Thrivecart Review 2021: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

in this video i want to give you a complete review of thrivecart a hosted shopping cart platform solution to help you sell more money more easily on your website okay let's go and dive into the review hey guys john whitford here i do tech tutorials like this and reviews to make sure you find the perfect tools for your next project so if you haven't done so already be sure to hit the subscribe button on this video to catch more videos just like this alright so let's first go ahead and dive into my screen here and let's talk about the good the bad and the ugly of thrive cart here in 2021 when i'm recording this video all right so first let's what we're going to cover like the basis there's going to be time stamps down below to everything we talk about here today but we're going to talk about what is thrivecart like how does the whole system work we'll talk about the features in division i'll show you my account we'll talk about the pros and cons even mention some of the competitors so you have a full well-rounded view of the entire software and i'll give you a few recommendations towards the end of this video if it's right for you all right but before we dive into it i don't want you to think that i'm some affiliate marketer that just signs up for a program and starts spamming it okay so i'm actually gonna dive i don't do this very often i'm gonna dive into one of our accounts we do have multiple accounts in thrive cart uh this is our primary and this actually shows our real time this is not a screenshot you can see i'm changing the filters here and everything still works this is actually our revenue over the last few months so this is from we started switching over to this account in february of last year so this is about 12 months worth of data and i could probably even switch over to the last 12 months but you get the idea oopsies so at this point we've done 384 thousand dollars of revenue on this one account and we also have sales through other platforms as well as we're testing all these software's out okay so this is real account real money this is my real recommendation i'll we'll go through all of this here in this video okay all right so with that out of the way let's go ahead and dive into what is thrivecart like how does this all work together and i figured the best way when i teach this to new people they're like i don't see how all these pieces work together so i just want to give you a quick diagram of how a shopping cart platform fits into your website how does it work with all these other tools that you're learning if you're just starting with your online business this high level overview i think is extremely helpful okay so when you're starting out your online business there's a lot of different things you could do but likely you're going to have a smattering of this you're going to have a blog maybe it's on wordpress or medium or something like that this is the way you're generating traffic or if you're like me and you like to be on video youtube is an easy way to get some not easy but it's a way to get traffic as well right and then at some point you're going to want to have something to sell right maybe an ebook maybe a course maybe a service like a coaching or consulting something like that that's really where thrive cart starts to come in and handles that transaction handles some automations and all that other stuff okay but we'll have some arrows pointed through this so it all makes sense for you i promise and then once they buy what do you want to actually have happen like just giving you money doesn't like make it all work right like what is it so you might have an online course where you'd have a learning management system like a teachable or a thrive apprentice or what all these different tools right or maybe a membership site where they can come and work with you and talk to you and get coaching from you so you'd have something over here which we like to call a fulfillment method like how are you actually fulfilling on the thing they're buying that's what goes down here and then also because you're a smart savvy marketer you want to be doing some sort of email marketing you want to track and trend and segment and understand who's bought what when did they buy it how much had they spent with me all these other things and you tend to keep track of all that inside your email marketing system okay so these are kind of like the five or so big pillars that are in this whole online business thing now here's how they kind of flow together so in the beginning you're having your traffic is coming from your blog and your youtube channel and you're going to direct them over to a sales page when it's time for them to convert from a visitor into a customer you'll want to send them into some sort of a sales process now thrive cart as i'll show you in this video has the ability for you to create an entire sales page directly in the platform so you don't need to spend 300 bucks a month on click funnels you don't need to spend every month on leadpages um the lifetime deal with thrivecart will give you everything you really need if you want to keep things simple okay so once they buy what happens next so thrive cart connects with all these different email marketing systems connects with all these different membership platforms where when they buy it's going to send a signal out to those platforms it's going to tell your membership site hey joe schmoe just bought your coaching package so unlock that portion of your membership area and send them their credentials so they can log in and get rocking and rolling okay so it does that on the membership site and then also on the email marketing system it's going to tell convertkit or activecampaign whichever one you're using hey this person just bought this so update their records so that now we