SendOwl vs Thrivecart 2021

?00:01
In this video I'm going to compare and contrast Thrive Cart versus SendOwl Now these are two software as a service shopping cart platforms They allow you to sell your products online. They're both very easy to use. They're very different and how they're set up and you need somebody to guide you step-by-step to figure out which one is right for you.

00:20
So let's go ahead and waste no time and dive directly into this head-to-head comparison between Thrive Cart and send-out. And if you're more of a reader, I'll also have a link down below to this entire article where we go step-by-step through all the different rounds all the different considerations, you should have as you're going.

00:36
Through it in this video I'm going to give you some of the kind of bullet points the most important aspects in my opinion but if you want to get more detail please be sure to click on the link down below to dive directly into this comparison. We're going to dive through the overview of each software what they are the pros and the cons ease of use pricing all the important things you need to consider when deciding which is the right solution for yourself.

00:58
So let's go ahead and start the first round. I want to call out some of the big features the big things are awesome on both SendOwl and Thrivecart’s platform. So number one on SendOwl three of most important things. I think are awesome about SendOwl. Is their pricing You know if you're just getting started out if you have an absolutely shoestring budget send dollar is going to be an awesome choice for you because you can get started from nine dollars per month Now don't go ahead and stop right now and go directly to the sign up for SendOwl because there's a lot more to unpack when it comes to pricing we'll cover that in just a second.

01:28
But they do have the lowest entry point of the shopping cart solutions we're talking about today. It's also slightly easier to set up a product and get everything up and running on SendOwl than it is in Thrive Card. Part of that is because you just have less options and what you can do, but also it's just very easy to get started.

01:46
Click a few buttons and get a product created also go into the platform just a moment to show you that in detail And lastly if you are a thrive themes user and you use Thrive. Apprentice to sell your courses, they have a very special partnership and integration with SendOwl which makes them kind of a unique player in the space because in most cases what you tend to find is you'll need to have an online course platform and some sort of membership or protection option and the third part being the actual payment processor like to send dollar a thrive card what you get with the unique integration with Thrive Architect.

02:21
Then thrive apprentice all the thrive themes suite of tools is you actually can get rid of that membership protection option and just use SendOwl to protect your courses. Now again a caveat on this it's a very basic protection option. You lose a lot of the flexibility in what you can do with that setup then you could if you had a wish list member which is currently if you're watching this right around the top that I publish it wishlist member doesn't have a lifetime deal.

02:47
Also down the link in the description below. But if your needs are very basic and you want to have the fewest moving parts possible if you use private. Apprentice for your course area SendOwl is a good option It's not my preferred option but it's a good option. On the pros for the thrive card here again on pricing you're going to pay a lot more way upfront, but that's the only thing you're going to pay to them.

03:11
No transaction fees no ongoing maintenance costs or support costs. You get lifetime support lifetime access to the platform for a single price. So now the price is more than $9, so you're gonna pay more for Thrive Cart, but if you are serious about starting a business, you're going to expect to be in business for one year two year three.

03:29
Years down the road right in which case threat can actually become the cheapest option available with it really reasonable price upfront You can also have unlimited products unlimited funnels a lot of a lot more options in thrive cart. You know ascendel we'll see that kind of throttle you on how many products you can have I mean options you can have.

03:48
There's a lot of limitations on the send dollar side. Thrive card throws out all the way unless you just go nuts and do whatever you want to do. Also on the thrive cart side, you have the ability to create up to five up cells and down cells in a specific sales funnel.

04:02
So if they show up on your checkup page, you can have the bumper. Right there Then you can have the upsells in the down cells and you can repeat that process and figure out what is the right combination of upsells and down cells to optimize your revenue as well as making sure your customers stay happy.

04:15
On SendOwl it's extremely limited you have to choose either a bump or an upsell. You can't do both and when it comes to design you're just very very limited on send dollars checkups. I'll show you the templates and a second but you just limited there whereas with Thrive card, they just released their drag and drop page building functionality.

04:34
So you essentially have I'm not gonna say it's like elementary or thrive architect those are you know a whole another. Level but to be able to customize your checkout page in the upsell page with a drag and drop ease of use definitely gives the nod over to thrive cart on the design side as well So just very briefly I'm here inside.

