Automatically segment customers into your Thinkific Courses and Bundles with SamCart's App Marketplace!
SamCart's App Marketplace allows you to automatically segment your customers into and out of your Thinkific Courses and Bundles, freeing up time for you to focus on what you love: building fresh content for your customers!
Below, we'll break down how to connect SamCart with Thinkific, and how to create rules allowing you to automate the management of your courses.
NOTE: You'll need a Thinkific Grow Package in order to utilize this connection.
Enabling Welcome Emails in Thinkific
Before we begin, you'll need to make sure that you have Welcome Emails enabled for all the Thinkific Courses and Bundles you're going to be selling through SamCart. This ensures that as soon a customer buys a course from your SamCart page, they're automatically emailed their login credentials.
To toggle these on, head to Thinkific and, on the left side of your screen, click Users (1). In the options that are revealed underneath, click Notifications (2). From here, toggle on welcome emails for all of the Courses and Bundles that you're going to be selling through SamCart:
And you're done! Don't close Thinkific just yet, you'll need some information from within you Thinkific account to complete the connection.
Connecting SamCart With Thinkific
To begin, you'll need to access some basic information from your Thinkific account. From your Thinkific Dashboard, click into Settings (1) on the left side of your screen. Then click Code & Analytics (2) followed by API (3).
When connecting Thinkific with SamCart, you'll need your API Key (4) and Subdomain (5) handy.
Now head over to your SamCart account. Once you're in SamCart, start by clicking over to your the Apps tab in your lefthand marketplace navigation bar to access the App Marketplace.
Once you are in the App Marketplace, you can search for the specific app you want to connect with! Search for Thinkific and click the Install button:
This will bring up a small pop up like the one shown below. Enter your Subdomain and API Key from Thinkific, and click the Connect button.
That's it, Thinkific and SamCart are connected! You will be redirected back to the App Marketplace within SamCart once Thinkific where you can start creating rules for your connection.
Creating Connection Rules
Now that SamCart is connected to Thinkific, you'll need to establish simple rules that tell this connection what to do when certain actions take place in your SamCart Marketplace.
From within the Thinkific connection in the App Marketplace, click on the + Add New Rule button.
This will bring up a side window where you can create rules for this connection! Here you can select the action and trigger to tell this rule what to do.
First, you'll need to select what kind of rule you want to create, a Global Rule or a Product Specific Rule (1). Global Rules will apply to all products in your marketplace, while Product Specific Rules will only apply to the specific products you select.
The next step is to choose the Action (2) for this connection. The action is what will occur within Thinkific when this rule fires! The actions available for this connection are Create Course Enrollment, Create Bundle Enrollment, Expire Course Enrollment and Expire Bundle Enrollment.
Once you've chosen the Action, you will need to select the Course (3) in Thinkific that you want customers to be added to or removed from as part of this rule. If you do not see the course you are looking for, click the Refresh Connection button in the top right corner of the window! Note - If you selected an action related to Bundles instead of Courses, the Course section here will instead be Bundle.
The last thing you need to choose is a Trigger (4) for the rule. This is the event that will occur within SamCart to trigger the Action within Thinkific! NOTE: Each application has different Triggers available. The following are available on Thinkific Connection:
Product Purchased - fires when a product is purchased as a primary product, upsell, order bump, or payment option.
Product Refunded - fires when a refund occurs inside of SamCart for the product.
Product Partially Refunded - fires when a partial refund occurs inside of SamCart for the product.
Subscription Canceled - fires when the Subscription Status turns to "Canceled” or "Delinquent."
Subscription Charged - fires each time your customer completes a successful recurring charge.
Subscription Charge Failed - fires when your customer experiences their first recurring payment failure.
Subscription Delinquent - fires when the Subscription Status turns to "delinquent." Delinquency occurs after 4 failed payments in a row. See more information on the Subscription Saver and Dunning feature here.
Subscription Recovered - fires when your customer is within the Dunning Cycle and has a successful charge.
Subscription Restarted - fires when you manually restart a user's subscription from either the fully delinquent status or canceled status.
Subscription Completed - (for Limited Subscriptions only) fires when a limited subscription has it’s final successful charge.
The final step in creating this rule is clicking the Add Rule (5) button. And we're done! Now you can see your newly created rule in the Thinkific connection within the App Marketplace.
Creating Connection Rules at the Product Level
You can also create rules for a connection from directly within a product! If you are working within a product and wish to create a rule with the Thinkific connection for it, simply visit the product's Apps tab:
From here, click on the blue + Add New Rule button to start creating a rule with Thinkific for this product.