can track and trend that they've done this and you can send them specific messages uh that are relevant to them now where they're at in their customer journey so maybe they were getting a sales cycle you were sending them some sales emails for a little while and maybe after the second email they buy you don't want to keep sending them sales messages right because that's kind of weird so that's why all the integration works okay so that's on like the forward end you know like a video game you're always moving from left to right but what happens if somebody refunds or they cancel their payment or something like that well what's nice about thrive card is because they have deep integrations with all these different tools if they happen to cancel a refund or something like that your email marketing system and your membership site can send those signals right on back into thrive cart and there's no code required by the way i know this sounds like intense but i like to do things in blocks so it can send those signals back to thrive cart and say hey revoke access to this membership site or revoke access to this email sequence whatever it is they bought access to it can kind of control all that in this nice closed connected little system all right so that's a high level of how it works so some of the features of thrivecart i'll go ahead and pop into the thrive cart's website right now so you can get an idea of it but we're going to cover the funnels of it we're going to cover the analytics and a b testing like some of the ways you can improve your conversions and make more money without getting more traffic their affiliate program where you can launch and create your own affiliate program or if you don't have a lot of traffic you can find a few big influencers make deals with them make them affiliates and they can sell for you it's a beautiful thing and also how the integrations all work okay but before we dive actually into the website i want to make you aware there are some special bonuses that i'm offering to people if they sign up using this link here okay so if you go to thrive incomes.com bonus there's also a link down below you can see all the kind of fun bonuses i put together for you as well as kind of the story of why i do give this platform my recommendation it includes done-for-you funnels and trainings to see how to go from being a simple little diagram like that into actually a functional working system i show you how to do all that inside the bonus how to create products if you've never had a product before and how to do it without having to spend months in a lab creating something how to actually optimize your sales process so how to do funnel analysis and improve conversions also show you a super simple way of doing email marketing that doesn't require you to be a good copywriter and how to make your offers convert better and a few other things so there's a ton in here as well as some support from me if you're interested in all of that go ahead and check out the link down below to see more of those offers okay so enough with that enough self promotion there that's enough we're gonna dive into the platform now all right so here we are on my special referral page it shows you this thrive cart is the number one cart software that grows your income from existing traffic and what they mean by that is because thrivecar focuses more on being able to take one customer from buying one product and moves them into a customer that buys three four five products through the sales funnel process it can really actually in our business is more than doubled our revenue per customer and which has been absolutely phenomenal and relatively life-changing uh for for my my wife and i so we can scroll down here you can see what goes on you can see those analytics are super cool let me go and bounce into our actual analytics platform so here on the analytics itself again i'm not just going to read a sales page too i'll just show you inside of my own dashboard you can see how many times somebody's viewed your checkout page or if you set up your sales page with this you can also see that product by product how many orders have come through what your conversion rate is how many people go from your checkout page to make it to actually making a purchase how much revenue you've made how many refunds you've made all the refunds are handled directly in the platform it's a click a button if you need to do one but you know you can see here one percent refund rate um this product works and people tend to be happy if you provide a good service how many uh dollars per person we tend to get so even though most of our products this is like a really important point most of our products are like 50 bucks or less that we sell oftentimes they're like in the 7 to 20 range and yet if we look here on our platform we're making about 70 per order so that is really the power of having a sales funnel platform because after offering special bonuses people see the value and they want to increase their order value and they do that through thrivecart all right so that's kind of how it works you also drill into each individual product but we'll kind of you know stop doing that now because this is actually our business account i'm not going to mess around with this anymore like that we'll also cover how the bump offers work to allow your customers to add more products into their cart on the checkout page with a simple click of a checkbox it's wonderful they can convert like 30 40 which is a beautiful thing and all kinds of good stuff a couple of the features i want to make sure i touch on though are both the analytics as well as their affiliate program so let's talk about their analytics program first so with thrivecart you can make your shopping cart you can have your upsells and your downloads you can link all these together where they convert nicely but what's better than