04:51
I've SendOwl dashboard to add a product. It really couldn't be easier. You click on add a product. You decide what type of product it is. It's individual digital product service a subscription or a bundle. Let's just make a simple product here. You can decide if it's a digital download which is easy.

05:06
It's just a link up your PDF for your zip file right there, and you're good to go. If there's a redirect where you take the new specific page, etc. Let's just say we're gonna sell a simple PDF here. So call this sample PDF I come here to attach my file and I can either enter a URL so let's just do that for simplicity sake here.

05:23
We'll say that when they buy they get access to my fantastic website and you can give it a price for the product let's say it's a $47 product and we can boom create the product. Now in no other software, would you be done right now? Like there should be hundreds more steps right to kind of setting it all up.

05:42
But we'll SendOwl you're kind of done at this point. You actually have a link right now where you can share this on social media, and if they go to that link. It's going to take them directly to a checkout process. Now, it's hideous, right? Like it's not a good-looking check-out process, but you could technically accept payments directly here.

06:01
Now you know linking up with all the stuff and linking to PayPal and everything else that you want to set up your account with you can use Stripe you can use a bit payout in the blog post in the description below. There's a full list of all the payment processors that it supports.

06:14
So there's a lot you can do with it. You can also embed this onto your blog so you can take this little HTML code and it'll put that kind of ugly looking check out on your website. So there's a lot to like here. If you're if you're absolutely, Avoided.

06:31
In tech as much as possible this could be a pretty cool option because it really takes a lot of that stress away of setting things up. Now, let's take a quick look at ThriveCard to show you some of the different options there. Alright, so now we're here in the Thrive Card Dashboard.

06:46
This is one of my sample accounts. So if I come in here to my products, I can create a product and it's very similar to send. Al's creation process where I say, okay a digital or physical let's create it. I can name it so I'll say awesome. Site. Give it a description.

07:04
URL, if you want to change with a checkout page goes to already more options here, right? Tester Live, let's just say test set a price for it more ways of setting pricing. So there's definitely more options in Thrive Cart which could add some complexity but it also allows you to grow more with the platform, right?

07:23
Customizing invoices all these things are kind of dug inside the SendOwl settings area. Bump offers again we didn't see that when we're setting up SendOwl payment processors let's do that real quick affiliate program I prefer as we're going through this process just to show you. I prefer this setup where you're walking through the entire wizard from start to finish as you're building out your products.

07:46
The reason why I prefer this is because sometimes with send dollar other platforms you're in a constant kind of subconscious worry of did I miss a step. You know, should I have gone to the settings area to set up my email integrations or things like that? You understand like when you start working through creating several products, or if you do.

08:05
This for a client especially you want to make sure that your checklist is checked off as you're going through and Thrivecart’s set up with the step-by-step wizard definitely allows you to do that you're going through every single step as you need it. And it's really hard to miss something here.

08:21
Okay, so we've set this up. Now, let's talk about the design area. So kind of really where Thrivecart starts to really win here is when it comes down to designing your checkout solution you have several different templates and pretty much unlimited flexibility with Thrive cart. So as I click in here, I can choose either multi-step single.

08:40
To step a full sales page and embeddable cart or a pop-up card So even if I just want to keep it simple and go with a single step checkout, I can launch the editor and I can add in testimonials wherever I want them to be whatever format three across that doesn't make sense there, but maybe we do something like this add your testimonials in add whatever fields you need just by clicking on okay, yes.

09:03
I want to have the first and last name boom. I've got the first and last name there. A lot of flexibility. I not only on the cart page, but also on the success page basically the thank you page, you might want to. Add a thank you video up top here to say hey thank you for your repurchase here's what happens next even questions do this a lot of clarity you can get by setting it up with ThriveCart drag and drop page builder.

09:28
Now as we click over to send dial we take a look here as well I'm going to go into the settings which is where you actually set all this stuff up and I can choose a checkout template here as well. So here underneath the checkout templates, I can either do kind of that simple, you know that not so pretty one where you can put your stuff in there or you can do the marketers check out which looks slightly nicer.

