TAM 070: ThriveCart Overview

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This is the last episode in our 'payment series' and this time I am talking about ThriveCart, what it can do, why I like it and why I switched.

ThriveCart hasn't been officially released to the public yet.However, I have been using it for quite some time and I really like it.

UPDATE: ThriveCart has allowed my to share a very special once only lifetime access price for ThriveCart ahead of the public launch. Get in now and get access to the best internet marketing shopping cart system and never have to pay a monthly fee again. Pays for itself in no time. Just click the button below.

ThriveCart Special Lifetime License

I outline some of its major features and how you can get lifetime access to ThriveCart at a very special price.

We Chat About ThriveCart Features Such As:

Payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal and ApplePay
Who is ThriveCart for and who it isn't for
Why I like it
One off products vs. subscriptions vs. a hybrid
Customer management
Customer lifetime value
Integrations with membership platforms and autoresponders
Upsells and downsells
Order form bumps
Multi-currency
Affiliate sales
Dunning

If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here.

If you want to take your sales funnel and marketing automation skills to the next level, join us at The Active Marketer Academy my private mastermind and coaching community where we share all the best stuff!

Inside you will find, courses, live training calls, quick wins, shared automations and a helpful community of smart business owners and service providers just like you. Check it out here.

Links Mentioned In The Show

Other Payment Series Episodes

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Announcer: Welcome to The Active Marketer Podcast where we talk about how to design, automate, and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics, and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at TheActiveMarketer.com. Now, here's your host, Barry Moore.

Barry : Welcome to The Active Marketer Podcast sponsored by TheActiveMarketer.com. I'm your host, Barry Moore, and this is the podcast that's all about sales funnels and marketing automation. This week, we are going to do a overdo wrap up to our payment series. We're going to cover one more payment platform before we move on back to some more automation-focused topics. This week, that platform is ThriveCart.

Now, I have been holding off doing this ThriveCart podcast for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to get the founder, Josh on to talk about it, and two, it hasn't quite gone public yet. There's some special VIP access and pricing I'll talk about a bit later on, but it hasn't quite opened up to the public yet, but I want to get this information out to you guys because I think it's a great platform. It's the one I've chosen for my business, and this is probably hopefully the last one. I've been through them all if you guys have been following the series at all even though that it all spawned out the fact that I wanted a payment system that worked for me and my journey to evaluate literally dozens of different products to finally end up with using ThriveCart for my business.

Now, that doesn't mean ThriveCart is exactly right for your business so I would urge you to go back and listen to the episode on how to choose a payment platform to make sure that you're finding the payment platform that's right for your requirements. Before we jump into this week's episode, of course, it is time for the shameless social proof segment where I read out your iTunes reviews of the podcast. If you'd like me to read out your review next week, by all means, head over to iTunes and leave us a rating and review, and I will read it out on a future show. This week's review comes from Interview Valet CF in the United States. "Five stars. Fantastic actionable steps given."

He says or she says, "Huge marketing insights come from listening to this podcast. My notepad was full after listening to the much needed episode about 'How To Use Scarcity Without Being A Douchebag', one of my favourite titles. Thanks for keeping it so simple and so doable takeaways, use price increases, limited availability, limited spots. All of these are very professional and clean while still hitting on the scarcity pain points. Excited to learn more."

Thanks so much Interview Valet CF. Thank you for taking the time to leave a rating and review. Now, let's dive into this week's episode on ThriveCart. All right. This is the last episode in our ongoing payment series. I've saved this one for last for a couple of reasons, but this one is going to be about one more payment platform called 'ThriveCart'.

Just before we get started, I want to clear up a question that I get asked quite a lot is you hear me talking a lot about Thrive Themes and Thrive Leads, and I get the question, "Is this the same company?" No. No, it's not. ThriveCart and Thrive Themes are two completely different companies, two different founders. Really don't have anything to do with each other.

Just want to clear that up before we start. ThriveCart is a platform that I've chosen for my own business going forward as well, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. Right. What is ThriveCart? ThriveCart is a payment platform that allows you to create checkout pages and create payment plans for your products and basically process the payment.

