It’s the single most important web page for any online business: The checkout page.

As such, it’s important to have a solid shopping cart software. Payment processors handle credit card information securely so we don’t have to worry about it, and high-converting checkout pages are a great way to add more revenue and profit to your overall sales funnel.

ThriveCart is one of the best shopping cart solutions on the market. In addition to dedicated checkout links and multiple payment options, the ThriveCart pricing is tough to beat: A one-time payment gives you full software access for life.

Special Offer: One Payment, Lifetime Access

Use our preferred partner link to purchase ThriveCart and secure lifetime access with one investment -- at no additional cost to you. Easy checkout, sales page templates, terrific integration potential, and more.

Learn More

Let’s do a rundown of ThriveCart’s features and benefits, along with why a quality shopping cart software should be one of your first investments as an online professional.

Why Is a Checkout Page Important?

In conversion marketing, we focus on three primary metrics: traffic, leads, and conversions.

• Traffic refers to users seeing or checking out our work. This is usually measured in terms of page views or video views.
• A lead is a user who has indicated interest in learning more. I define a lead as a new email subscriber, but for you it might be a form submission, or a webinar registrant.
• A conversion is a meaningful user event. A sale is a conversion, but you could define it other ways, too. In paid ads, for example, conversion might refer to acquisition, or how much you spent to acquire a new lead or customer.

You can grow your business by attracting more traffic into your funnel. But growing traffic is tough. If your sales funnel is leaky, you can pour in all the traffic you want; most of it will simply drip right back out.

Related: What Is Content Marketing, and Why Should I Care?

Another way to grow your business would be to maintain the same amount of traffic, but improve your conversion rate instead. If you double your conversion, you’ve doubled your revenue. One way to do this is to use high-converting checkout pages.

Checkout pages are less distracting than other types of web pages. They are technically a landing page in that there is only one action to take on the page. Whether you’re selling digital products, physical products, or 1-on-1 services, a good checkout page software can help online businesses bring in more revenue and resources.

What Is ThriveCart?

Released in 2016, ThriveCart is a checkout page software. In recent years, the platform has released other tools and acquired related companies like ConvertBox, but their most prominent product continues to be their checkout page builder.

ThriveCart lets you accept payments securely, and the ThriveCart lifetime deal of a one-time fee is rare in today’s subscription software culture.

Here are the most important features to know about.

Special Offer: One Payment, Lifetime Access

Use our preferred partner link to purchase ThriveCart and secure lifetime access with one investment -- at no additional cost to you. Easy checkout, sales page templates, terrific integration potential, and more.

Learn More

ThriveCart Shopping Cart Features

Flexible Checkout Experiences

ThriveCart offers checkout pages in a number of different formats. You can create a standard checkout page, a sales cart for a funnel, an embeddable checkout widget, or a pop-up.

Checkout pages on ThriveCart are drag-and-drop, and you won’t need to know any code to get your shopping cart pages up and running. You could also use a ThriveCart page as your entire sales page and attach a custom domain if you want to.

• You can offer multiple pricing options for a particular product, such as single payment, recurring payment, payment plan, or “pay what you want.”
• You can create custom coupon codes, and have these coupon codes expire after a certain date or number of uses.
• You can offer free trials on products by delaying the start date of a customer’s first payment.
• Thrivecart also allows for sales tax calculation if you sell physical products and need state-specific tax information to ensure the correct sales tax is being applied.

Bump Offers

In sales funnel culture, a bump refers to a small add-on offer that users can add to their cart with just one click.

You’ve encountered bump offers many times in your life. When you go to the grocery store, and are in the checkout line, there are magazines, candy, and gum displayed right before you reach the cash register. These are bump offers; they’re low in price and an easy way to add to your cart.

Bump offers work because your customer already has momentum. They’re planning to check out anyway, so the pain of adding something to their shopping cart is mostly gone at this point.

ThriveCart offers the option to add a bump to your checkout page in an effort to increase revenue.

Brainstorm potential bump offers you could add to your checkout cart. Examples might be templates, a related product, a workshop replay, or a physical gift.

Upsell and Downsell Pages.

ThriveCart offers a funnel builder that lets you create your own custom upsell pages. In sales funnels, an upsell is an additional page the user is taken to before their transaction is complete. Since your customer has already entered their payment information, they can choose to add this item to their purchase with just one click.

Upsells can dramatically increase your average order value (AOV), and you can offer more than one upsell in a checkout experience. You can also offer a downsell after an upsell; if the customer declines the upsell, they are offered a downsell before being taken to the next upsell.

How much can an upsell make? In a previous iteration of my sales funnel, I offered a $57 product with a $197.50 upsell. The upsell converted 25% of customers, for an average AOV of $106.38. By offering an upsell, I nearly doubled my revenue from the same number of customers.

Upsells are powerful, but the upsell offer must be quality and relevant for them to work.

Integration with Email Marketing Providers

ThriveCart’s checkout pages easily connect with most email service providers. This means you can add a customer to a tag or a list as soon as their purchase goes through. You can set these integrations up directly in ThriveCart. ThriveCart integrates natively with ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and many other ESPs.

This kind of advanced user management can feel tasky at first, but once your automations are all running smoothly, you’ll be glad you did it.

Special Offer: One Payment, Lifetime Access

Use our preferred partner link to purchase ThriveCart and secure lifetime access with one investment -- at no additional cost to you. Easy checkout, sales page templates, terrific integration potential, and more.

Learn More

An Online Course Platform

One of the biggest ThriveCart features released in recent years is ThriveCart Learn, which lets you sell digital products and host them in a membership site built directly into ThriveCart.

Membership platforms often come with a separate recurring monthly charge, so this update is welcome for existing users and further justifies ThriveCart pricing.