09:49
So I can preview what the marketers check out would look like and you see you get a bit more of a full page checkout experience where you can maybe have custom fields and an email and some other stuff here, but again if you Want to have a testimonial you're out of luck if you want to do certain things you're out of luck in general if even you want to cut change the color scheme you're kind of out of luck so if design is something that's important to you if you want to be able to measure and optimize how your checkout pages performing based on what the price point is and a lot of different aspects like that, you're going to want to have a bit more horsepower underneath the hood and that's really where I've cart comes into play.

10:28
So as we kind of scroll down in the review ease of use, it's a close one because SendOwl when just to create a bare minimum product it is easier. It's You are clicks I give it full credit for that But it also forces you to go into your settings area to look at your checkout templates It also forces you to go to the marketing tab to set up your email marketing platforms.

10:49
There's other things you have to do to make sure that everything set up correctly where thrive cart while it could take you a few more minutes to set up that initial product when you're done with that process, you know, you've done it right because it's walked you through a step-by-step.

11:02
I really appreciate that. Now, let's talk about pricing because this is going to be the one that's really going to be the big decision-maker the big driver for a lot of you because the, Both software as a service platform They're both very easy to use relatively They both handled taxes amazingly which having touched on when it comes at European Union value-added tax VAT, both SendOwl and thrive cart are set up right out of the gate to take care of that on all its own.

11:29
It gives you these fantastic reports you can send to your accountant and you're good to go. So they're both great on that other platforms don't give as much care to the VAT side of things. If you try to run a sustainable business, is there to last for a while you want to take care of the taxes as well, right?

11:45
So let's just talk pricing. For a moment here You know I'm not gonna lie but SendOwl can save you some money So they have several different plans they're actually really confusing because they've got four different pricing tiers, but also three different pricing structures. They've kind of self-hosted a subscription a standard.

12:02
Most people are going to use their standard pricing and what you need is going to be in the different tiers here. So the basic unit of 10 products with very limited customization all those checkout options. I showed you earlier are not on the basic plan, you'll need to go to at least two the standard plan, which is $15 per month, which gives you 30 product.

12:22
S but no subscription If you want to have a membership or do recurring billing for anything you're going to need to go up to their premium plan which will get you kind of what you would expect out of a checkout platform 100 products maybe that's overkill because to me, I would rather have maybe 50 products, but maybe be able to have five or six different recurring billings six different subscription levels.

12:45
Here you get one for $24 a month. Not a fan of that. Upsells they're limited and SendOwl you basically have let me show you real fast. So here underneath the marketing area, you can create. Upsell so I'll add this upsell and we'll call this a six-month five-month supply whatever.

13:03
Let's say you're selling supplements. States is enabled that's where you want to turn on or off now here's where the limitations really start to come into play you have to choose whether you want the upsell to be offered before the checkout in other words a bump offer or after the payment which is a one-click upsell I would rather not have to choose right?

13:23
I would rather be able to have a bump offer and then also offer something after the fact here you kind of have to choose. I do like they have a replacement product or if it's adding on extra products, so if you want to go from a one dollar trial all the way to an annual subscription plan you have the option to do some of those things here and then just a lot of the different rules you can set up but here's kind of the downside here is your level of customization, you have to make your upsell your own you can say product offered, you know, this is the product and then you have a little bit of text so we'll say want to upgrade to this.

13:59
And you can add image so it's upload a quick image here so this is pretty much what you're going to get it's a checkout want to upgrade to this or whatever text you put in a little bubble, you can have one image and a yes or a no button now it could still be effective it could still help you increase your revenue but it simply is not enough to be able to customize and add, you know a nice video in here you can add HTML but trust me I've done it and it ends up becoming a mess when it comes to mobile responsiveness different screen sizes picking the right size of your video, it's an Mess so definitely limited you're also limited to only one upsell when you're selling a product no down sells nothing else in there it's very much a bare bones feature set there now if you compare that to what you go thrive part, you get the full drag and drop capabilities of adding text having you can make it a very long page if you'd like to have a video play and float along with you after going through the story the upsell and then have you know, much more customizable colors and branding all these things that can only help increase your conversions there now when it comes to support we have experience with both of Them actually the first products we've sold in my my wife and my first business we sold through SendOwl that was the first platform we use so when I'm giving you know pros and cons of each one.