converting nicely is to convert greatly and what thrive allows you to do is test different things so maybe you want to try reducing the price of your main product and increasing the price of your upsell or to change the headline or add some bonuses do some different little magician stuff like run some experiments and try to honestly delight your customers more and make more money as a result and with thrivecart you're able to do that very very easily i'll go ahead and log into my test account here and i'll show you how all that works all right so here i am logged into a test account and to simply create a product i guess we should do that first right we can come here to simply create products and if you're launching a digital product or a physical product you can select this this is really important to note you can actually sell physical products like t-shirts or print on demand things all that works i tend to do more the digital product side but you can do what's right for you so i'll make a product you can give it a name do all this fun stuff so let's go ahead and give this a quick name alright we'll call it a sweet online course and i'll make myself the owner give it some pricings a cool feature about thrive cart is that you're not locked into simply selling something for one price so what you see a lot nowadays is people will give you the like buy all-in-one and save or maybe make two or three payments of 100 bucks to um you know make sure everybody can afford it with wherever they're at in their day so we're going to give this a couple options we're going to first give it maybe a 497 dollar one-time price point add that in and call that one-time payment we'll also add a pricing option for maybe a split pay so we'll say we're going to make three payments of 197 which will give us a bit more money if they pay all their their installments and allows them to get in now which is great all right we'll also send them an invoice it sends all your invoices automatically they're very nice and clear all right so we've got some pricing options here now let's come back through it handles sales tax so if you're uh doing business with a european union all these crazy vat rules all this stuff that's why you want to have a tool like thrivecart it allows you to track all the data you need and give a nice little report to send to your account at the end of the month it's a beautiful thing and i'll hit next now a bump offer we're actually going to offer a bump offer here and i will call this a special add-on so while we're creating a product for 500 we might want to also offer a simple bump offer for another 100 so if they click this little check box their 500 order becomes a 600 order and you can describe what they're getting right there in a little box as you're going through the checkout process all right we'll hit next payment processors this integrates with stripe authorize.net paypal and through their stripe integrations you can also do apple pay and google pay so we'll go and set these up with apple pay and google pay and paypal and what's cool about this you can notice there's actually a drop down so if you have multiple different accounts so if you have maybe a few different brands few different businesses you don't necessarily need three different thrive cart accounts to make all that work you can simply select which payment method goes for each product individually which is a lot of like granularity but it's helpful if you need it and then affiliate program i'm not going to set this up in this video but the affiliate program is really great you can customize what percentage of commission well let's go ahead and do it why not i'll select this here and you can set up your commission percentages so you might say that your affiliates can get half of all the sales that they refer to you um or if it's like a physical product maybe it's only 10 you get the idea you either do a percentage or a fixed fee so like a finders fee you get you know 20 bucks for everybody you send over and you can even customize it on every part of the funnel what i mean by that is in this product we set up a little bump which has a little ability for them to increase their order value with a check you can maybe say i don't want to give them any commissions on the bump offers but 40 commissions on the main product or i don't want to give them bonuses on the upsells because maybe you're selling your time you don't want to reward your affiliates with that you get the idea you can make whatever sales process whatever structure you want that's going to help you convert all right so we set all that up we're just going to walk through and notice here up at the top you've got these tabs product fulfillment checkout and behavior this makes it super simple for you to make sure you're not missing any steps it's a fast interface it works really really well and you're never feeling lost as you're going through the process just walk from left to right before you can sell something you have to be able to support it so we're going to put in a little email address for if they have any problems on their invoice is going to link them directly to contact you so it's very there's never any confusion about the product itself and now as far as um integrations like what happens after they buy remember that chart we talked about earlier they need to do something once you sell them your thing right so if you're selling like an ebook you can send them to a url to a specific page maybe it has the ebook and they can access that for uh maybe a week or so before it expires to make sure they don't just start spamming your link everywhere or probably what's most common if you're getting into selling online courses is integrating this in with a few different um with membership platforms so we'll bounce over to their membership platform so you can see what they do we can come here to the