Where it differs from something like ClickFunnels for example is ClickFunnels comes with a bunch of other stuff like landing page designers and membership areas and all that stuff. ThriveCart is just the cart portion of that, so where people go to checkout, fill in their details, give you money, get exposed, do upsells and downsells, and order form bumps which we'll talk about in a second. All that stuff is done on ThriveCart, and then when they checkout, then they're redirected back to your site or wherever your designated thank you page is going to be. All right.

It's probably the most similar to Samcart and the other platforms we've talked about so far, and very similar in functionality as well, but it's a software as a service. Payment platform allows you to design payment forms, upsells, downsells, create your subscription plans for example in the cart if you want a 14-day trial, and then [fall 00:05:20] to $39 a month or whatever. You would build that all inside ThriveCart. Who is it good for? ThriveCart is good for people who are selling non-physical products, so if you're selling coaching or a membership programme or a software, software as a service, or if you're selling physical products that people would buy as a one-off and don't have a lot of variations.

For example, if you're selling a book, a physical book for example, the book doesn't come in different sizes and colours. It only comes as a book. You could certainly use it to sell that. What it won't do is the more traditional shopping cart functionality where I put product A in my cart, product B and product C, and then I go checkout with all three products at once. ThriveCart is really more designed around a single product sale with additional add-ons to that sale, and I'll talk about that in a second.

If you're selling physical goods with a lot of variations like you're selling t-shirts and they come in small, medium, and large, and red, blue, and green, ThriveCart is not the thing for you. You're better off with some one of the more traditional retail type shopping carts like WooCommerce or Shopify, BigCommerce, something like that. For those of you who are selling digital products or non-physical products, coaching, membership sites, online courses, it's perfect for that kind of stuff. Why do I like it? Why did I choose it over all the other ones?

I'll tell you, it's got a great mix of flexibility and power. There's lots of different variations you can build into your sales funnels and build into your products and build into your pricing, so it's got a lot of flexibility to it and a lot of power, but quite a very simple interface that you're not going to get lost in. It's a great mix of simplicity from the user interface point of view, but still flexibility and power from a product point of view and being able to set up your products and being able to set up upsell funnels, downsell funnels, order form bumps, all that kind of good stuff. I'm going to run to you through some of the features of ThriveCart here. As I said, it's best suited for one-off products that have additional things that could be added onto the sale.

Think about McDonald's. Right? You go in there for the cheese burger. They upsell you to the fries, and the Coke, and the value meal with that. That's a similar sales model that works really well with ThriveCart. Let me just give you a quick example of a typical sales scenario here that might involve some upsells and downsells. Right.

Let's say you're an author or an authority or a speaker or something like that and you're selling your book for example, and so someone's going to buy your book for 29 bucks. Certain percentage of those people are going to want the next thing as well. Right? If they really like you, they're going to want the next little piece that they can get, and some will want another piece after that, and some will want another piece after that. Some percentage of people will buy whatever you put in front of them if they really like you.

What a typical scenario might be for example is they go to the landing page for the book, they go to buy the book, and then they're offered what's called an 'Order form bump'. An order form bump is just a little checkbox on the order form where you can add an extra thing in there. You might say, "Here's my book for $29 or $39, whatever it is", and then there's an order form bump for an extra 30 bucks. You can get the audio recording of the book as well. Right?

Immediately, you're upping your average cart value because some percentage of people take that order form bump. Right? Whereas, if we were just offering them the book, all we would sell is the book. They're offered the book on that page. On that checkout page, there's a little order form bump that says, "Click here if you want the audio version of the book as well for an extra 30 bucks or 20 bucks", and then, so people just click, "Yeah, I want that", and they put in their details.

They click 'Buy now'. Then, they may be presented with an upsell which is, "Hey, join our inner circle coaching programme for whatever it is, 10 grand a year". Right? It's a big leap from a book, but maybe some people will take it, or let's call it a 'Five grand coaching programme' for the year. If some people really like you and you're really the recognised expert, and they want a fast result, obviously some people might go and take that offer. Right?

If they say, "No, I don't want that offer", maybe we downsell them to a 30-day quick start programme for whatever, $500 or something like that. Right? Out of that one book, we've added three more sales opportunities. We've added an order form bump for the audiobook. We've added an upsell for our premium coaching product.

If they don't want that, then we've offered them a downsell to a lower price product that they still might buy anyway. We've taken that $29 book. We might turn that into a $5,000 sale. That's a typical online sale scenario that is surprisingly hard to do with most tools. There's only really a small handful of tools that will do that, and ThriveCart makes it super simple to do that as well.

