Hacking Thrivecart for Anticapitalist Business
Thrivecart is an amazing software, and it has made it possible to grow my business so that I’m making enough money to survive and thrive (no pun intended.) I use it as my checkout software and I host my online courses there.
It’s designed in an intensely capitalistic way, intended to maximize your profits and squeeze every drop out of your potential customers. Obviously, this isn’t how I’m using it. It has some amazing functionality that can be hacked for anticapitalist means, and I want to tell you about how I’ve done that. I’m also dropping my affiliate link here so if you sign up for Thrivecart, they’ll give me a kickback. Unfortunately they don’t offer an affiliate discount to customers, so it’s the same price for you whether you use my link or not. Here’s my affiliate link:
https://bearhebert--checkout.thrivecart.com/thrivecart-standard-account/
Payment plans
You can set up payment plans on Thrivecart to increase financial accessibility for your customers. For many folks, the problem isn’t that they’ll never have the money to afford your services, but that they don’t have it all in one lump sum, so payment plans can make it easier for them to sign up to work with you anyway.
I never charge more for payment plans! Even though that’s a very common practice in businesses across the board, I refuse to do it. It’s normalized because we live in a system where we’re taught that as business owners, we need to protect ourselves from our clients, so charging a higher rate for payment plans is one way to do that.
The result of charging more for payment plans is that people who already have enough money are rewarded with lower rates, and people who have less money are penalized with a higher cost. If you’re worried about the extra admin labor that managing payment plans creates, I encourage you to do the math on what you need to be paid to compensate you for that time, and then distribute that into your overall payment structure. So rather than charge 10 percent more for payment plans, charge everyone 5 percent more. This allows people who have more money to help offset the financial cost of your business offering payment plans.
As anticapitalist businesses, we can make choices that are more humane and equitable for everyone, and no-interest payment plans are one way to do that.
Thrivecart makes it super easy to have multiple payment plan options, and will automatically bill payment-plan customers on the same day each month. It also initiates automatic re-billing if a payment happens to be declined. For my most recent online course, I offer 2-, 3-, and 6-month payment plans that customers can self-select into at checkout. Then Thrivecart manages the rest!
Solidarity discounts
For a majority of my offerings as an anticapitalist business owner, I have some discounted spots available for people who can’t afford the full rate. Thrivecart makes managing this super easy.
I never want to have to vet customer’s eligibility for solidarity discounts, so instead, I provide lots and lots of information for people to be able to make an informed decision about how much they should pay. Then I have an array of discount codes that people can choose to apply to their order at checkout. This way, they automatically have access to the course without having to jump through hoops, and I don’t waste time trying to determine who is most worthy or valid.
Thrivecart allows you to create as many discount codes as you want. You can set them at a fixed amount or a percentage off. They can be set to be applied to all your products or only certain products. This makes it so easy to create the financial accessibility I’m committed to as an anticapitalist business owner without creating a ton more admin work for myself.
You can also limit the number of times a code can be used. So if you’ve got 2 half price spots available for a more limited offering, for instance, the discount codes can be used on a first-come first-served basis, and after that, the codes won’t work anymore, signalling to your customers that all the solidarity spots have been used.
Sliding Scale
As mentioned above, Thrivecart lets you create as many discount codes as you want. So while there isn’t a “choose your own price” option (yet!), you can hack Thrivecart to make a sliding scale pricing structure happen. To do this, you would set the price of the item as the top of the sliding scale, then set up scaled discounts down to the bottom of your scale. For example, if you have a service that’s sliding scale $15-150, you could set up discounts at 10 percent off, 20 percent off, 30 percent off, etc, all the way down to 90 percent off, to let people pay $150 (full price), $135 (10 percent off), $120 (20 percent off) $105 (30 percent off) all the way to $15 (90 percent off).
This isn’t a perfect sliding scale where the customer can choose their own exact price, but I find that this kind of tiered pricing serves the same purpose of creating financial accessibility and autonomy for the customer, while minimizing the labor it takes for you as the business owner to provide that access.
Here’s my affiliate link for Thrivecart:
https://bearhebert--checkout.thrivecart.com/thrivecart-standard-account/
And for Thrivecart Pro:
https://bearhebert--checkout.thrivecart.com/thrivecart-pro-account/
I teach an online course about pricing and financial accessibility for anticapitalist businesses.