Should I Integrate With a Checkout Tool, a Membership Plugin…or Both?

Note: Thrive Apprentice has a built-in feature to handle membership on your website while offering courses. Therefore, you don’t need to integrate it with an external membership plugin. You can refer to the following documents to manage payments while using Thrive Apprentice.

• Thrive Apprentice – Upgrading From Stripe v1.2 to v1.3
• Linking Thrive Apprentice to External Checkout or Sales Page Using Custom Payment Links

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When setting up a WordPress site to sell courses or memberships, it can be very difficult to know what kind of technical setup you need in order to satisfy your requirements.

You might be asking yourself questions like the following:-

• What’s the best way to take payments?

• Should I integrate with an offsite checkout tool?

• Do I need a membership plugin?

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of setup?

• What is the checkout flow like?

In this article we’ll try and help to help you decide which technical setup is right for you.

But before going into further details about this setup, it’s worth mentioning some of the most important Thrive Apprentice features that you can use when building your online school:

• Thrive Apprentice is a ‘drag & drop’ course content builder, that’s fully customizable.

• You can organize your course into lessons, chapters, and modules that you can publish all at once or schedule for later.

• The course supports text, audio and video lessons and you can also attach resources to your lessons.
  
• Drip lesson content to students based on their behavior and course progress using ‘Drip’ schedules.
  

• Thrive Apprentice also functions as a full membership plugin for WordPress; you can protect and restrict access to your course content with ‘Products’ that you set up directly in Thrive Apprentice.

• Use the ‘Conditional Display’ feature to hide or show content to different users.

Course Platforms, Checkout Tools and Membership Plugins

There are 3 useful components to selling premium content, either as courses or as a membership platform, on your site:-

• Membership platforms (like Wishlist Member, MemberMouse etc.) protect content.

• Payment tools (ThriveCart, SendOwl) manage the processing of payments (Stripe, PayPal) and sales funnels.

• Course platforms (Thrive Apprentice) help you to create and organize beautiful course content.

Your 3 Options for Integrating Thrive Apprentice

• Thrive Apprentice can be used directly with checkout tools (like ThriveCart and SendOwl).

• Alternatively, you may wish to integrate Thrive Apprentice with Membership solutions (such as Membermouse and MemberPress).Finally, it’s also possible to integrate Thrive Apprentice with a membership solution which in turn integrates with a checkout tool!

The setup you choose depends on your business needs.

Let’s take a closer look at each in a little more detail…

Thrive Apprentice + Checkout Tool

With this setup, Thrive Apprentice is used to create your courses and handle access. Your checkout tool is for taking payments. In more detail:-

• Thrive Apprentice will handle everything except payments.

• You create your course content and set up access restrictions inside Thrive Apprentice.

• Everything to do with payments, cancellations, processing refunds and disputes, digital VAT are handled inside the account of your checkout tool and not in Thrive Apprentice.

• Customers make payments offsite (they are directed to the checkout form hosted by your checkout service and redirected back to your site after payment is completed)

• Any changes made inside your checkout tool are communicated to Thrive Apprentice so that access is automatically granted/removed where necessary

Thrive Apprentice + Membership Plugin

With this setup, Thrive Apprentice is used to create your courses. Your membership plugin controls access to your Apprentice courses and integrates with your payment tool of choice.

• Thrive Apprentice handles the content of your courses.

• You create all your module, chapter and lesson content inside Thrive Apprentice

• Your membership tool handles access restrictions to Thrive Apprentice courses (there are various ways of setting this up depending on which membership tool you use)

• Advanced access restriction logic, such as dripping content over time, is handled by your membership plugin.

• Your payment solution is integrated directly with your membership tool, rather than with Thrive Apprentice directly.

• If you run an affiliate program for your courses, your membership tool would usually integrate directly with your affiliate platform of choice.

Should you Integrate Thrive Apprentice with a Checkout Tool or a Membership Plugin?

Thrive Apprentice has built-in features that let you build a membership website. So, you no longer need to integrate it with an external membership plugin.

However, at the time of writing, there were some reasons why you’d want to consider integrating with a membership tool.

What’s the 80/20 Solution to Create my Course and sell it Quickly?

If you just want to create a few courses and charge people either a one-time fee or a membership fee for access to your content, then you don’t need to worry about using a membership plugin.

Simply hook Thrive Architect up to either SendOwl or ThriveCart, create your course content and start taking payments. This is the exact strategy we teach in Course Craft.

Once your business is up and running, you can always move to a membership solution in the future if your requirements dictate.

What Checkout Tools and Membership Plugins does Thrive Apprentice Currently Integrate with?

Click on any of the integrations below to learn more about its capabilities with Thrive Apprentice:-

If you’re still not sure what technical setup you’ll need then we’re happy to advise to the best of our ability. You can open a support conversation here.