When you’re known as the ‘go-to Thrivecart person’ you get asked a lot of questions! In this blog post, I decided to round up the 7 most common questions I get about Thrivecart and keep them in one handy place for you.
Whether you are already using Thrivecart or are considering switching and migrating to Thrivecart, this post is for you.
7 Biggest Thrivecart Questions:
1) Should I switch to Thrivecart?
By far, the Thrivecart question I get the most is, ‘Should I switch to Thrivecart?’
This question actually inspired the creation of my Move to Thrivecart group program.
And the answer, to be completely honest, is: it depends, but probably yes.
While I loveeee Thrivecart and typically recommend it to everyone who is selling courses or digital products – there are a few questions you should ask yourself first:
- What are you using right now that Thrivecart would replace?
- What are you paying for all of those tools right now?
- Are you able to invest in Thrivecart right now?
- When will you have the time and capacity to make the switch / set everything up?
2) If I switch to Thrivecart, can I move current payment plans over?
No. If you’re using another platform right now and want to switch to Thrivecart, you aren’t able to move over current payment plans.
Your students or customers will need to either 1) finish their payment plans on the current platform OR 2) sign up for a new payment plan with you in Thrivecart. I think there are strategic ways you can and should incentivize that, but yes – sometimes it’s hard to get folks to pull out their card again.
3) What exactly can I streamline with Thrivecart?
It would be easier to say what you can’t do with Thrivecart, but here’s a full list of what you can streamline (or stop paying other tools for):
- Checkouts and payment processing
- Subscriptions
- Sales pages (hi, I have fabulous templates for that!)
- Sales funnels (including bump offers, upsells, and downsells)
- Affiliate program that can run totally hands-off
- Course and digital product hosting (with Thrivecart Learn)
- Automation (Thrivecart integrates with most email marketing providers so no need for Zapier or other 3rd party software for most options)
Heads up: Thrivecart will send some automated transactional emails for you automatically, such as a purchase receipt, login set up emails, notifications of new courses added to your dashboard, etc but for all marketing emails, you’ll need an email service provider – more on that below.
4) What else do I need besides Thrivecart for my business?
It depends on your specific needs and what your business looks like. But, a few of the most common extra things you’ll need beyond Thrivecart are:
- An email marketing provider – I currently use Drip, but if you aren’t sure which one is right for your business, you might want to check out Email Service Matchmaker. This $9 workshop + comparison guide will help you figure out which ESP is best for you, your budget, your needs, and your style.
- Video hosting – Thrivecart doesn’t host videos so you will need somewhere else to host your videos that you can then embed into your Thrivecart Learn lessons. I personally use ScreenPal. Others embed Loom videos, host their videos with Vimeo, Bunny.net, or Searchie.
- A community (optional) – if you have a membership or program with a community you can use a private Facebook Group, Slack on a free or paid plan, or my personal favorite that I use for Bundle Formula, Heartbeat.
5) What’s the big difference between Thrivecart and Thrivecart Pro?
Thrivecart Pro has some pretty valuable extra features included, like:
- The option to have an affiliate program
- Simple sales tax setup
- Advanced user management – being able to create subuser logins for your team while protecting your financial data privacy, your payment processor settings, all that is huge! See this article for other ways to protect your Thrivecart account
In my opinion, it’s worth the extra one-time upgrade cost to a Pro account. There are a lot of reasons why but the big one is: affiliate programs! If you’re selling courses and digital products, you’ll definitely want to get your own affiliate program up and running!
Along with Thrivecart Pro, there is also the upgraded option of Learn Plus, which includes extra course platform features, like:
- Creating bundles of products so you can deliver multiple courses/templates with one purchase, if you’d like
- Advanced tagging for course access (for example: if I only want people who purchased early bird to get access to a specific lesson in the course, I could only include people with that tag in Learn to see it)
- Bulk importing students via CSV – extra useful if you are switching from another platform
6) Do I have to pay my affiliates through PayPal?
Yes and no.
The only option for paying affiliates directly from Thrivecart is via PayPal. However, you can mark affiliate payments as ‘manual payments’ and send your affiliates their payment another way (like through Wise or Stripe), but that will have to be done manually.
7) Can I use Thrivecart and Thrivecart Learn for my membership?
Yes! I have created an entire training on this for you because there are some extra things to think about when setting up a membership. Click here to check out Thriving Memberships!
Want to see behind the scenes of how I use Thrivecart?
You’ll want to watch this quick (seriously, 15-minute) video showing you exactly how I use Thrivecart for my entire funnel system – that’s sales pages, checkouts, affiliate program, and my course platform – without a single Zap.
