How to Use Thrivecart and Squarespace Together (Sell Products, Courses & Checkout Integration)
Thinking about using Thrivecart and Squarespace together but not sure how to integrate them or what’s possible? Let’s dive in…
As a Squarespace website designer of 10+ years, I often find myself integrating different tools with Squarespace for my clients, and Thrivecart is one that I also use myself for selling and hosting my online courses!
I’ve used both Squarespace and Thrivecart together for years and love how simple it is to connect both tools to create a seamless experience for selling products online.
Table of Contents
Watch this as a video or keep scrolling to read…
*Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links for both Squarespace and Thrivecart, which means I get a small commission if you sign up to either of these tools with my link. Thank you in advance if you do :)
What is Thrivecart?
Thrivecart* is one of the leading checkout platforms that offers a range of features helping online business owners sell digital (and physical) products online.
It’s known for being one the best e-commerce options available particularly for selling digital products, online courses and programs, due to its advanced ‘sales funnel’ options.
Some of my favourite Thrivecart features include:
Multiple payment options for customers
Thrivecart integrates with most popular payment gateways (eg. Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Square, AfterPay, Klarna and more).Bump offers, upsells and downsells (a full checkout ‘sales funnel’)
Thrivecart lets you add multiple steps to your product checkouts, offering additional products and add-ons for people to add while they’re purchasing, increasing order value and conversions.Countdown timers
Adding a countdown timer to the checkout page can automatically ‘expire’ the page for you and redirect elsewhere on a certain date or time or based on an ‘evergreen’ timer that’s individual to each customer!Advanced affiliate programs
Allowing you to scale your business with affiliates selling your products for you.Tax and VAT handling
Thrivecart offers in-depth tax collection and calculation for you (including for digital product VAT for UK and EU sellers).Integrating easily with Zapier and other tools
If you want to be able to connect your ecommerce to other tools, such as email marketing or team communication, lots already have Thrivecart integrations, but Zapier also offers a huge range of triggers and actions with Thrivecart.Lifetime pricing offer! No subscription needed 🤯
One of the craziest things about Thrivecart is they currently have a lifetime pricing offer* that means you only pay a one-time fee for their tool, with no ongoing subscription!
What is Thrivecart Learn?
As well as its checkout tool, Thrivecart also offers the ‘Learn’ add on, which allows you to build and host online courses all within the platform (which then connects seamlessly to the checkouts so that students can access their course immediately after purchase with no other connections needed!).
I’ve recently moved my courses over to Thrivecart and love how simple it is to have everything in one place!
Thrivecart Learn makes it easy to create as many courses as you like, with several different layout options and lessons that can include text, video, images, embedded code and more.
Plus, you can even choose to ‘drip feed' course content (so that it’s not available all at once) or display specific content to certain students depending on their ‘tags’ (which you can define at the checkout).
This is a great option for hosting your online courses within one all in one tool, and is included in Thrivecart’s Lifetime offer* too 🤩. I used to pay over £1000 each YEAR just for course hosting, whereas now my bill is down to £0.
Wait, doesn’t Squarespace have ecommerce and online courses?
Squarespace* is a website building platform where you can design and host beautiful, professional websites, and YES, they do offer an ecommerce add-on that allows you to sell products (physical or digital) and a ‘digital products’ add-on where you can build online courses, digital products and memberships and sell these all from within Squarespace as well.
So you may be thinking, why would I need to use Squarespace AND Thrivecart, when Squarespace has everything built-in anyway?…
Why use Squarespace and Thrivecart together (+ the benefits of Thrivecart’s checkouts)
There are a lot of reasons why you might want to use both Squarespace and Thrivecart together for selling your digital products, online courses, programs or services!
Selling on Squarespace requires extra subscription & transaction costs
Whether you want to sell physical or digital products on Squarespace*, you’ll need to upgrade your website hosting subscription to a higher plan and pay more monthly, OR have up to 9% transaction fees taken from each sale. Meanwhile, Thrivecart currently has a one-time payment offer*, with no additional transaction fees or monthly/annual subscription needed!
Squarespace’s ecommerce lacks good ‘sales funnel’ features
All those features I mentioned above that Thrivecart does so well (eg. order bumps, upsells, downsells, countdown timers, affiliate programs etc)? Squarespace’s ecommerce or digital product add-ons doesn’t come with any of these. This is mainly because Squarespace is primarily a website building platform (and physical product ecommerce platform) FIRST, rather than Thrivecart which is a specialist in sales funnels for digital products.
Squarespace’s ecommerce and ‘digital product’ add-ons don’t integrate easily with other tools
I love Squarespace as a website builder, but because it is a ‘closed’ platform where they offer 'all-in-one’ solutions for everything (such as email marketing, membership sites, ecommerce etc), it doesn’t offer many integration options with other tools if you don’t want to use their built-in ones. They also don’t offer very many connection options to Zapier to help with this, whereas Thrivecart has LOADS!
Thrivecart isn’t a website builder - so you still need a website!