You can have order form bumps to add a little thing. You can specify sales funnels so that there's a designated upsell or several designated upsells if you like, and several designated downsells if you like as well. You can sell one-off products, so it might be like your book. It's $29 and when done, you can sell subscription products. If you have a membership site, you can sell ongoing yearly or monthly or quarterly subscriptions to your membership site.

One-off products, subscription products, you can do a combination of both where you might say it's a 200 ... Say you're a web hosting company or an SEO company, or Facebook ads or something, it might be like a $500 set up fee, and then a hundred dollars a month after that for example. You can set up those combination of one-off recurring subscriptions on the same order page as well. You can do things like trial offers, so you might want to give somebody a 30-day free trial or a 14-day $1 trial, and then after the trail period is over, the normal $59 a month price kicks in. It's quite simple to set up all those kind of things in ThriveCart and those kind of different permutations that you might want to experiment which I think is fantastic.

The other thing that's surprisingly hard to do in a lot of the platforms is manage your customers. Right? If somebody's bought from you and maybe they call you with a query or they want to change their subscription or maybe they want to pause it for three months while they go on holidays or something, a lot of carts just you can't even do it. Like you get in there and there's almost no customer information on those people as well. It's really mind-boggling, but ThriveCart has great ...

You could just go in at customers. You can search for any customer. You can see what their sales were over any given period. You can see what products they've bought. If they have subscriptions, you can pause those subscriptions to either for a specified period of time or indefinitely which is a great way to keep recurring subscribers onboard who might want to quit.

You say, "Instead of quitting, why don't I just put you pause on where do you want to pause for six months and see how we go or whatever". You also get customer lifetime value, so if I call up your customer record inside ThriveCart, I immediately see what your customer lifetime value is, all the stuff you bought from me, all the products, all the subscriptions, everything. Just get a nice little number there that says, "Hey, this person is worth whatever, $3,000 or whatever", like that. Some of the other cool features that it has is coupon codes, so that you can set up coupon codes if you want to run a special and give somebody a coupon. They can put the coupon in and get a discounted price. You can say, "Which products those coupons apply to?", so you might want to apply the two products, but not these other three over here.

You can do that. You can also pan the coupon code at the URL and send it out, and so they don't even have to put the coupon code and they just click on it, take in straight to the checkout form with a coupon code already embedded. Another nice thing though is if you don't want to show that coupon code field because that can be kind of a conversion killer sometimes because someone will go to checkout, they'll see there's a coupon code box there, and then they'll run off scouring the internet trying to find doing Google searches for your coupon code. They might be able to find ... That takes them away from the order page, and then they may never come back. You can turn the coupon code box off which is a nice little conversion feature as well, so it doesn't distract them.

It doesn't encourage them to go running around the internet trying to find a subscription code. It also has the embedable checkout forms which is nice, so normally, you just have a button on your site that says, "Buy now", and that could flip you off to a ThriveCart page, the ThriveCart checkout page much the way Samcart does. It could flip you off to a ThriveCart checkout page, or you can actually embed the order form within your own WordPress site so that you have your own branding and all your own stuff surrounding the order form, but remember, the fewer things you give somebody to do, the better your conversion rate is going to be, so you don't want to surround your order form with too many distracting things, but you can embed the order forms on your own site. It can do sales tax as well, so if you're one of those people that has to worry about VAT or GST here on Australia, you can get the cart to calculate that GST for you so you know how much that you owe in the end.

They're won't pay it for you, but at least it will keep track of it for you based on the customer's IP address essentially, so wherever they are when they checkout, it will go right this person that's in the U.S. or this person that's in Australia, et cetera. Obviously in Australia, we need to charge them GST or this person is in this particular EU country, we need to charge them VAT which has a nice little feature that most people don't have in their carts. It has a lot of integrations already out of the box even though it hasn't even launched yet. As far as payment gateways go, you can plug in Stripe, you can plug in PayPal, and you can plug in Apple Pay which is pretty much all you need to get going. I know there are some other payment gateways plan in the future, but that's really should be all you need to get you started.

