Product Reviews & Comparisons Read the blog...
This site uses affiliate links and I may earn a small commission when you use my links and make a purchase without incurring additional fee yourself. Many thanks for supporting this website. Please see my legal page for more details.
Last updated: May 2026
When I first started selling online, my setup was… fine. Functional. It worked. But it also meant I was paying monthly for a course platform, monthly for a checkout tool and spending a lot of time trying to get them all talking to each other via Zapier. Every time something broke, I had to figure out which piece of the puzzle was the problem.
That’s the situation a lot of course creators and digital product sellers find themselves in. And it’s the reason I eventually moved pretty much everything into ThriveCart.
I’ve been using ThriveCart since 2020 – first just for taking payments while my courses lived in Podia, then moving everything across when they launched ThriveCart Learn and the lifetime deal made it a no-brainer. I currently have around 45 offers housed in there, from full courses to tiny digital downloads to bundles. Checkout pages, sales pages, affiliate programme, course hosting – all of it.
So this Thrivecart review isn’t based on a free trial or a quick look round the demo. It’s based on six years of actually building a business in it.
ThriveCart is a genuinely solid investment for course creators, digital product sellers and anyone running an affiliate program. The upfront cost can feel steep, but it pays for itself quickly – bumps converting at 50%+, upsells at 15-30%, and no monthly tool fees add up fast.
What Is ThriveCart?
ThriveCart is a checkout and sales platform built specifically for digital product sellers – course creators, coaches, membership owners, digital download sellers. At its core, it handles your checkout pages, bump offers, upsells, order bumps and affiliate management.
But over the years it’s grown significantly to include course hosting (ThriveCart Learn), sales page building, and now their brand new community and courses platform, Thrive Academy.
The platform is widely used in the online business space, which – as I’ll explain later – is more important than it might sound.
How I Actually Use ThriveCart
My whole offer suite lives in ThriveCart. Every single thing I sell – from a $9 mini product to a $597 course – goes through it.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Checkout and sales pages.
I host both my sales pages and my cart checkouts inside ThriveCart, so they’re connected. You don’t have to do it this way – you can host your sales page on your own website and just embed the checkout, or keep them completely separate. But I prefer having them together because it gives me more meaningful conversion data. I can see how many people visited my sales page and how many actually bought, not just how many clicked through to a checkout they might have arrived at from anywhere. Less friction too – one fewer button to click.
Bump offers and upsells.
I add order bumps and upsells to pretty much everything. Bumps convert at upwards of 50% for some of my products. Upsells typically land somewhere between 15-30%. Both of those add up significantly to average order value without requiring any extra traffic.
Affiliate program.
The whole thing is automated. Affiliates sign up, get approved (or auto-approved if you set it that way), get their links, and get paid – all without me manually managing spreadsheets. I can set different commission rates for different affiliates, reward top performers automatically with triggered emails or custom deals, and set up bespoke JV arrangements. There’s a lot of flexibility there that I don’t think people fully appreciate.
Course and product hosting.
Everything lives inside ThriveCart Learn. Even my smallest digital downloads are set up as “courses” – they just have one or two lessons rather than a full programme. I’ve also hosted events in there, like my 12 Days of Business Freebies. It’s flexible enough to adapt to different product types, even if it wasn’t originally designed for all of them.
*I will be switching to Thrive Academy soon (Thrivecart’s new community first course platform,) to layer in more community and gamification into my offer suite!
I use Convertbox within Thrivecart using HTML blocks
This was an unexpected discovery!
I discovered Convertbox (owned by same company as Thrivecart) can be embeddied within courses and sales pages via HTML blocks. It’s easy to add a HTML block in any lesson or on any sales page with Thrivecart.
I now use ConvertBox popups inside my ThriveCart lessons and on my sales pages in ways that have made a real difference.
- Exit intent popups on sales pages to recover potential lost sales with a behind-the-scenes video.
- Popups inside lessons pointing students to my Facebook community for support.
- Prompts to download workbooks.
- Upsells to my warmest possible audience – people who are literally inside a product they already bought.
It’s one of those combinations that sounds small but adds up.
The other way I use the HTML blocks is to embed Shareables widgets directly in my lessons. That allows me to share my resources and affiliate links and showcase my related offers without recreating the page in every course. I simply embed a block and keep it updated from Airtable!
Read more – 7 fun ways I use Shareables in my business
What I Love About ThriveCart
Everything in one place.