15:20
I've actually used both these we've sold thousands and thousands of dollars through each platform. I will say that SendOwl and write card they're both very simple tools, they work really well, you're not gonna have that many bugs with either one of them so I don't use the support that much but when I have had conversations with each team, I've just personally had a better experience.

15:39
I've had more personalized help and feedback on the thrive cart side than I have. On the SendOwlside but if you keep things simple you may not need to use them at all moving on to integrations this is a very important topic if you want to you know have a dynamic business and let it grow over time so you want to take a look at the integrations they both have a payment processors are pretty much the some the same across the board paid health stripe interestingly send all has bit pay which I think you can sell with bitcoin.

16:06
I don't do that myself. I'm not into cryptocurrency and you have Authorize.net on thrive card side email marketing platforms, they both have a good list here you can review on the blog post membership platforms thrive card. Wins first. Sure because everything on the send-all side are only WordPress based integrations whereas with Thrive Curry can also add in teachable and several others that you have bit more flexibility with.

16:33
You also have to do that zapier on both sides exactly areas apier, but then just in general fulfillment services you can self physical products, you can sell print on demand t-shirts you can sell CDs and physical books. So if you want to do a book funnel or any of these a very popular types of selling methods, you'll just have a better option a better set of tools on the thrive part side.

16:54
So, That is a pretty good overview between SendOwl and thrive card I definitely do give Thrive card an A+ right now for the one time payment with their continued updates. They're just it really exciting platform. They're a simple platform, but they don't limit you with their simplicity, they allow you to kind of work really well with it.

17:12
I also have a bonus offer. Click on down to the blog post and read all about that. I've got seven exclusive bonuses with Thrive Cart SendOwl is also a good solution. I give it a C plus that might sound kind of negative but there's a lot of competition in this space and I simply haven't seen the SendOwl keep up and Add additional functionality over time You know their affiliate program is there It's basic The right cards is there and it's excellent.

17:37
On the upsells and down cells send all can do a bump it can do an upsell but they don't look very good, they're not very customizable and I don't see them really helping you increase your revenue that much whereas the right cart it's designed from the ground up for that advanced selling functionality.

17:52
There are two cases in which I would recommend you go for SendOwl over thrive card case number one is you simply can't afford it and you don't think of your business as being that sustainable. Investment point yet right Like if you don't know if you really want to do this and you want to just give something a try sure try SendOwl try it for you know 30 days see what it works for you but I will warn you that when you're dealing with payment processing and especially if you want to have something where it's like a membership a monthly subscription deal, you don't want to swap out every other month from one's platform to the other.

18:27
So I would recommend you if you can afford it that go with the platform is gonna grow with you not the one you're gonna outgrow within the next few months or so as you start to get success in your business. Also any, One of the features of the right product they're better affiliate program they're upsells are down sells the different things you can do here will easily make up the additional money that that platform costs upfront.

18:51
Additionally to do the math after a couple of years, you're gonna be in the same position either way and then after that private car is going to be an easier investment for you. The other scenario that SendOwl could win over thrive cart is that they have that tight integration with Thrive themes and I'll do a video where I kind of update that process and show you how all that works together how you can protect your courses using SendOwll, I will warn you though.

19:14
Well it is a nice and a tight integration it's still is too limited for me to heavily recommend. You know, if all you want to do is sell a simple course it works well for that. But if you want to be able to have a more dynamic experience, you're still going to want to add in that membership plug-in like a wish list member or a member press to be able to kind of tie everything together have a community aspect have just been account area for people to see a lot of details in that.

19:42
I strongly recommend Thrive part if you can afford it. If you cannot get started to SendOwl make some money, Realize a few months later that I was right and then once you have that profit go ahead and invest in the right solution at that time. I'm John from income mesh calm.

19:56
I hope this was helpful for you be sure to subscribe like hit the bell do a lot fun stuff and I'll see you guys in the next video take care.