ThriveCart review [2025] - is this online shopping cart worth it?

Running an online store can be an effective and low-overhead way of monetizing your fan base. If you're an author, designer, course creator, or even an influencer, you're well-positioned to turn your audience into an income stream. The challenge is finding a way to process payments and securely deliver digital products to your customers.

ThriveCart is an online store platform that helps you do exactly that.

What is ThriveCart?

ThriveCart is a shopping cart solution for online marketers, with a focus on landing pages, funnels and bump offers. It differs from traditional online store systems in that it's designed around the idea of embedding shopping carts into landing pages or linking to sales funnels from your socials. You can use it as a traditional store as well, but the true power of the platform comes in the high-converting checkout pages.

What is ThriveCart Used For?

ThriveCart is suitable for all kinds of digital entrepreneurs, from new solopreneurs to influencers or content creators with a large following. It's an inexpensive shopping cart solution with a lot of useful features for affiliate marketing, sales funnels, etc. The software comes with a free version of ThriveCart Learn, a course hosting platform that can be used to sell courses and memberships and keep track of the progress made by your students.

ThriveCart does a good job of being an all-in-one platform for hosting, upselling and marketing your digital downloads. The combination of sales funnels and upsells/downsells helps entrepreneurs close more sales and make more money per customer. Let's take a closer look at how ThriveCart aims to help creators make more sales.

ThriveCart's Best Features

If you've tried to sell online using traditional store platforms such as WooCommerce, or to market courses through a dedicated course and community platform such as Udemy, you may be wondering what differentiates ThriveCart from those platforms, and why so many online entrepreneurs have made ThriveCart their platform of choice. Here are some of the features offered by ThriveCart.

Affiliate Programs

If you're great at creating high-quality content, but aren't much of a salesperson yourself, why not recruit others to do that part for you? ThriveCart offers a wealth of affiliate features, helping you keep track of the performance of your affiliate partners, and reward them for their efforts.

The experience is smooth and professional looking on both sides, so you'll be able to offer a good service to your affiliates, without having to waste a lot of time managing your programs.

Payment Processing

Setting up payment processing on some online shopping platforms can be complicated, especially if you aren't a developer or systems administrator. Thrive Cart is easy to set up and supports several different payment methods, including Google Pay, Apple Pay, and PayPal.

The checkout flow is smooth and simple, with as few forms to fill out as possible. This is another sign of how ThriveCart has been designed from the ground up to ensure maximum conversions.

On the payment page, you can set up a variety of options, including free trials and pay-what-you-want options (with a nudge to suggest a payment value). You can also offer tiered pricing, subscriptions, and even payment plans.

Adaptive Pricing Options

Sales and marketing experts have put a lot of time into researching the psychology of pricing, and you can take advantage of that research when you use ThriveCart.

Let's imagine you have a $600 product. You know it's good, and your prospective customers have seen lots of positive reviews, but the price is just a little too high for them. In today's economy, few people have $600 lying around for an impulse buy.

You can make the price a little more palatable by letting the customer pay $100 a month, or even just $50/month. That's far more accessible, and providing that option could increase your conversion rate significantly.

But you might still have some people who just don't want to open their wallets. They don't want to commit to spending that much, even over the course of a year. So you set up another prompt for prospective customers who try to leave the site without making a purchase, this one offers a paid trial for a nominal fee.

By requiring even a nominal fee, you screen out people who aren't serious about making a purchase, but you also avoid driving away prospects who are worried about getting scammed. Set the trial at $5 or $10, and you should get quite a few people taking you up on it.

So, your prospective customer signs up for the trial, loves what you have to offer, and decides to extend their membership. Everyone wins.

Subscriptions

It's not just one-time payments that ThriveCart can help you with. You can also use the system to set up recurring billing and manage customer memberships. Running subscription programs can help you have a more stable and predictable income, and ThriveCart helps you maximize that income thanks to its dunning feature, which will automatically send messages to customers whose subscriptions are at risk of cancellation.

