I recently moved over to ThriveCart and am I loving it overall. I particularly love that it only required ONE lifetime payment vs a monthly or annual fee like I was paying with SamCart before. But it’s not just about the savings; it’s also a great platform!
I use ConvertKit for my email marketing, which I’m also a big fan of, and I have written posts about it before. However, recently I discovered an issue – in the integration between the two – that posed to be a serious problem…
When a subscriber on your list in Convertkit has previously unsubscribed… but then purchases something NEW via ThriveCart… they need to be resubscribed in order to get related product emails and updates. ThriveCart’s integration handles tags but it won’t reactivate previously cancelled subscribers. So what to do?
I had a subscriber – let’s call them Lily – who unsubscribed, what ConvertKit calls “cancelled,” from my list way back in 2018.
Recently, thanks to my book launch, Lily purchased something new from me. However, I happened to notice she was still marked as “cancelled” in ConvertKit. Meaning, she wasn’t going to receive any of the emails or the updates related to the product that she just purchased. So, this was clearly a problem.
Note: She was tagged, which ThriveCart does to ConvertKit really well… but it still was showing her as “cancelled.”
Now, this is a known issue with ConvertKit. Their stance is if someone has unsubscribed at some point, then they need to resubscribe through one of your forms to be reinstated as a confirmed subscriber. But this doesn’t consider the fact that people aren’t just resubscribing they’re buying and that action is what needs to reactivate them.
The thing is this isn’t just a ConvertKit issue. Several shopping carts are integrated with ConvertKit to handle this, but ThriveCart isn’t one of them. This doesn’t mean that ThriveCart is out. No, it just means we need to find a workaround, but I could not for the life of me, figure out how to do it!
I’ll get back to that in a second, but first I want to address:
Should you be having this issue on the ConvertKit side, regardless of the shopping cart used… one solution is to manually resubscribe people.
You can create a form, that doesn’t require a double opt-in, and you can do it yourself. Meaning, you’re creating what I call an “admin-only” form, and resubscribing them. They don’t have to know about any of this happening. This action will then update their profile in ConvertKit as confirmed, enabling them to actively receive your emails again. Obviously, do this with integrity.
However, when it comes to identifying people in your ThriveCart purchases who are cancelled on your list, it’s impossible… without literally downloading a CSV from each platform and comparing them. This is actually how I stumbled upon this. I was doing something else, but noticed one of the customers was still marked as cancelled in convertkit. I would have never known that until somebody had potentially complained that they hadn’t got an email or something like that.
There’s no straightforward way to identify the intersection of people who had purchased tags from ThriveCart AND are marked as “Cancelled.” It would be cool if there was a way to create segments or a rule to filter and cross-reference those who are cancelled/unsubscribed… but there’s not. Regardless, having to manually check and re-add is far from ideal.
I searched high and low, finding countless forum posts of fellow ThriveCart and ConvertKit users, all having the same problem, all to no avail. I even contacted ConvertKit support about it, but that was unfortunately a very unhelpful conversation. I mean, I love ConvertKit but their support chat didn’t help and was more frustrating and time-consuming because even though I was in chat support, it took a shocking two and a half hours for anyone to get back to me in the chat.
Long story short their answer didn’t lead me to the solution… which is the one you are about to get!
So, at this point, I am deep in the rabbit hole of trying to find a solution. Possibly a similar rabbit hole that landed you here today? Though, hopefully you found this post on your first or second search and I’ve saved you hours of anguish that it took me to search and then finally create a solution that works.
The key is that if the shopping carts API can push the purchase info over to ConvertKit, then it will automatically reconfirm the subscriber.
ThriveCart’s integration doesn’t do this, and judging by the mountains of forum posts and discussions I’ve come across, they are well aware that’s an issue. Nevertheless, their integration is not currently passing the purchase information through. Hence the glaring need for a workaround.
I had a hunch that Zapier may be the key to solving this puzzle, but there was no Zap already created that I could find. And given that it’s a little bit more advanced, you know, we’re dealing with like API calls, I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to crack it. I’m pretty geeky, but API/JSON stuff is next level for me.
After like three attempts with API code, trying Code by Zapier, and all these different things (I even tried ChatGPT to help me with it)… I just kept getting errors.
The good news is I finally discovered a solution and was able to make it work for ThriveCart.
I put the Zap to the test with a Cancelled subscriber, and I could hardly believe it when it worked like a charm! Which is why I am so excited to share it with you:
Use this Zapier template, customizing it with your ThriveCart and ConvertKit account info. Then you should be all set!
When you test it, you simply need to see that there’s purchase information showing up in Convertkit.
Remember, tags are being covered by ThriveCart’s rules (if you set those up), but it’s the purchase information that we need Zapier to pass through to ConvertKit for every single ThriveCart sale.
In ConvertKit, find the email address of the record that Zapier is testing. As long as Zapier is passing “Purchases” information, and you can see that it’s creating the purchase info under that section in ConvertKit, that will be the sign that it will reactivate and reconfirm any formerly “cancelled” subscriber.
Here’s where to see this in Convertkit, on the subscriber’s detail page:
Woohoo!
I really hope this helps you save a lot of time and anguish that I had for hours and hours of not being able to find a solution. I hope this helps you! Do let me know. Give a like on the video, leave a comment, or subscribe.
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All the best to you in all of your sales on ThriveCart and your emails on ConvertKit!