Integrating your shopping cart with your existing website is incredibly important—and it can make or break your online sales process. It’s something most people don’t think about (unless they’re website designers or developers), but it’s incredibly common to use a separate software like ThriveCart to build your online store, especially if you sell courses and digital products. And because that software is technically separate from your WordPress website, you’ll need to integrate them well to provide customers with a seamless experience.
When it’s time for customers to hit the buy button and purchase something from you, you don’t want to send them off to an off-brand checkout page that breaks their trust (and momentum.) That’s where ThriveCart integration comes in, and in this blog, we’ll talk about how to make it work seamlessly with your WordPress site.
Understanding the importance of on-site integrations
First, let’s talk about why keeping everything on your WordPress website matters. When you’re building an online business and making sales from your website, every click away from your site is an opportunity for a customer to get distracted or lose confidence in the purchase.
Plus, keeping everything centralized on your WordPress site has some serious benefits:
- Better SEO
- Stronger brand consistency throughout the buying process
- Complete control over the customer journey
- Improved analytics and tracking
- Higher conversion rates (fewer abandoned carts!)
Integrating Thrivecart and WordPress
ThriveCart is extremely popular for service providers, coaches, and course creators because it’s easy to use and it’s incredibly affordable (it’s less than $500 for a lifetime account, which is a seriously good deal compared to alternatives like Kajabi.)
Fortunately, ThriveCart works pretty seamlessly with WordPress, so you can get all the benefits of a professional-looking checkout while keeping customers on your website.
Pro tip! We always recommend embedding external software into your WordPress website, so you have more control over analytics, brand consistency, and customer experience.
How to integrate ThriveCart and WordPress
The way we like to integrate ThriveCart and WordPress is to design the sales page itself on WordPress. Then, we use ThriveCart’s embed code for the product on the checkout page.
Then, people can view and shop the product on your WordPress website, but use ThriveCart to check out.
Here’s what the end result looks like:
This page design (and navigation) is seamless with my client Leah’s website, but is powered by ThriveCart checkout and delivery—the best of both worlds.
So, let’s talk about how to integrate ThriveCart and WordPress.
🚨Important! Before you make any changes to your WordPress website, go ahead and back up your site, just to be safe!
Step-by-step guide to integrating ThriveCart and WordPress
Step 1: Set up your ThriveCart account
Before we dive into the technical stuff, you’ll need to:
- Sign up for a ThriveCart account
- Choose the right plan for your needs (Pro Tip! if you’re planning to use upsells or affiliate programs, the Pro plan is worth considering.)
- Set up your basic account settings like payment processors and business information
Step 2: Create your product in ThriveCart
Now it’s time to set up what you’re selling:
- Log into your ThriveCart dashboard
- Click Products and then Add New Product
- Fill in your product details:
- Name
- Price
- Payment options (one-time, subscription, payment plan)
- Thank you page settings
- Delivery method
Step 3: Embedding ThriveCart in WordPress
Here’s where the magic happens. ThriveCart can be embedded directly into your WordPress pages, creating a seamless checkout experience:
- In ThriveCart, get your product’s embed code
- In WordPress, create or edit the page where you want the checkout to appear
- Add an HTML block
- Paste your ThriveCart embed code
- Preview to ensure everything looks right
Pro tip! Test the embedded cart’s appearance at different screen sizes to ensure a great mobile experience.
Enhancing your site’s e-commerce capabilities
ThriveCart isn’t just a checkout system – it’s a full-featured sales platform. Here are some cool features you can use to boost your sales:
- One-click upsells (perfect for offering complimentary services)
- Affiliate program management
- A/B testing for checkout pages
- Custom thank you pages
- Advanced subscription management
Plus, you can integrate these features with your favorite WordPress plugins (including WooCommerce) for even more functionality.
Setting up custom upsells
Let’s talk about one of ThriveCart’s most powerful and popular features: upsells. While ThriveCart makes it easy to use their built-in upsell pages, we suggest creating custom upsell pages on your WordPress site for better branding and control.
Upsells are basically like an automated salesperson, suggesting related purchases that your customers might want to make to go along with the purchase they’re making.
In ThriveCart, you can use the same upsell product across multiple funnels, but here’s the catch: if you’re using custom pages on your website, you’ll need a unique page for each funnel.
Let me break this down with an example:
Let’s say you sell a mini-course and a full course, and you want to offer the same planner upsell option with each. Here’s how to set it up:
For the mini-course funnel:
- In ThriveCart, create your funnel and add the planner upsell.
- Create a custom page on your WordPress site for this specific upsell.
- Enter the URL of your custom page in ThriveCart.
- Add the unique embed code ThriveCart provides to your page.
For the full course funnel:
- Create a separate funnel and add the same planner upsell.
- Create a different custom page on your WordPress site.
- Enter this new URL in ThriveCart.
- Add the new unique embed code to this page.
Pro tip! Don’t try to use the same custom page URL for different funnels – ThriveCart won’t let you save it. If you haven’t set up your custom page correctly, ThriveCart will default to their hosted pages until you fix it.
The good news? If you’re happy using ThriveCart’s built-in upsell page templates, you can skip all this and use the same upsell across multiple products without any extra work on your website.
Monitoring and optimizing your integration
Once your integration is live, it’s important to keep an eye on performance.
Watch your analytics for the new page—in particular, you want to keep an eye on page views, how long people are spending on the page, and bounce rates. If you’re not getting enough eyes on the page, you’ll need to evaluate your current website and SEO to make sure you’re strategically driving traffic and guiding website visitors to make a purchase. If people aren’t spending a lot of time on the page itself or bounce rates are high, you should check the page itself for clarity and sales strategy.
Use this data to continuously optimize your checkout process. Small tweaks can lead to big improvements in sales!
Best practices for a smooth integration
To keep everything running smoothly, you’ll need to keep your WordPress site speedy (adding new sales pages, products, and integrations can slow things down!) Make sure you’re using a good hosting provider and optimizing images.
Now that you’re accepting purchases and buyer data, you’ll also need to step up website security. Keep WordPress themes and plugins updated, get an SSL certificate (if you don’t already have one) and regularly backup your site.
Ready to level up your WordPress site with ThriveCart?
Integrating ThriveCart with WordPress gives you the best of both worlds: a professional, branded website AND a powerful checkout system that converts. You’ll maintain control over your analytics, keep your brand consistent, and provide a smooth experience for your customers.
Let’s make your checkout process seamless!
Ready to integrate ThriveCart with your WordPress site but feeling a bit overwhelmed? We’ve got your back! Book a call now to chat about your new website.