This sounds obvious but it’s underrated. I don’t have to log into four different platforms to understand what’s happening in my business. It’s all there.
The affiliate program is a real asset.
Not just the mechanics of it – the rules and automation features are genuinely powerful.
I can trigger an email to an affiliate who’s performing particularly well, or automatically set up conditions that reward certain milestones. That’s the kind of thing that takes an affiliate program from a nice extra to a powerful asset!
Bumps and upsells are easy to set up and they work.
The interface for adding bump offers is simple, and the results speak for themselves. 50%+ bump conversion rates on some products is not something I was seeing before.
It’s widely used.
This might sound like a strange thing to love about a tool, but it actually matters. I’m in the ThriveCart dashboard every day. That means when I’m considering promoting someone else’s product as an affiliate, I’m much more likely to do it if their product also lives inside ThriveCart – because I can grab my link quickly and not have to remember where yet another affiliate portal lives.
And I know plenty of other people feel the same way. That’s a real reason to keep your products there if you have an affiliate program. It makes it frictionless for your affiliates to promote you.
It’s robust.
Six years in, it’s never seriously let me down in a way that affected sales.
What Frustrates Me About Thrivecart (Some of these things are being fixed soon)
The lesson editor has been clunky.
You can’t copy and paste directly from Google Docs without the formatting going wonky. And there’s a two-step saving process – you have to save at lesson level and then again at course level – which is easy to forget. I’ve lost content this way which has annoying. But Thrive Academy promises to change things there!
New features can be a bit glitchy at launch.
ThriveCart moves fast with new features, which I respect, but it occasionally means something ships before it’s quite ready. My approach now is to sit back and let others test new things for a while before I upgrade or adopt them.
The sales page design interface can feel limiting.
I’ve still managed to build sales pages I’m really happy with, but the builder isn’t as intuitive or flexible as dedicated page builders. This is something ThriveCart knows about and is working on – the roadmap suggests improvements are coming, and Thrive Academy’s new design features look promising.
Customer service can be on the slow side
Thrivecart have been a victim of their own success in that they exploded quickly and for a while, they didn’t have the customer service infrastructure in place to support such rapid growth. They were open and transparent about the issue and that they were training up more customer service team members.
The problem has vastly improved. I can get a response pretty quickly now though I do occasionally have to wait a day or two and this is probably the thing I hope they focus more on going forwards.
The sales page and lesson builder issues should both be resolved via Thrive Academy and the new page builder on their roadmap.
ThriveCart Pricing – Is It Worth It?
ThriveCart moved away from its well-known lifetime deal model and now operates on a subscription. The lifetime deal was available for years and a lot of existing users (myself included) benefited from it significantly – it saved me a lot in monthly fees compared to running separate tools.
Current pricing is subscription-based. The exact figures change, so I’d recommend checking ThriveCart’s current pricing directly for the most accurate numbers.
What I will say is this: the upfront cost – whether lifetime or subscription – can feel steep when you’re looking at it as just a checkout tool. But that’s not really what it is. When you factor in:
- Bump offers converting at 50%+
- Upsells adding 15-30% to average order value
- No separate affiliate management tool needed
- No separate course hosting fees (at least historically)
- The time saved not syncing things together via Zapier
…it pays for itself pretty quickly. For me it definitely has, many times over.
If you want a bonus package to help you get the most out of ThriveCart faster, I have a ThriveCart bonus page here with some useful extras included.
What About Thrive Academy? Does That Change Things?
This is worth addressing because ThriveCart are launching Thrive Academy – their new community-first courses platform – and it changes the value proposition in a significant way.
I’m planning to move my courses into Thrive Academy when it rolls out. And the reason isn’t just the shiny new features. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Because the online education landscape has shifted.
Information is everywhere now, and people can get an answer to almost anything from an AI in seconds. Self-directed, DIY courses don’t convert the way they used to.
That’s not unique to my business – it’s being felt across the industry. Courses still sell, but not at the same rates they did a few years ago.
What people are actually craving is connection. Accountability. A human on the other end who actually helps them implement, not just teaches. Community where they can ask questions and hear from others going through the same things.
That’s what makes Thrive Academy really interesting to me. Community-first learning, gamification that keeps students engaged, Q&A and support structures built in – it gives the human touch that pure self-directed courses just can’t.