So it sounds like I’m super ‘PRO THRIVECART!!’ right now, but it’s not a simple ‘either / or’ situation. Thrivecart can’t be a full replacement for Squarespace, because it isn’t a website building platform. If you want a beautiful, professional looking website, you still need Squarespace! Which is why it’s best to use the two together.
Is Squarespace or Thrivecart better for selling physical products?
As you can see, if you’re selling digital products, online courses, services, or the occasional one-off physical product, Thrivecart is a better checkout option that you can use alongside your Squarespace website.
However, what if you’re wanting to sell lots of physical products online? For example an online jewellery shop or a clothing boutique?
Realistically, this isn’t what Thrivecart specialises in, so it doesn’t offer a lot of the extra features & functionality that an expanding e-commerce store would need. It also isn’t very easy to upload, add or edit products in bulk or manage stock. Therefore I don’t usually recommend this for most physical product stores!
Meanwhile Squarespace* makes e-commerce for physical products much easier to manage, and makes it quicker and easier to create and update them, so you can use the in-built e-commerce feature for this instead.
How to embed a Thrivecart checkout on a Squarespace sales page
Create a product sales or landing page in Squarespace
Create a new page in Squarespace and design it how you like with all the information about your digital product, online course, program or service! Include as much detail as you can to make your product really appealing.
You can use buttons throughout the page encouraging people to click to ‘buy now’ or ‘join’, or leave space for an embedded checkout that we’ll set up in Thrivecart…
Set up your product in thrivecart
Once you’ve set up your Thrivecart account, head to Products and create a product, filling in the name and information about what you want to sell. Here you can select what payment processors you want to use, the pricing, optional bump offers, and choose how the product is fulfilled (ie. is it a course that they’ll get added to, a digital product they get sent etc.)
Design the checkout page in Thrivecart
Depending on whether you want to embed the checkout onto your sales page, or link to it from buttons, select which type of checkout you want to create and start designing it how you’d like it!
The great thing about Thrivecart is how customiseable these checkouts are; you can choose what information you want to collect, and whether you want it split across multiple pages or all done at once etc.
link to the checkout with a button or modal pop-up
If you want to have the checkout pop-up or open a new page when a button on your Squarespace page is clicked, you can do this with the various Thrivecart checkout design templates. Save the design and then copy the checkout url to paste into your button settings easily, or copy the modal pop-up button embed code and paste into a code block in Squarespace.
…OR Embed the thrivecart checkout on the squarespace page
Or if you choose an ‘inline’ embedded checkout design, you can copy the embed code in Thrivecart and go back into Squarespace. Add a ‘code block’ where you want the checkout to appear and paste in the code! Now, when you save and exit your Squarespace page, you’ll see the checkout load on the pages.
How to integrate Thrivecart into Squarespace product pages
If you’re setting up a mini shop of digital products, rather than one-offs with longer, specially created sales-pages, it might be easier for you to create the products using Squarespace’s e-commerce product pages instead.
If you do this, you won’t have to pay the Squarespace ecommerce subscription, don’t worry, as you won’t actually be usuing their checkout system!
Set up your products in Squarespace
Create a ‘Store’ in Squarespace and start adding your products here. You can add images, descriptions, pricing and categories etc. but you will just want to make sure that the pricing matches with the products you create in Thrivecart!
Set up your products in Thrivecart
Create products in Thrivecart as I explained above; filling in the details, pricing, payment options and how the product/course/service will be fulfilled, before designing the checkout page (which template you pick will depend on whether you want to embed the checkout directly on the product page, or create a button for it to link to).
Use code to remove the ‘add to cart’ buttons
Copy and paste the custom code below into your Squarespace website’s ‘Custom CSS’ area, and this will hide all the ‘add to cart’ buttons on your site, so that people can’t actually use your Squarespace checkout and ecommerce system when they view your products.
.sqs-add-to-cart-button-wrapper { display: none!important; }.product-quantity-input {
display: none !important;
}
Replace with a button or embedded Thrivecart checkout
Once those buttons are removed, you can go in to each product page in Squarespace and add a new button that links to your Thrivecart checkout OR go into the ‘additional information’ area in the product details, add a code block, and embed the checkout right there on the page.
Managing payments, customer notifications and reports in Thrivecart
If you choose to use Thrivecart* as your checkout, integrating with Squarespace* as above, just remember that all your payments, customer notifications and sales reports will therefore all be managed within Thrivecart (NOT in Squarespace). So don’t go poking around your Squarespace website back-end wondering where all your orders are!
In Thrivecart you can easily customise customer invoices and receipt emails, view customer information and issue refunds, and find reports about your sales data.
Save ££ with this Thrivecart lifetime offer!
Right now if you use my sign up link, you can get an unlimited lifetime ThriveCart account* (including online course builder) for a one-time payment of $495, with no recurring subscriptions!
I cannot shout about this offer enough as it has saved me £1000s each year on subscription costs I’d be paying to Squarespace and my previous course hosting platform, so well worth the investment.
