports and analytics dashboard
- Has a built in affiliate marketing program, complete with a user section, affiliate section and performance analytics
- Offers 24/7 customer service with quick issue resolution
- Supports offer bumps, product upsells and down sells. This increases customer lifetime value
- Offers lifetime licensing for a one-time fee
- Automatically calculates sales tax, saving you time and money you’d have spent on other software
- Built-in dunning increases recurring revenue by automatically reminding customers of due payments
Cons
- While it does a lot, it’s not a complete all-in-one platform
- No free trial
- Not a ton of native integrations
Key Features (What Does It Do)
Payment Options Available
ThriveCart offers four different payment options for selling your products to customers: one-time fee, subscription, split-pay, and pay your own price. This means that for any product, you can decide to have customers pay using one or more of these payment types.
If you decide on multiple payment types, your product set up page will reflect the different prices that you have set up. Note the image below for instance.
You don’t need to create different checkout templates for every pricing option; Simply load them on the same template and customers can select their preferred payment option.
In addition, you can:
- Set quantities under each option
- Customize coupons for each pricing
- Tailor affiliate commissions to adjust with each pricing option
- Create behavior rules and tags and send automatic emails depending on the pricing option a customer purchases with
- Access analytics for every pricing option
Having a variety of payment options improves customer experience and results in higher conversions, and, potentially, increases the likelihood of customer referrals. It also reduces the likelihood of buyer remorse.
Payment Processor Functionality
ThriveCart can process payments through PayPal. It also supports Stripe (and ApplePay and GooglePay by association since you need Stripe to use digital wallets).
If you want your customers to pay you through credit cards or debit cards, you can also integrate Authorize.net to ThriveCart. Note that Stripe also supports credit card and debit card payment.
Integrating with several payment processors has its advantages. For instance, you can offer your downsells and upsells from within PayPal to customers who pay with PayPal. You may not be able to do this without PayPal.
Other functions you get from integrating different payment processors include:
- Tracking successful and failed subscriptions
- Processing refunds
- Tracking affiliate activity
The great thing about ThriveCart is that since payment is handled between the payment processor and you and not from ThriveCart, you have full control over payment transactions.
This means that all that transaction data remains within your business whether or not you still use ThriveCart.
Downsells, Upsells, Bump Offers
You can increase revenue in your business by upselling, down selling or offering bump offers in ThriveCart.
Bump offers differ from upsells or downsells because you offer them before a purchase happens. In fact, the setup tab for bumps is located in the product set up area.
On the other hand, for upsells and downsells occur after a transaction is made. So, if you linked a product to a specific downsell or upsell funnel, it will automatically trigger after the transaction.
Creating upsells and downsells is a two-step process that involves:
First creating your sales upgrade in the products page. Choose “upsell” or “downsell” depending on the sales upgrade what you want to create.
Then, creating a sales funnel for that upsell. Click “create funnel” on the specific upsell that you want to offer.
The whole process of creating an upsell or downsell should feel familiar because you will have access to the same page settings, page editor elements, and simple work flow as when you were creating your main product.
As well, just as with your main product, you can set multiple pricing options and define behavior rules to trigger upsells when customers take specific actions.
Since upsells, downsells and bump offers are created on a funnel by funnel basis, this allows you to use them across multiple products.
It also makes it possible to initiate and launch campaigns in a few clicks without having to do a full campaign build every time because you always have your offers ready-made and waiting.
Shopping Cart Templates and Editor
ThriveCart allows you to build product pages using its legacy templates as well as its new updated template frameworks that include:
- This is a checkout that you can embed inside the content of your website.
- This type of checkout loads in the popups on your website.
- This framework splits your checkout page into a content section and a sidebar, with a checkout area at the bottom.
- Sales page. This is a one-page checkout template with content at the top and checkout area at the bottom. These are designed to be high converting checkout pages.
These multiple checkout frameworks ensure you have what you need to build a checkout type that suits your brand. You can further customize your templates to your liking by choosing to make them single or multi step.
After you choose one of these frameworks, you can proceed to the page editor to create a checkout template.
The page editor has a sleek, drag and drop design with editing elements available in one page.
Dragging and dropping any of the editing elements into the page area launches more options to the right of the page that allow you to further customize the appearance of your checkout page.
The page editor also has a SEO settings area where you can optimize your page to make it easier to find on search engines.
Integration with Other Tools
ThriveCart supports integration with email, CRM, social media, payment gateways, fulfilment services, membership platforms, Zapier and other services.
ThriveCart’s Zapier app allows users to create zaps for their products, or choose from a list of inbuilt zaps that trigger when specific actions are taken by customers. Zaps are behavior rules created within Zapier.
ThriveCart’s Zapier app also supports integrations with more services beyond those offered natively within ThriveCart.
Having said that, I do wish the platform had more native integrations with other tools.
