Its clear that online shopping is a huge market and can save tons of money from leaving your pocket. In particularly, health foods. Health food products can be extremely expensive and usually not widely available, unless living in large cities or in more health conscious areas. Hence, I stumbled upon Thrive Market sometime last year.

First Impressions:

Wide variety of health products
Free shipping on orders over $49
Free trial membership ($60 annual, more about this later)
Huge savings. Claiming 25-50% off.

After exploring their website, I decided to sign up for my first 30 days free and make my first order. Note: I had fully intended to cancel my membership before being charged the annual fee. BUT, I fell to their marketing strategy and forgot to cancel before being auto-charged on day 31. So I decided to stick it out and use their services.

My experience from the first order seemed great at the start. The website was easy enough to navigate, the shopping cart was clean and the order process was smooth. Here's where things get slightly misleading. Thrive has a feature that estimates your delivery date. Everything seemed great until my package didn't arrive on the estimated date, or the next day. So, I decided to use the UPS tracker. The order was showing about double the estimated delivery provided by Thrive! This has been the case for all four of my Thrive orders. The usual shipping time has been about 7 days, when thrive estimated 3-4. A little annoying but I thought the savings would be well worth it, right?

Here is where I was wrong.

Thrive market compares their savings to an MSRP, which is completely normal business practice. Although, I started to notice that the items I was purchasing were available locally for slightly higher prices but I would hardly see the 25-50% savings as advertised. Especially once I started to look elsewhere online. So, I decided to do a little analysis of this whole membership fee justification.

A little Math....

At 50% savings, I would only have to spend $120 dollars in a year to cover my membership.
At 25% savings, $240 annually.

So.... I decided to dig a little and take the top 30 products (non-thrive products) in the cooking and meal ingredients section and do some deeper shopping.

I searched online for the exact same products and found the following data.

Average comparable savings for these products is 0.1% compared to other resources. For these particular products, I would have to spend $60,000 annually to make my membership fee back!!!!

As you can see, the data cant even remotely justify the $60 membership fee. Not to mention that there is one resource in particular that I found while doing this analysis, LuckyVitamin.com. I have never used them but they have comparable products at the same or less value than Thrive Market. They do NOT have a membership fee and offer the same free shipping on orders over $49.

I wrote Thrive an email prior to this analysis and explained that I felt they were misleading and I would like a refund. I even told them that I assumed a saving of 5% overall and that I would have to spend $1200 in products just to cover my membership. They responded with a general statement that they save 25-50% and the membership would pay itself off in 1-2 orders. They also boasted about giving military families and low-income families free memberships.

In my opinion, the free memberships are pretty useless when other services offer free membership for nearly the same service.

I believe Thrive Market could spend a little less marketing dollars and stop passing those cost to their users via "justified" membership fees.

Note: This does not take into account the Thrive Market Brands. If I get a good response, I would be happy to do a cost per ounce analysis for comparable products.

I plane to try out LuckyVitamin.com, I will post an update once I get my first order.