It integrates with a number of different membership platforms as well like Digital Access Pass, Member Mouse, OptimizePress, Wishlist Member. I'm using ActiveMember360 for my membership site. Now, the good thing about ActiveMember360 is that it ties in with ActiveCampaign, so the membership software doesn't even actually have to talk to a shopping cart. What happens is if someone checks out a ThriveCart, that gives them a tag in ActiveCampaign that says they're allowed this level of membership or access to this product. We set that up in WordPress to say, "This page is protected, and only people with this purchased X, Y, Z tag are allowed to see this particular page, to see this particular content", so when they check out a ThriveCart, ThriveCart talks to ActiveCampaign and gives them the purchase X, Y, Z tag. Then, when they go to log into the website, WordPress website, ActiveMember interrogates ActiveCampaign to see what tags that particular person has, and then it grants them access to the content based on whatever ActiveCampaign tag they have so that I can swap out my shopping cart whenever I want.

It doesn't matter because ActiveCampaign and ActiveMember are the things that are controlling my membership area which is a nice little future-proof if you ever decide to change shopping carts. That's pretty cool as well. I think between all those membership platforms and those payment gateways, you're pretty much ready to go for most people as well. Now, here's some nice features that I've only found in ThriveCart. I haven't found these in any other payment platforms so far, and they might seem like small things, but I guarantee, you're probably going to want to do at least some of them at some point, and then you're going to bang into limitations of your payment platform that you can't do it.

One really cool thing that I haven't seen anywhere else is multiple Stripe accounts and multiple PayPal accounts. Something like Samcart, you can set up multiple Stripe accounts. You can hook your shopping cart up to multiple Stripe accounts, but you can only use one at any given time. With ThriveCart, you can actually have several gateways going simultaneously, so you might have say two Stripe accounts and a PayPal account or two PayPal accounts going simultaneously. The reason you might want to do that is to separate where the money goes. Right?

What you could do is you could set up Stripe account A and Stripe account B inside a ThriveCart, and then you can set up the payment gateway that you're going to use on a per product basis, so product A can put the money straight into Stripe account A, and product B when people checkout and they buy product B, that can go straight into Stripe account B which is a pretty cool feature if you're running multiple businesses or you want to run this on behalf of your clients or something like that. That's pretty groovy. The other groovy thing is you can set currency on a per product basis, so I can have one checkout form per product A, and that might be in U.S. dollars, and then I can have another checkout form for product B, and that might be an Australian dollars or Canadian dollars or Euros or whatever. You can assign the currency on a per product basis as well which is pretty cool. If you're one of those people that wants to be able to charge people in your country one price, and people on a different country a different price, you can certainly do that in their own currency.

You have to use the third party tool if you want to automatically sniff out what country they're in and get the right checkout form, but you could just say "Australian customers, click here", or "Overseas customers, click here", and they would get different payment forms with different currencies attached to each product, so that's pretty cool as well. Some of the things they do have planned but aren't on the street yet is affiliate programme built into the platform. If you're selling product A and you want to get a bunch of other people to sell product A on your behalf as well and set up an affiliate programme so that they can sell it for you, that'll be built into ThriveCart eventually, and from what Josh has said, it's really just right around the corner, so certainly before the end of the year, I think that will be live. The time of recording is late November here, so it should be ... He said he would wanted to have it up by the end of November or the very least, at the end of December.

The affiliate platform, affiliate build out should be live pretty darn soon. The other thing that's coming as well is built in dunning features. If you don't know what dunning is, if you have a subscription programme where people are paying you monthly or quarterly or yearly or whatever and you're charging their credit card every quarter every month, I'm sure you've run into the problem where their credit card expires or they've changed their card or something like that, so all of a sudden, your recurring payments start failing, and now you've got to chase up that customer and get the new details as well. You can use third party tools like Stunning.co which is really great at dunning and following up people whose cards are going to expire, but it would be nice if you didn't have to use a third party tool and that was just part of the shopping cart. Dunning features are coming into ThriveCart as well, and they're hopefully not too far away as well.

We didn't talk about ActiveCampaign integration, but ThriveCart has integration to all the major kind of autoresponder type people, but ActiveCampaign's got a great integration with ActiveCampaign, so you can integrate it at a number of different levels. You can put somebody straight onto a list which we know is not great, and it's a limited appeal of putting someone straight on a list. You can put people straight into an automation which I haven't seen before which is very cool. You can say, "People who buy this product, I want you to put them straight into this automation", or you can add a particular tag.