I also can’t wait to move my community away from Facebook, where reach gets throttled and posts disappear into the algorithm. Having students interacting directly in the same dashboard where they access their courses feels like a proper upgrade.
And on a personal note – I work alone for most of my working week, fitting everything into part-time hours around my two young children. I’ve missed community. I’m genuinely excited about this, not just strategically but personally.
Who Is ThriveCart Best For?
ThriveCart is a strong fit if:
- You sell digital products, courses, templates, toolkits or memberships
- You want checkout, sales pages, bump offers, upsells and affiliates in one place
- Running an affiliate programme is part of your business model
- You want a platform that’s well-known and easy for affiliates to work with
- You’re building toward an evergreen, semi-automated sales setup
It’s less ideal if:
- You only have one or two very simple products with no upsells or affiliates
- You need a very sophisticated page builder from day one
Thrivecart Review – Is it worth the price?
ThriveCart has been one of the better decisions I’ve made in my business. The combination of checkout, bumps, upsells and affiliates in one place – with the reliability and the ecosystem benefits of being widely adopted – has made it genuinely central to how I operate.
The learn/course side has had its rough edges, but Thrive Academy looks set to address most of them, and the broader ThriveCart roadmap is ambitious in a way that makes me feel confident it’s going somewhere good.
If you’re weighing it up and the price feels like a lot – just run the numbers. What would a 40% bump conversion rate on your next 100 sales look like? What about adding a 20% upsell on top of that? The maths usually answers the question pretty quickly.
You can check out ThriveCart and the current pricing here, and if you want to get more out of it once you’re inside, my ThriveCart Toolkit covers templates and tutorials to help you set things up faster.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ThriveCart worth the price?
For most digital product sellers and course creators, yes. The bump and upsell features alone typically increase average order value by a significant margin – bumps can convert at 30-50%+ depending on the offer, and upsells typically add 15-30% on top.
When you factor in not needing separate affiliate management software and the value of having checkout, courses and sales pages in one place, it pays for itself quickly for anyone with a reasonably active product suite.
Does ThriveCart include course hosting?
Yes. ThriveCart Learn (included with ThriveCart) allows you to host courses, digital downloads, challenges and events.
You can set up drip content, progress tracking and access control. ThriveCart has also now launched Thrive Academy, a separate community-first platform with more advanced course delivery, gamification and community features – available on a separate subscription.
What is the difference between ThriveCart and Thrive Academy?
ThriveCart is the checkout, sales and affiliate platform. Thrive Academy is ThriveCart’s new community-and-courses platform, built separately and priced on a monthly subscription. They work together – Thrive Academy plugs into ThriveCart’s commerce layer – but they’re distinct products. You can use ThriveCart without Thrive Academy, but Thrive Academy is designed to sit alongside ThriveCart rather than replace it.
Can I use my own sales page with ThriveCart?
Yes. ThriveCart is flexible on this – you can host your sales page on your own website and embed the checkout there, keep the sales page and checkout completely separate, or host both inside ThriveCart. Many creators host both inside ThriveCart to get cleaner conversion data showing how many sales page visitors actually completed a purchase.
Does ThriveCart have an affiliate programme feature?
Yes. ThriveCart includes a built-in affiliate management system that handles sign-ups, tracking, link generation and automated payments. You can set different commission rates per product or per affiliate, create custom JV arrangements, and use automation rules to trigger actions when affiliates hit specific milestones. It’s one of ThriveCart’s stronger features.
What is a bump offer in ThriveCart?
A bump offer is a small add-on product shown on the checkout page, typically with a checkbox a buyer can tick to add it to their order without going through a separate checkout. Bump offers tend to convert very well because the buyer has already made the decision to purchase – adding an extra item is low friction. ThriveCart’s bump feature is straightforward to set up and can significantly increase average order value.
Is ThriveCart good for small digital products – not just courses?
Yes. Even small digital downloads like templates, toolkits and workbooks can be set up inside ThriveCart Learn as simple one or two lesson “courses.” It handles everything from $9 mini products to full $597+ courses, and the same bump and upsell features apply regardless of product size.
What’s the difference between ThriveCart and other checkout tools like SamCart?
The main differences come down to the affiliate programme depth, the integration with ThriveCart Learn (and now Thrive Academy), the level of automation in bump and upsell flows, and the overall ecosystem. ThriveCart’s affiliate management is more flexible than most alternatives. It’s also more widely adopted in the creator economy space, which has a practical benefit for anyone running affiliate promotions.