settings and integrations and you can see here they connect with tons of payment processors which are these here with autoresponders or email marketing platforms plenty there membership platforms this is kind of going to be your fulfillment so you can see i've used most of these the ones i really recommend their teachable integration is what we do for most of our sales so they buy with thrive cart and it unlocks some courses inside of teachable works really really smoothly also if you're big into wordpress wishlist member is a very solid integration as well and if you need anything else you've got zapier on your side as always so once you follow the integrations you'll simply be able to select when they buy this product give them access to this content maybe it's a course maybe it's a membership level really depends on how you set your thing up um or you can simply send them to a url like uh they can go to my website when they buy and because on this product we're also doing a bump offer we'll set something up for the bump as well for the same website for now all right now for designing out your cart itself this is where it's really really fun if you want to use your own sales page builder like um you know click funnels or leadpages or anything like that you can totally do that and in which case you're just going to send them to a checkout page at the end of the process which you can use like their standard checkout format but what i think is really more exciting especially if you want to keep things simple is you can use their new sales cart feature and this new functionality and build out your entire sales page right here let me show you how that works i'm going to come in and launch the editor well i'll go ahead and start out with a little starter kit so you get the idea so i have the ultimate funnel tool kit was a product i sell right now and i'll copy this design i think i know the design we're going to get here and you'll get an idea what you can create using this software so it's very simple very clean you can do your lists you can do your text you can do your headers you can do images anything you really need to create a nice clean sales page you can build all this very very drag and drop so this sales page converts extremely well and i can also test the process like how every process is working how the conversions are going you can even add in video testimonials which i have here on this page as well as the buy buttons wherever they click that button it takes them directly down to the sales process so here you can see i've got my pricing options that we set up i can collect information if you need to collect more like if i want to collect their business name which i would not recommend unless you need it or if you need to collect a phone number you can ask for that if you need to collect their address you can collect that as well and it all just kind of works for you it's a beautiful thing now here you can see i've got my bump offer down here so if i wanted to i probably should change this around because the bump offers only 97 which we set up here i can add a different image and drag some images in so maybe this image here you can just type directly on the page get this thing now to be more awesome tomorrow all right and that's pretty much how it works you can see we've got tons of different things we can use here videos images text sub headers product information bullet points countdown timers so countdown timers are always effective kind of annoying but effective i can drag those in and customize them i can even put a countdown timer down here at the bottom of this page boom and you can put in actual evergreen or fixed dates so if you actually have like a launch happening and something's going to end afterwards you can set that up right here where i can see choose the date it should end i'm going to say this is going from february 11th to february 27th and it's going to end at midnight and when the timer ends maybe replace the cart by saying oops sorry it expired or send them to a different page which may send them to like a waitlist or something like that all right so i'll go ahead and save and exit off of this guy you can also do all the design in mobile as well to drag things around or hide things you don't need and then tracking what's beautiful about this is you don't need to be an expert with a facebook pixel or an awesome google tag manager anything advanced you simply say hey i want to track this in facebook i want to track it in google and it's going to tell you just put your pixel id here everything's taken care of all the events everything you need to be a smart marketer is all taken care of right here for you you can even add your own custom scripts here for other tools you might want to use i'll go and take these off for this demonstration and then as i mentioned earlier on that little overview chart i can add in integrations where when the product is purchased i can go to activecampaign or convertkit or even send custom html and i can update my email platform i can tell them what's going on they have everything they need to be in sync and there's tons of triggers like check this out so when the main product is purchased or refunded the cart's abandoned you can send custom email sequences if they abandon cart if payments are declined bump up like anything you would possibly need to kind of keep your stuff together this handles for you and it does it in a very simple you know step-by-step way which i really appreciate all right so i'll save it and i can even take a look at the checkout right here which will load nice and quickly and here's your brand new beautiful sales page and also if you like the idea about being able to copy a design from something else i also do give you a fully done for you kind of modeled after this style if you like that clean style of single page checkouts i have some of those