Easy-Peasy Tax Compliance

If you're selling to users in different countries, and need to apply tax, it can be a huge pain to set these conditions manually.

ThriveCart automatically applies the correct tax to customers based on their location and shipping address.

Solutions for Physical Products

ThriveCart offers fulfillment services through its integration flexibility, and also has a built-in integration with Kunaki, which sends users CDs and DVDs. Laugh all you want, but some users still purchase DVDs—you’d be surprised!

ThriveCart customers can see their customer data and change their card on file with just a few clicks.

User Self-Service for Your Membership Site

Some shopping cart platforms are great as payment gateways, but don’t have a customer log-in option. This means that if your customer wants to change their email address or card on file, they have to contact you, which can result in more support tickets and administrative work.

ThriveCart has a user-facing checkout page that you can control. Users can log in and manage their membership and customer information on their end.

A Healthy Affiliate Program

ThriveCart has a strong built-in affiliate program that quickly offsets the cost. The affiliate commission is a whopping 50%, meaning that you only need two customers to purchase ThriveCart on your affiliate link to recoup your investment.

The ThriveCart affiliate interface isn’t the most beautifully designed, but it gets the job done. Your affiliates can create their own links and see their performance, and you can also enable affiliates having their own affiliates if you want.

Integration and Embedding Into Sales Pages

If you have a Wordpress website or other standalone website, know that ThriveCart shopping carts can be exported as embed code, letting you place them on any web page you want. This can be handy if you already have a sales page you like, or if you want to add certain payment options to your sales page, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Did I Mention It’s a One-Time Fee?

We’ve talked about a bunch of features, but in conversation, one detail about ThriveCart comes up again and again: Lifetime access for a one-time fee.

This is rare for a shopping cart software, and ThriveCart’s cost is one of the few expenses that users tend to make back quickly.

ThriveCart Pricing

ThriveCart standard is a one-time fee of $495 for a lifetime account. ThriveCart pro is $695 for a lifetime account. The difference between standard and pro is that pro lets you have affiliates within your account.

Let’s look at how ThriveCart compares to other shopping cart services.

ThriveCart Compared to Other Shopping Cart Platforms

ThriveCart vs. SamCart

Real talk: I am someone who used ThriveCart, then moved over to SamCart for two years (and was featured by them as a case study), and then moved BACK to ThriveCart in 2022.

I originally moved to SamCart for one reason: The tool lets you offer more than one bump on a checkout page. Since I had several smaller courses, I wanted to offer more bumps in an effort to increase my revenue per transaction.

SamCart is a fantastic tool, but is also an investment. Expect to need the $99/month or $199/month tier in order to get the features you need. If having extra bumps increases your revenue enough to offset the cost, go for it.

ThriveCart vs. Kajabi

Kajabi is an all-in-one software tool that lets you host courses, send emails, create sales pages, and receive payments.

Here’s my thing: While it can be tempting to go with one tool that does everything, the tendency is none of these tools’ features are actually that good. Moreover, if something happens regarding a certain company’s political position or values, you may no longer feel aligned with giving that company money.

It’s good to diversify your software stack, and ThriveCart has the stronger features set of the two.

ThriveCart vs. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email service provider. The company appeals more to creators than enterprises, and has a built-in checkout page feature that lets individuals and freelancers receive payments quickly and securely.

ConvertKit’s checkout tool is fine, but you won’t be able to customize much in comparison to ThriveCart. Also, remember that ThriveCart pricing is for lifetime access; with ConvertKit and many other software tools, you’ll need to keep paying monthly or annually for the resources.

ThriveCart vs. LeadPages

Leadpages is a landing page software that is great for opt-in pages and sales pages. It has a checkout widget that integrates with Stripe, but you cannot add bump offers to this checkout widget, and you don’t have as many payment method options.

If you need features like an affiliate program, sales tax calculation, an online course platform, or membership sites, ThriveCart has these features and will also help you make more sales.

Where to Get Quality ThriveCart Checkout Templates

ThriveCart has a community where users have uploaded some of their own templates. You can also share a checkout page template with anyone, so there’s a big market for templates that can be plugged directly into the app and used as high-converting cart pages.

Look around for low-cost checkout templates that you can purchase to make your setup process easier.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is ThriveCart Used For?

ThriveCart is a shopping cart software that lets you build checkout pages. You can assign multiple payment processor options, and ThriveCart integrates well with Zapier, a marketing automation tool.

How Much Does ThriveCart Cost?

ThriveCart Standard is $495 for lifetime access. ThriveCart Pro is $695 for lifetime access, and includes a built-in affiliate program.

Does ThriveCart Have a Money-Back Guarantee?

ThriveCart does have a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re on the fence, give it a try. Look at the terms and conditions closely to assure you’re eligible for a refund if you decide it’s not for you.

Can You Create a Sales Page in ThriveCart?

In addition to checkout pages, you can create a sales page in ThriveCart as well. Since the builder is drag-and-drop, you can add as many elements as you want to a page, including headlines, imagery, videos, testimonials, and more.

Can You Host a Course on ThriveCart?

You can host online courses or other digital products in ThriveCart using the ThriveCart Learn platform. This tool makes the ThriveCart cost that much more compelling.

Should You Get ThriveCart?

Other shopping cart solutions come and go, but once you incorporate ThriveCart into your online business, you won’t need to care about the competition anymore.

Consider investing in ThriveCart today to incorporate high-converting checkout pages into your business, resulting in more revenue with less effort. ◆

Special Offer: One Payment, Lifetime Access

Use our preferred partner link to purchase ThriveCart and secure lifetime access with one investment -- at no additional cost to you. Easy checkout, sales page templates, terrific integration potential, and more.

Learn More

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