Using the dunning saver feature, you can automatically retry failed subscription payments, and engage with those customers. You'll have a chance to get more information about why customers aren't using their accounts, giving you a chance to improve your service for everyone, build goodwill with your customer base, and encourage them to keep their subscriptions.

Upsells and Offer Bundles

Upsells are products or services you wish to promote to your customers once they've agreed to the purchase of the main product. These are usually small, but related things. For example, if someone's buying a course you might offer them some extra worksheets or an ebook as an upsell.

ThriveCart makes it easy to set up upsells, and even make a bundle of related products to offer on a single page. You can save these upsells, related downsells (shown when someone declines an offer), and product bundles, and add them to sales pages with just a few clicks.

Sales Funnels

Sales funnels are an incredibly powerful tool for converting potential customers, and ThriveCart makes creating high-performing sales funnels a simple process. It's simply a matter of selecting a product, and then choosing the upsells (and/or downsells) you want to show at each stage of the funnel.

The platform has its own drag-and-drop editor which is incredibly easy to use. If you feel that the editor is too limited in features, you also have the option of uploading a custom page. However, the ThriveCart editor uses templates that are tried and tested, so unless you're a UX expert yourself, it's probably best to stick with the suggestions ThriveCart provides.

Cart Abandonment Tracking and Recovery

This handy feature helps you capture more sales by sending out nudges to people who abandon their shopping carts. It's entirely automated, and a great way to close a sale to someone who had strong purchase intent, but got distracted during the checkout process or decided to shop around for a better deal.

Coupon Codes and Time-Limited Offers

People love to feel like they're getting a bargain, and ThriveCart provides you with quite a few ways of doing that. You can offer time-limited deals, with a countdown timer on your landing pages or sales pages to add a sense of urgency. You can also offer coupon codes to give your customers that little sense of exclusivity.

Coupon codes tie in well with the affiliate marketing feature. Issue codes to your affiliates, so they can offer their audiences a great deal on your products. Alternatively, send out codes to customers who have abandoned their carts, prompting them to come back quickly to complete the purchase, before the coupon expires.

As you can see, each of these features ties in with the others, working together to help maximize your revenue.

Order Bumps

Order bumps are similar to upsells, but smaller, so they require less effort to sell. For example, if you're selling an online course, you might upsell an ebook or a video companion to the course, that costs $50 or more. Upsells are attempted after the shopper has made the purchase, and you need to have a good sales pitch to get people to open their wallets a second time.

An order bump would be a smaller add-on, such as a set of printable worksheets to help you with the course. That might cost only $9, which is a much smaller psychological step for the buyer to take, but if half of your buyers agree to that purchase, that's a lot of extra revenue for you.

Order bumps are made as part of the checkout page, and all the buyer has to do is tick box or select a slider. It's a smooth, frictionless experience that can help you greatly increase your income.

Attractive Checkout Pages

If you've ever struggled through the checkout process on an old, unappealing website, you'll know how frustrating that kind of shopping experience can be. You probably try to avoid going back to that website whenever possible. Poorly designed, overly longwinded or deliberately confusing checkout pages are a sure-fire way of driving shoppers away.

ThriveCart uses a two-step checkout system, providing a variety of popular payment systems to take away as much of the friction from the checkout process as possible. This helps increase the conversion rate and increase the lifetime value of your customers too.

Tax Calculator

Keeping track of taxes when you're selling internationally can be confusing. ThriveCart's digital tax calculator is easy to set up and handles this for you.

Sophisticated Testing Tools

Your customers aren't robots, and their interests aren't static. Trends change over time, and so do the things that motivate the people who buy from you. To have prolonged success, you need to be constantly learning and doing market research.

With ThriveCart, you can configure different sales funnels and checkout pages, and use the platform's built-in A/B testing tool to show the pages to different customers, getting an idea of how well each page performs.

API Integrations and Automation

You don't have to be a developer to use most of ThriveCart's features, but if the platform does provide an API offering thousands of triggers and actions, across more than 2,000 apps. You can use the API to get real-time notifications, synchronize data with a CRM, manage your memberships, or even trigger email messages when a refund is issued. The API is well documented, with source examples in JavaScript and Python.

