The best course platform to sell digital products
I’ve used a handful of different solutions to create, host, and sell digital products online before settling on my current ThriveCart Pro and Learn+ accounts as a digital creator. I’ve also worked within the backend of even more learning management platforms while helping clients build and sell digital products too. This blog post is a rapid fire ThriveCart review and ThriveCart Learn+ review from that context.
Basically, I’ve tried a lot of different solutions to build, sell, and host digital products. And there’s a few reasons why I almost always recommend ThriveCart Pro to new digital product sellers and course creators.
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My experience as a creator selling digital products
I first started using ThriveCart Pro in 2020. The digital product side of my business was starting to take off, which meant that with the increase in customers, I was experiencing other side effects:
- My checkouts weren’t optimized to maximize conversion rates.
- PayPal (the default with my old Squarespace website) was wrecking havoc on my bookkeeping from errors in the sales data pulled.
- I had to manually calculate the sales tax collected for Canadian customers, and was eating the difference.
- The whole experience was rudimentary for clients, and more complicated than needed for me.
- When I upgraded to a course hosting platform from Squarespace and emailed links self-hosted, I needed to set up a bunch of zaps on Zapier that always glitched.
Plus a bunch of other issues. When I found ThriveCart, it seemed to be the solution I needed. And it was a 1-time investment! I was sold. It really was a no-brainer decision at the time, and I’ve been happy with the switch ever since.
Next, I started using the ThriveCart Learn+ platform to host my products in 2023, after using Thinkific for years. I’ve been so happy with this transition as well! This blog post will focus mostly on my ThriveCart Pro review, but you can read my thoughts about ThriveCart Learn+ here.
Prefer to watch?
You can watch or listen to my rapid fire ThriveCart review on YouTube here.
My honest ThriveCart Review
I get that when you’re starting out selling digital products, it can be overwhelming. “What tech do I need to make this happen?” … This is a daunting question to answer! It’s one that keeps a lot of people stuck when building their digital products too. I get it because I’ve been there. You want to sell digital products because you have something special to share with the world. Not because you like fiddling with tech all day long.
That’s why I’m sharing my honest ThriveCart review… To help you save time. You’re busy, and want the information fast. You want to move onto the next step and get your products into the hands of people who need them.
This blog post is focusing on my review of the ThriveCart Pro platform. While I’ll briefly talk about Learn+ which is the course hosting tool, this is mostly going to be about the checkout tech tool. If you want to know what I think about Learn+, their course hosting platform specifically, read this blog post.
Most importantly, you can charge location-based sales tax
Canadian businesses are required to charge sales tax after passing a specific threshold of sales. That sales tax is calculated based on the location of the buyer, not the seller. So when you’re selling digital products online, the percentage of sales tax charged, collected, accounted for, and paid out as the business owner can vary for every single transaction.
That’s a lot of data to keep track of, then dollars to pay out.
ThriveCart is a great solution for my fellow Canadians who are required to charge sales tax on their digital products at the checkout based on location. The ThriveCart checkout can collect this information at the point of sale, and calculate the appropriate sales tax based on the location provided by the customer.
Prior to using ThriveCart, I was losing money by eating the sales tax of every Canadian purchase. I also wasted a lot of time by manually confirming the location of each customer in order to determine what percentage of sales tax I owed for their sales. That all adds up to wasted time and money.
ThriveCart Pro fixed that problem for my business.
ThriveCart Review: The checkout builder is easy to customize
I hired someone to help me set up ThriveCart when I first started using it. But after using the platform a bit, I took the time to figure it out and it’s been easier than expected. The checkout builder is failure intuitive and walks you through every single step, sequentially. You just follow the prompts, make any selections you want, and it’s ready to go.
When I’m working with clients to help them build out their shop, I typically provide recommendations for the final stages of the setup: Behaviours that should be tracked to trigger email automations, for example. I’m able to offer suggestions of what happens at the time of purchase (add the customer to a list, segment that list, what emails they receive, etc.).
You can also easily customize the checkout design. For example, you can customize the colours, fonts, branding, etc. Add your logo, digital product mockups, and anything else you want on the checkout page.
One of the best parts about ThriveCart is that you have the option to do a standard page checkout or a version that embeds into your existing page. I use both in my business for different reasons. The standard checkout works best for all the digital products in my shop. I typically use an embeddable form in tripwires or funnels.