in my bonus offers in the link down below of course and so if we want to purchase we can go through and just fill in our information we can do a fake purchase since we're in test mode right now and we can complete our order it'll also allow you to customize your thank you page what they see after they buy which i don't think we did here on this little setup but they're going to go right through and because i didn't set anything up i would be able to design this entire page as well and i can get straight access into the file that i just bought so i bought access to my website which is right there all right so that shows you like the overall creating a product method but i haven't shown you the funnel functionality yet which is really where things get exciting so let's go ahead and show you here when we're in our product settings we can also customize our own sales funnel and what this allows you to do is click this little box and all of a sudden like the whole world opens up it's a beautiful thing so now when they buy this product i don't have to take them just to a thank you page i can actually take them to some upsell pages or down sell pages and what all that basically means the lingo of that is simply you make them additional offers that are likely to convert meaning they're likely to buy it because it's very relevant to where they're at right now in their buying process if they just bought a product they're likely interested in buying more products so you can make them very wise offers at this time all right so we're going to add in some upsells i've got some examples here so let's say if they buy this i want to give them a specific offer and i can put in the the url which they go to if they say yes so i'll just put in the same url and i can design the entire page as well i can click over here and i can copy the design from something i've already done let's do i think this one will be a good one and so here you can see you can create your page it'll give you some buttons on what they can click and buy if they click here they're going to give you more money if they click down here they're going to say no thank you and so based on what they do i would recommend putting a little video in and then you're good to go if they say no to that you could end the process right there and just take them to the thank you page or i like to give one upsell and one down sell what a down sell is is a very related offer to what they just said no to but maybe reduce the price a little bit take a few of the nice bells and whistles out and still give them the opportunity to get the majority of the benefit of what they were trying to get in the first place so here we'll do the cell course and then i can edit that page as well and let's copy one more design and let's do here we go and here's another uh example of a down cell page here all right so now that we've done all that you can do as much of this as you want to i would highly recommend don't get too crazy and try to give them five upsells but an upsell maybe two upsells and a down sell is a great combination right there all right so i'll save the sales funnel and now it's all set up so we can do kind of wrap this review up is we can click into it we can say wow this looks awesome i love this and when they're ready to buy we can make them buy put the information down here we can even take the upsell as well so now we're giving them 594 fictitious dollars today we'll complete the order and instead of taking them directly to the thank you page since we set up the funnel now we're going to give them an additional offer right here see i've got a very simple design a progress bar a headline a little video of myself offering something to people and they can choose to take it but because i want to show you all the functionality i'll say no to this one and in again now i have the down sell opportunity so here's a downsell offer that is being made and they can click through and maybe they choose to buy this as well okay so doing this they've added a few things they've bought the main product they've bought the bump offer and they bought the downsell so if i come to my thank you page i would expect to see those three products available for them to purchase and there you go you've got your three products i can add any other videos or content there and you've got a well-oiled sales machine where anything can happen as you'd like it to do all right i know that was like drinking from a water hose let me kind of break it down for you and give you the pros and cons of what i like and don't like about this system okay so first on the pros it's super quick to create a funnel like i just put together a pretty advanced funnel right a lot of different things going on there in a few minutes while talking to you here while recording myself talking to you like so you can really work through this quite efficiently also you don't need to start from scratch every single time so share funnels or you know share designs uh you can build something you love once and then just clone it and swap it around change out the product change out the price point and launch another funnel even quicker this is also huge if you want to keep a good on point brand you can kind of have a general style where people know when they come to your sales page they know what to expect you know that it works it's a beautiful thing and it's hosted off of your website so as i'm recording this video right now there's a huge uh push for web website optimization i know a lot of people use woocommerce and these hosts like self-hosted solutions meaning they're on your website and they're great if they work for you but it also will slow your website down because it's doing way more than simply being a blog or being a traffic generation site so having a hosted solution i like a lot because it takes some stress off of me to have to make sure all my plugins