ThriveCart's Payment Gateways

As you can see, ThriveCart comes with a whole lot of useful features. It truly is an all-in-one ecommerce system - but how can buyers pay for your products? You can accept payments on ThriveCart via several major payment processors:

• Authorize.net
• Stripe
• Google Pay
• PayPal
• Apple Pay

There's no cryptocurrency support, which may frustrate some sellers, but it does offer a wide variety of other payment options and has some handy integrated features, such as support for one-click upsells. The developers are always working on adding new features and payment options, and are quite responsive to feedback on this subject.

How Much is ThriveCart?

The pricing model for ThriveCart is unusual. Rather than charging a monthly fee, it asks for a one-time payment which grants a lifetime license. Officially, the lifetime license costs $1,995 for ThriveCart and an additional $1,000 for the upgrade to ThriveCart Pro. However, you'll find the company often runs promotions, so it's possible to pick up a lifetime license for ThriveCart for just $495, with the Pro upgrade costing an additional $195.

If even those discounted prices sound expensive, keep in mind this is a one-off payment that grants you access to all of the features of the platform and the right to create unlimited products, bundles, upsells and funnels. If you were to try to replicate all of the features of ThriveCart by using other platforms, you'd end up having to pay a hefty monthly subscription fee.

For serious entrepreneurs who are thinking long-term, the up-front pricing structure of ThriveCart makes it a great option and could save you a lot of money in the long term.

There's no free trial on ThriveCart, but the platform does offer a refund within 14 days. This could be off-putting for anyone considering using the platform, as 14 days is not a very long time to decide if ThriveCart is right for your business or not.

Pros and Cons - Is ThriveCart Worth It?

ThriveCart is incredibly useful for entrepreneurs who are interested in affiliate marketing, and those who have a lot of related products to promote, enabling them to take advantage of the bundles and upselling features. If you fit in that demographic, you'll find it flexible and powerful. However, there are some reasons why ThriveCart may not be a good fit for you - let's take a look at the pros and cons.

Pros of ThriveCart

• A one-time fee rather than a monthly subscription
• Easy to create product bundles and deals
• Affiliate program features
• Create and sell an unlimited number of products

Cons of ThriveCart

• No live chat support
• Limited order bump features
• Some features gated behind ThriveCart Pro
• Limited customization options

When exploring reviews of ThriveCart, it is clear to see that there are many unhappy customers. ThriveCart has only a 3.2 out of 5 star rating on Trustpilot - though it is crucial to know that there are only 44 ThriveCart reviews in total. While 52% of these are 4 and 5-star reviews, 48% are 1 and 2-star.

While some users praise the platform, others warn prospective users of the lack of customer support and difficulty in getting a refund.

With all of this in mind, including the features and level of support, it is safe to say that ThriveCart is less suited to selling services. While there are workarounds if you'd like to set up coaching calls or use the platform to take commissions for your artwork, it wasn't designed with this sort of thing in mind, so setting it up would be cumbersome. Fortunately, there are other solutions on the market that cater to online service providers.

Top 3 ThriveCart Alternatives

ThriveCart isn't the only player in the world of sales funnels. If you like the sound of the platform's features, but aren't quite ready to spend several hundred dollars upfront, consider one of these platforms:

Kartra: A Polished Lead Generation Platform

Kartra is a lead generation platform that also offers tools for website creation, webinars, and calendar bookings. It's more flexible than ThriveCart and may appeal to coaches and other online service providers since ThriveCart lacks webinar hosting features. The platform also has a membership site builder that's ideal for hosting videos, audio content and other digital downloads.

Kartra offers a 30-day free trial, and has three membership tiers: Starter, Growth, and Professional. The Starter tier costs $99/month if billed annually, or $119/month if you choose a month-to-month subscription. To access the Webinar features, you'd need to opt for the Growth tier, which is $229/month (reduced to $189/month when billed annually).

One major benefit of Kartra is that it has agency features, so you can easily manage multiple accounts on the platform. The pricing structure may be prohibitive for smaller content creators, but for bigger brands or online marketing agencies, these tools could well be worth the money.

