Automatically segment customers into your Thinkific Courses and Bundles with SamCart's Integration Engine.
This guide includes screenshots from a previous user interface and experience of the SamCart platform. For a tour through the new place to connect to other platforms, please reference this guide here: App Marketplace
SamCart's Integration Engine 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 use this integration.
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 Support Your Students (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, however...
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, we'll need our API Key (4) and Subdomain (5) handy.
Open a new browser tab and head to your SamCart Dashboard.
Once you're in SamCart, start by clicking over to your Marketplace Settings and, on the left-hand side of your screen, selecting Integrations.
Here, under the Integration Setup tab, you'll see a list of all your active integrations that are connected via the Integration Engine. To add a new Thinkific integration, click the New Integration button:
Clicking New Integration will prompt a box to appear which will walk you through the steps required to complete the integration. Select Thinkific (1) and click Next Step (2):
Next, SamCart will ask you to name the integration (1). This is just an internal label, and can be anything you'd like as long as it doesn't already appear in your Integrations list. You'll also want to open copy and paste in both your Site URL (2) and API Key (3) from the other browser tab you opened earlier.
Lastly, hit Save Integration (4) and you're done! SamCart is officially "connected" to Thinkific:
Once Thinkific is successfully integrated, it will appear in the Integration Setup tab:
Now we're ready to create some Integration Rules! Below, we'll go over the two types of Integration Rules in SamCart.
Creating Integration Rules at the Product Level
Now that SamCart is "connected" to Thinkific, you'll need to establish simple rules that tell the Integration Engine what to do when certain actions takes place in your SamCart Marketplace.
Head over to your Product and click into the Integrations tab (1), then click New Rule (2).
First, you’ll need to decide what action you want to perform on your integration. An action is the functionality available in an Integration you are connected to. In the Integration dropdown, select your connected Integration you'd like to set up a rule for. Then select the Integration specific Action.
Once you have your Integration and Action selected, click on Next Step.
Next, you’ll need to select a trigger. A trigger is the event inside of your SamCart Marketplace that tells the Integration Engine it’s time to make something happen in a connected application.
In the first dropdown on the second step, you will want to select either eCommerce or Courses. eCommerce rules will apply to actions on your product pages, while Courses triggers will be anything related to the Courses app. The available triggers in the dropdown will be specific to the selected integration. In this example, we’ll use the Product Purchased trigger as it’s the most common.
Select Product Purchased from the drop-down menu and click Next Step:
NOTE: Each application has different Actions available. The following are available on Thinkific Integration
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.
In this example, we'll use the Product Purchased trigger as it's the most common.
Select Product Purchased from the drop-down menu and click Next Step:
In the following window, we'll establish the specific action we want the rule to perform. First, select your Thinkific integration (1) from the first drop-down menu. Your integrations will be sorted using the internal label you chose when you connected Thinkific for the first time.
Next, choose an Action (2) you'd like the rule to trigger inside of Thinkific. The available Thinkific Actions are:
- Create Course Enrollment
- Expire Course Enrollment
- Create Bundle Enrollment
- Expire Bundle Enrollment
In this In this example, we're choosing Create Course Enrollment, which will enroll all new customers for this Product in a Course in Thinkific. When you're done, click Next Step (3).
Lastly, we need to choose which Course the Integration Engine will enroll your new customers in. For this example, we're going to enroll all of our new customers for this Product in the "Course Two" Course, which was created in Thinkific.
Choose the destination from the drop-down menu (1) and click Submit (2):
And we're done! Now, anyone who purchases this Product will be enrolled in the "Course Two" Course in Thinkific.
We strongly recommend creating Expire Course/Bundle Enrollment rules that automatically remove customers from Thinkific Courses/Bundles upon Subscription Cancellation, Refund, Delinquency, etc.
Creating Global Integration Rules
Global Rules aren't too different from Product-Level Integration Rules, except for the fact that they're triggered by every Product in your Marketplace. For example, if you'd like to send an HTTP POST to your Notify URL whenever a customer purchases any of your SamCart Products, you'd want to create a Global Product Purchased Rule.
To create a Global Rule in SamCart, head back to your Marketplace's Integration Settings.
Here, click on the Global Rules tab (1) and select New Rule (2):
Once you've done that, the steps to creating a Global Rule are identical to that of a Product-Level Integration Rule. Reference the "Creating Integration Rules at the Product Level:" section above for a detailed breakdown on how to proceed.
After your Global Rule is created, it will appear under the Global Rules tab:
Custom Field Mapping
First, go to the Integration Setup tab in the Integration Engine and complete two actions.
Press the Refresh icon (1) to pull in all custom fields from Thinkific and then click the Mapping gears icon (2) to open the mapping popup.
Click +Add Custom Field Mapping to select which SamCart Custom Field & Thinkific Custom Signup Field you want to map.
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 integration 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 integration 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 an integration rule fails to fire, there's always a reason. The Integration Enginekeeps a record of the last 1,000 integration events that took place in your Marketplace, and they can be viewed by heading to Marketplace Settings > Integrations > Logs.
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.
Q: The Course/Bundle I'm looking for isn't showing up when I try to create an integration rule. What should I do?
A: If you don't see what you're looking for when creating a rule hit the Refresh button before looking again:
If you created the Course/Bundle after you set up the integration 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 delete, re-name, or refresh my integration if I made some changes in Thinkific?
A: Head to Marketplace Settings > Integrations and click the Edit, Refresh, or Delete buttons to make these changes to your integration:
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 tag or list. What do I do?
A: This is due to integrations 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 to your integration.