Affiliate Program
ThriveCart has separate logins for the vendor (you), and affiliates, (the people who will be promoting your product for a commission). You and your affiliates can access affiliate details on your respective dashboards, assuming you have already set up an affiliate program. This increases accountability and transparency between you and your affiliates.
You can set up an affiliate program for your product under the affiliates section in the products area.
ThriveCart also offers the JV contracts program, which allows vendors to partner with one or more people to sell a product. What’s great about this program is the ease with which you can manage details such as:
- Setting start and end dates for different contracts
- Define partnership percentages for individual pricing options
- Set rules to trigger automatically
Ease of Use
The thing that really stands out to me about ThriveCart is just how easy it is to use. You don’t really have the learning curve here that’s so common with other tools. In some ways, I’d call it dummy proof because it’s almost impossible to mess things up.
There are several things you can do within ThriveCart. They include:
- Creating a product. This includes creating upsells, downsells and product bumps
- Creating high converting cart pages.
- Setting up payment processors
- Integrating with other software
Although it can take a few steps to accomplish each of these tasks, the steps involved flow quite easily from one to the next.
Look at the products tab below for instance. You first create your product, you define pricing parameters for it, you create a bump offer (or not), and then you set up an Thrivecart affiliate program. Clicking next or back takes you one step forward or back respectively, and this makes your workflow very smooth, in addition to ensuring you don’t miss any steps along the way.
Although things get a bit detailed when you go into the interior tabs, the steps are also quite easy to follow. For example, this is what the bump tab looks like to begin with.
If you opt to set a bump offer, the options increase as follows:
Here, although you have more areas to fill in, it’s all really easy to do and the page also maintains the same back and next buttons that make everything quite navigable.
That said, product creation on ThriveCart becomes a lot easier and faster when you set up all your integrations before you start creating your products.
For instance, if you want PayPal to be one of your payment options, you should integrate it with ThriveCart beforehand as not doing so will mean that you have to do the integration during the product creation process. This will prolong the product creation process unnecessarily, and potentially complicate it.
Customer Support
ThriveCart has a helpdesk that contains articles and videos to help you right from when you first log in, to:
- Creating your products
- Setting up highly converting funnels
- Billing for your products
- Managing customers
- Managing integrations
- Creating and managing affiliate programs
- Working with custom scripts
And so much more!
There are also two tabs dedicated to FAQs: one for general FAQs and the other for pre-sales FAQs. Clicking on these two FAQ tabs will take you deeper where you’ll find help resources grouped under relevant categories.
As ThriveCart doesn’t offer chat or phone support, this detailed helpdesk is ThriveCart’s way of providing immediate answers to customers.
In case you don’t find what you are looking for in the helpdesk, you always have the option of contacting ThriveCart’s customer support through a ticketing form or via direct email.
Although chat support would be a great option to have, these three support options that ThriveCart offers suffice in most cases.
Not to mention, the team is quite helpful and proactive when it comes to fast issue resolution.
ThriveCart Special Pricing
Multiple cart options, one click-upsells, bump offers, multiple payment integrations, Zapier, affiliate programs, dunning, these are some of the features that come with ThriveCart’s shopping cart solutions.
But what does all this cost you?
As you would expect, getting access to such features costs a pretty penny – $95 per month, or approximately $1950 annually to be exact.
While this might not sound like a lot to a high-turnover business, it could be quite a significant cost if you are just starting off.
The good news is that you don’t ever have to pay that price. This is because ThriveCart pricing is currently set at a one-time price of only $495.
If you take advantage of this offer, you can access ThriveCart’s standard package for life, without ever needing to pay subscriptions again. What’s more, if you need to upgrade to the pro package for life, you only need to pay a one-off fee of $690.
Yes, you’ll be paying more up front, but when you compare it to the monthly subscriptions other competitors offer, this pricing will start saving you money very quickly.
This offer is for a limited time only, so if ThriveCart seems like the best shopping cart for your business, taking advantage of this offer may save you quite a bit in subscription fees.
Is ThriveCart Worth It?
So, is all the hype around ThriveCart really worth it?
ThriveCart is an all-in-one solution for online business transactions. It’s more than just a shopping cart platform. It is an e-commerce platform that allows you to: process payments for customer sales, build out complete sales funnels, run affiliate programs, and offer your services and products on a subscription basis.
If you want to do all of these things, and if you also intend to sell volumes, ThriveCart is a great choice for you.
Alternatives to ThriveCart
One of Thrivecart’s key competitors is Samcart who rival the on many features. I did a comparison of the two shopping cart platforms in our Thrivecart vs Samcart piece.
Thrivecart’s rivalry with Shopify is dissected in our Thrivecart vs Shopify comparison also.
The similarities with the WordPress software, Woocommerce can also be reviewed in the Thrivecart vs Woocommerce article produced here at Today Testing.
Lastly, our Thrivecart vs Clickfunnels review separates the two platforms’ strengths as checkout and lead generation software.
Have any questions about my ThriveCart review? Let me know by leaving a comment below.