ThriveCart’s connectivity saves me time and money
I mentioned that using ThriveCart Pro and Learn+ together has helped me eliminate substantial expenses in my business. For example, I no longer need Zapier to help enroll customers or start the welcome sequence in Active Campaign. This all happens automatically! With Zapier, I experienced years of repeat glitches, so it’s a relief that doesn’t happen anymore.
ThriveCart Pro talks to QBO for easy bookkeeping. And of course, ThriveCart Pro and Learn+ work seamlessly together. This makes enrolling and student management legitimately automatic.
ThriveCart Review: It’s a 1-time fee for licensing
This is probably my favourite thing about ThriveCart: Everything you purchase is a 1-time investment. I purchased ThriveCart Pro years ago, then Learn+ more recently. I love that these 2 tech tools have eliminated monthly expenses in my business. Not just by directly replacing something like Thinkific (that was costing me hundreds of dollars every month). But also, ThriveCart and Learn+ working together have eliminated my need for a Pro Zapier account.
My monthly operating expenses are so low now since auditing all my subscriptions, and this adds to those savings. Competing options like Thinkific, Kajabi, or additional tools like Quaderno for sales tax calculation all have recurring fee models.
Comprehensive analytics make my ThriveCart review a no-brainer
ThriveCart Pro‘s analytics have been so helpful for me as a business owner. Seeing a snapshot on my dashboard of more than just sales data allows me to make smart business decisions about my digital product shop.
ThriveCart Pro shows you analytics like cart views and conversion rates, abandoned cart data, upsell conversions, refund data, and more. With this information, I’m able to optimize every step of my funnel to maximize revenue.
It’s all about working smarter, not harder… Right?
ThriveCart Review: Initial reactions switching from Thinkific to Learn+
At the end of 2023, I switched from Thinkific to ThriveCart’s Learn+ platform for hosting my digital products. The biggest motivator was obviously the cost difference. Thinkific was costing me hundreds of dollars each month. Really! Their latest pricing model change didn’t work in my favour.
Learn+ was a 1-time fee that would allow me to increase profit margins for my digital product shop beyond the initial setup. Once I decided to switch, it only took a few days to migrate all the content over.
You can watch my initial reactions to ThriveCart’s Learn+ platform here. I wasn’t sure what to expect because it was a newer product at the time of switching, but not so new that there’s commonly beta glitches.
Come along for an over-the-shoulder tour of my initial reactions migrating my digital products from Thinkific to ThriveCart Learn. In this video, I explain why I’m switching and what I like about ThriveCart Learn so far. I show you how I create standard setup formatting for each of my digital products, what that looks like in the customer dashboard, and more. You also can see the comparison between Thinkific’s customer dashboard preview with ThriveCart Learn’s.
Other resources to create and sell digital products
Now that you’re sold on using ThriveCart for your digital product business, where do you start with the setup?! Here’s some other resources that might be helpful for you.
Freelance to Digital Products: How to Transition
This post shares my experience of growing the digital product side of my business as a freelancer. Things like how to grow your audience, making the time to create digital products, and leveraging your existing business to grow and scale this side too.
Digital Product Ideas for Freelancers
If you’re still stuck thinking about what digital product is going to be the best fit for your business, read this post. It covers plenty of digital product ideas for freelancers, and how to choose one for yourself.
How to Create and Sell Digital Products: Step-by-Step
This series on the blog walks you through step-by-step:
Get my best tech tool recommendations
Tech recs for non-techy people from a non-techy person! I don’t have time to fiddle around with stuff, so when I find tools I love and that make my life easier, I stick with them. If you need more support deciding what tech to use in your online business, check out my recommendations here.
Launch your first digital product
If you have your digital product idea and are working on setting up all the marketing pieces for your first digital product, I’d love to help you. The Digital Product Sales Pack is a template pack of all the copywriting and related promotional materials you need to set up and sell it. This template pack includes things like launch copy, a sales page template, delivery sequences, and more. Check it out here.
Selling digital products changed my business, therefore my life, for the better. This is part of the reason why I’m able to work part time hours and spend the majority of my days raising my littles.
If you have any questions about ThriveCart, I’m happy to answer those in the comments below. Best of luck creating and selling your digital products!