This high monthly fee could be off-putting for smaller sellers. If you're able to purchase ThriveCart during one of its regular sales, the cost savings of having a lifetime license would become apparent within around six months.

ClickFunnels 2.0: All-In-One Marketing Platform

The ClickFunnels brand has been around for a long time, and it's got a good reputation among sellers of both physical and digital goods. ClickFunnels 2.0 is the company's latest iteration of its services, and it offers a full suite of tools including a website builder, blogging features, and sales funnel management.

You can use ClickFunnels 2.0 for courses, digital downloads and membership sites. The platform has built-in analytics, automation and email marketing tools, and an extensive list of third-party integrations to help you bring ClickFunnels into your existing workflow as smoothly as possible.

If you're looking for an all-in-one solution that enables you to have a website or blog, your courses and all your digital content available to manage under one dashboard, ClickFunnels 2.0 can do that for you, making it an appealing alternative to ThriveCart.

However, you'll pay a hefty fee for that. ClickFunnels 2.0 does offer a 30-day trial, but once that trial is over, you'll have to pay a monthly fee for the service. The platform recently changed its pricing structure, and while the new plans are both less expensive and more generous than the legacy ones, the cost of membership will still mount up quickly.

The most basic plan is the Startup plan, which costs $81/month for three brand workspaces and team members, with unlimited funnels/courses/members. The Pro membership costs $248/month for 10 brand workspaces and team members. These prices assume you pay annually. Otherwise, the Startup and Pro memberships are $97 and $297/month, respectively.

While this is less expensive than Kartra, there are some gotchas to be aware of. These ClickFunnels 2.0 memberships aren't all-inclusive, and there are some features that operate under a metered billing system. So if you're a heavy user of the platform you may find yourself faced with an unexpected bill on top of your monthly membership.

Whop: A Versatile Social Commerce Platform

Whop is a social commerce platform with which you can sell a wide variety of products, including courses, ebooks and videos. You can also create communities and engage with your users with chat, forums, and videos. Everything is hosted and managed in whops, which are your online hub. Discover what a whop is here.

Unlike the other platforms we've discussed so far, Whop does not require an up-front purchase fee or a monthly membership. The platform is free for creators to use, and Whop only makes money once sellers start making money themselves.

When you sell products on Whop, the platform will handle payment processing for you, and take a 3% commission on each sale you make. That's all you have to pay. There's no metered billing system, and no need to worry about having to pay extra to unlock account limits.

As a seller, you can create an unlimited number of whops (your online spaces) and upload an unlimited number of products. Whether you're a new creator who is looking to test the waters and doesn't want the time pressure of having to figure everything out in a 30-day free trial, or you're an experienced influencer who expects rapid growth and wants a platform that will grow with you, Whop can help.

The platform supports one-time purchases and monthly subscriptions and gives you access to a variety of analytics, sales funnels and communication tools. It also has powerful (and well-documented) integrations, so established entrepreneurs should find it easy to integrate Whop into their existing workflows.

Whop.com offers tools to cover all of the features of ThriveCart, and far more. The platform has an easy-to-use web interface, helping novices get started, but under the hood, the features give you the power to do far more and sell a wider variety of products and services than you can with ThriveCart.

Getting started is easy. Join Whop.com today and create your first whop for free with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ThriveCart easy to use?

ThriveCart is incredibly easy to use with an extensive list of templates, a drag-and-drop page builder, and lots of guided setup options that help you build checkout pages that convert.

Can you build a website with ThriveCart?

If you're just getting started in the world of online marketing, you could use ThriveCart as your primary web presence. However, it would be a rather basic one. The platform is a checkout page builder, not a website builder.

Does ThriveCart have blogging features?

Unlike Whop, ThriveCart focuses purely on courses and sales pages. It does those jobs well but lacks built-in blogging features, so you'll need to have separate hosting for your blog.

Is there a free alternative to ThriveCart?

ThriveCart doesn't offer a free trial. If you're looking for a free service similar to ThriveCart, try Whop.com, which offers sales pages, communities and course creation features with no up-front costs or monthly fees.