and everything's working together it doesn't slow the website down the load speeds down and it just makes my it helps me sleep better at night honestly and when i do have any technical issues for example one of the reports i ran the other day didn't look quite right i emailed into their tech support they got it fixed within 24 hours and it was honestly my mistake in the first place so it's good on them and obviously it's very easy to use the platform as i showed you here now the cons is if you like building very simple sales letters like the sales page like i showed you here it's good for you but if you want to be able to do the really fancy animations and make it like a full-fledged page builder like click funnels or thrive themes or one of those types of things there's still a lot of limitations with their page building it's being developed um i would like to see a little bit better so i want you to focus that thrive cart is going to be good for the checkout process and integrating everything you need if you want the full on design suite you're probably going to want to add something else to the pie but from my testing i would challenge you to say like do i actually need the fancy design or do i just want it because what i've found a lot of times is even the most simple pages if your message is clear if you're offering value in the letter itself they're going to look past any crummy design you might have on there and they'll still buy so um i want better page functionality but maybe it's a blessing in disguise they don't have it and lastly this is a bit more of a techie problem that i have with it is if you're connecting it into a membership site you can't like mix and match so if you want to sell unteachable for your main product but then offer like an ebook as your upsell you have to kind of make them all the same membership option so they all have to be courses or they all have to be ebooks or something like that or you have to kind of mix and match them a little bit it can be a little bit frustrating but ultimately it's a small thing and i think most people they're going to sell digital products they're going to stick with the same method in general i'm just a geek and i want that awesome flexibility and that's where i only have my one little gripe there all right so competitors so there are competitors in the space obviously a woocommerce sendel sam cart influencersoft cartridge they're all great platforms i have reviews on most of them on this channel as well be sure to hit that subscribe button so you can see all those cool things but in general i find that thrivecart has a few things that really makes it stand out from the rest of the pack um the 800-pound gorilla in the room is that there's still a lifetime deal available for thrivecart right now i think for for well under 700 you can get started and even get their pro plan where you have all the tools you'll need for the foreseeable future and it'll grow with your business without the monthly fee so to me that kicks out options like the sam cart where it's like 200 bucks a month or something like that um and it does about the same thing so if you're on a budget you can get started for free with woocommerce but i would i would urge you like don't get stuck in tech heck like get out of that and move forward with your business or you can go the all-in-one route which is also decent cartridge and influencer soft but like i would say if you want the least amount of compromise if you want to have all the functionality and all the design and all that the other if you want your business to kind of be what you want it to be i think thrivecar is an awesome option because it's going to let you pick the best and breed membership site it's going to let you pick the best and breed design tools going to let you pick you get the idea right because it serves that one function really really well it's it's what you need right there okay so it makes it very simple all right so lastly is thrive cart right for you what i would say is if you're just getting started and you don't want any tech to deal with at all right you might be a good candidate for an all-in-one platform like a cartridge or a influencer soft but if you want to be able to have a lot of flexibility what you sell how you sell it how it all connects together and you want to be able to interchangeably switch out the pieces as your business grows thrivecart is my number one recommendation right now the price is right yeah you pay a little bit of a hefty price up front but in your first month of using it it's probably going to pay for itself so you've got that going for you and then also it connects with everything that's popular right now and so if you want to use it doesn't really matter what your other tools are there's a way to make it work using thrive card okay that's what i would say about it i think it's pretty awesome tool what do you think let me know down in the comments below what you think about thrive cart if you'd like me to compare it with any other tool out there let me know and be sure to subscribe to the channel and check in often i release content like this to give you honest value my true sentiment on all these tools and be sure to check out my bonus offers incomemesh.com thrive cart bonus all the links are down below and i'll see you the next video take care did you realize every time you hit like on one of my videos down below it increases your conversion rates by one percent don't ask me how it's science so make sure you hit that like button hit the subscribe button over there check out more of my videos up here and down here grab the freebie that's made just for you thanks so much i'll see you next video

Channel: Unbeatable Tech

Views: 5,821

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Id: beg4f81_PcY

Length: 30min 48sec (1848 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021