You're going to write, "If someone buys this product, I want to give them this tag or these number of tags as well". You can do those actions based on a couple of different things. You can do it based on a successful checkout. You can do it based on card abandonment. You can do it based on a refund, so if someone buys, they might go into one automation.

If they've been in the current, they might go into a different automation which files them up with the card abandonment sequence, or if they refund the product, they might put them into ... Give them another tag or put them into a different automation which then cancels all their accesses and whatever we want to do and when someone refunds a product. Lots of different levels of AC integration which is really good to see, and they also have via WebHooks, they have integration with Zapier as well. If you want to put all your new purchases into zero for example, you could do that by WebHooks and Zapier as well. Really flexible platform, and it works really well and it's really simple to use, and it's not even really available to the public yet. ThriveCart hasn't actually launched yet.

I got an early Beta access to it way back in February, but it's really ready for primetime. Any day now, it's going to drop and go public, so you can't buy just yet in the public domain, but what Josh has done for us and listeners of The Active Marketer Podcast and fans of The Active Marketer, we have a special lifetime deal that's cheaper than you're going to find at anywhere else, so there is a lifetime Beta access deal going around at the moment if you can find it, but he's done even better and given us a discount on top of that as well. Now, I'm not allowed to tell you what it is on the air and I'm not allowed to tell you what it is in a public forum. If you want to get access to this special lifetime deal, I need to get you into the Automation Nation private Facebook group. That deal is not available to the public.

It's only available to Automation Nation and ActiveMarketer Academy members. I can't put it out in the public. If you want it, what you need to do is or if you're curious at what the price is, what you need to do is go to Facebook. Search for Automation Nation, and that's our private Facebook group. Say you want to join.

I'll let you in, and then you'll see a pin post right at the very top that has all the details for the lifetime access to ThriveCart at the special VIP price. I would suggest you do that because the great thing about it is it's exactly at its lifetime price. I know if you've looked at Samcart recently, they just upped their prices, but their base price is $99 a month. That adds up after a while.

ClickFunnels again, their base price, $97 a month. Adds up after a while. It's nice to be able to just pay a one-off price for something and just have it done. I guarantee, I can't tell you it's less than six months worth of any of those tools, so use ThriveCart for a couple of months, you're already ahead of the game. Again, if you want to see what that special VIP pricing is, go to Facebook. Search for Automation Nation, join, I'll let you in, and then you'll get access to the special VIP pricing as well, or if you can't remember all that, just go to the show notes over at TheActiveMarketer.com/70, and I'll have a link to the Automation Nation Facebook group in there as well, and you can just click straight across.

That's how you get access to it. I've been using it for a while. I'm really impressed with it. Simple, stable, does what it says, and you can get a product up and running in just a matter of minutes. It's really ...

I've been through a lot of them, and this is certainly the best one that works for me and my business. Again, it might not work for you and your business. Go back to that episode on how to choose a payment platform, and really nail down your requirements before you go buying any piece of software and add to shopping cart. That's ThriveCart. Again, it should be soon. I'll try and get it once it's launched.

Publicly, I'll try and get Josh on the show to have a chat about that, but I will see you back here next week. Thanks. If you want to check out the show notes for this week's episode, you can find those over at TheActiveMarketer.com/70, and I will also include a link off to the Automation Nation on Facebook group so you can get access to that special lifetime deal on ThriveCart. Now, if you're a regular listener of The Active Marketer Podcast, you have noticed a bit of a gap in my publishing schedule, and that is because I have been heads down completely redesigning our private membership community now called 'The Active Marketer Academy'. The Active Marketer Academy has been redesigned from the ground up to be a much, much better user experience with tonnes of training and resources and shared automations, and a community of users who are all on the same journey as you putting this sales funnels and marketing automation technology to work in their business.

If you need some help with your sales funnels, your marketing automation, your copy, all that kind of stuff, you can find that inside Active Marketer Academy. Head over to ActiveMarketerAcademy.com, and get all the details. We look forward to seeing you inside with the rest of our really cool members. Until next week, everybody. Get out there and design, automate, and scale your business to the next level with sales funnels and marketing automation. See you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to The Active Marketer Podcast. You can find the show notes and all the latest marketing automation news over at TheActiveMarketer.com.

TAM 070: ThriveCart Overview

We Chat About ThriveCart Features Such As:

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

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Barry Moore

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