First, you'll need to Select the App or App Instance (1) you are wanting to create a rule for - in this case, you should select your Thinkific connection! The next step is to select any other products you want to add the rule to in the Select Additional Products (2) section. This step is optional and can be left blank if you do not wish to add the rule to any other products.
From here, the rest of the rule setup is exactly the same as when you create a rule from within the App Marketplace! Select the Action (3) for this connection - the action is what will occur within Thinkific when this rule fires! The actions available for this connection are Create Course Enrollment, Create Bundle Enrollment, Expire Course Enrollment and Expire Bundle Enrollment.
Once you've chosen the Action, you will need to select the Course (3) in Thinkific that you want customers to be added to or removed from as part of this rule. If you do not see the course you are looking for, click the Refresh Connection button in the top right corner of the window! Note - If you selected an action related to Bundles instead of Courses, the Course section here will instead be Bundle.
The last thing you need to choose is a Trigger (5) for the rule. This is the event that will occur within SamCart to trigger the Action within Thinkific! NOTE: Each application has different Triggers available. Check out the Creating Connection Rules section above for a full list of Triggers available with the Thinkific connection!
The final step in creating this rule is clicking the Add Rule (6) button. And we're done! Now you can see the rule you have created on the Apps tab of your product:
Custom Field Mapping
First, go to your Thinkific connection within SamCart's App Marketplace.
Press the Refresh Connection button to pull in all custom fields from Thinkific:
Then, scroll down to the Mappings section of the Thinkific connection page and click + Add New Mapping to get started:
This will bring up a side window that will allow you to select the SamCart Custom Field (1) and the Thinkific Custom Field (2) that you'd like to map (you can read more about SamCart Custom Fields here). Once you have selected your custom fields, click Add Mapping (3).
That's it, your mapping is done! You will now be able to see this setup in the Mappings section of your Thinkific connection within the App Marketplace. Note - You can only map SamCart Custom Fields to Thinkific Custom Signup fields that are the Field type of “Text.” All non-text Thinkific custom properties with data cannot be mapped to SamCart custom fields.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: I've set up my connection correctly but nothing is showing up in Thinkific after running a Sandbox Mode/test order.
A: Check the email address you used in your Sandbox Mode/test order. If you used the same email address as the administrative email address in Thinkific, it's likely that the order won't show up. Try again using a different email address.
Q: My connection seems to be functioning properly most of the time, but a customer wasn't enrolled in the correct Course/Bundle seemingly at random. What happened?
A: If a rule fails to fire, there's always a reason. Our system keeps a record of the last 1,000 events that took place in your Marketplace, and they can be viewed by heading to the Thinkific connection within the App Marketplace and scrolling down to the Logs section at the bottom of the page.
Here, you can search for the event in question and check if anything went wrong. 99% of the time the Logs can provide insight into exactly what might've went wrong with that action! The Configuration logs will show you logs related to the configuration of the App Instance (connecting the app, refreshing the app, etc.), and the Action logs will show logs related to actions associated with the rules you have set up for the Thinkific connection.
Q: The Course/Bundle I'm looking for isn't showing up when I try to create a rule. What should I do?
A: If you don't see what you're looking for when creating a rule hit the Refresh Connection button before looking again:
If you created the Course/Bundle after you set up the connection with SamCart for the first time, there's a good chance you'll need to refresh the list in order for it to fetch your current settings.
Q: How can I uninstall, update, or connect a new instance of my Thinkific connection?
A: Head to the Apps tab to access the App Marketplace and select the Thinkific connection. Click on the three dots to the right of the Thinkific connection - this will bring up a few options! The Connect New App Instance button will allow you to connect a new instance of Thinkific (this is great if you have more than one Thinkific account you want to connect to SamCart!). The Change App Credentials button will allow you to update the credentials you are using to connect this instance Thinkific within SamCart. The Uninstall App button will uninstall all instances of the Thinkific app from SamCart, and any rules for that instance of Thinkific will no longer work.
Q: How can I prevent my customers from canceling their subscription inside their Thinkific account?
A: In Thinkific you will need to set your course to Private by clicking on Manage Learning Content and from there selecting the course you would like to set as Private. After selecting your course, click on Course Settings and toggle the course to Private. This will make it so customers cannot manage their billing inside of Thinkific!
Q: When creating a rule, I do not see my course or bundle. What do I do?
A: This is due to connections only showing some of your tags to help it load faster! If you start typing in the name of the tag/list then it'll appear. If you are still not seeing your tags/lists, you might need to “Refresh” the connection.