ThriveCart doesn’t actually host any of your digital downloads, so we are often asked where to upload your products on ThriveCart by people not understanding that you actually need to use another service to host your digital downloads.
ThriveCart is built to manage payments and access, and with the creation of ThriveCart Learn, the platform can now manage online courses.
(In fact, our own ThriveCart Course is managed on ThriveCart Learn.)
That heavily oversimplifies the complex product that is in fact extremely powerful, but it also highlights what you need to manage yourself – and one of those things is managing the hosting of your digital downloads.
There are two popular ways to deliver your product to your paying customers when using ThriveCart:
Method #1 – Via a download link on the Success page
Using this method you simply add a link on the Success page (which you design within ThriveCart) so users who have purchased the file can click to start the download.
Below is the actual Success page on ThriveCart for a purchase of one of the ThriveCart templates available on another website of mine, MyThriveTemplates.com.
Although not strictly a download link, you can see in the great box I have included a link to import the template into ThriveCart. This is how you would give access to any file you’ve hosted somewhere online.
Method #2 – Via a download link within a ‘Thank You for Buying’ email
This method delivers the download link via email so that the customer always has access to their download in their inbox. This is my preferred method as it dramatically cuts down on customer inquiries asking where their download is if they accidentally navigate away from the Success page after purchasing the product.
Do you see the trend?
Both of these methods require you to use a download link, which points the customer to your file.
This means you need to host your file somewhere.
I personally host my files between Dropbox, Google Drive, and my WordPress host (I use WPX.net). Then when a customer buys a product from me, they get a link to the file which is hosted on one of those platforms.
But won’t people share my download link?
Yeah, that’s possible.
You could spend a few days painstakingly researching how to prevent people from sharing your links, but at the end of the day it’s only going to be a tiny portion of your customers who are tempted to do this, and no matter the protection you use, if someone wants to share your product with people who haven’t purchased it, they will.
Don’t stress about that – just focus on getting more sales. 😉
Hopefully, now you know where to upload product ThriveCart (Hint: You don’t! You upload it onto any other hosting platform of your choice).
