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If you’re a small to medium-sized business, you know how important it is to ensure you keep track of all of your sources of income. Whether you sell tangible goods or provide a variety of services, being able to both easily offer and track the sales of these products and services is crucial to the success of your business. What can help make all of this simple for you is the adoption of a commerce platform that can help you sell and keep track of your products and services both online and in person, while also giving you the ability to easily collect payments through check-out processes and invoices.
Enter, HubSpot’s Commerce Hub, a new HubSpot tool that allows you to not only sell your products and services directly within HubSpot in a variety of ways. Commerce Hub also allows you to save time through automated workflows as well as gain better clarity on the performance of your sales and subscription offerings through customizable reports. In this blog, we’ll review all of what Commerce Hub has to offer, the different ways that you can use it, and how it can benefit your business in the long run.
HubSpot’s Commerce Hub in Detail
HubSpot’s new Commerce Hub brings a variety of new objects to your HubSpot account that allow you to better track and manage your customers' orders. Much like with the other Hubs, Commerce Hub organizes these orders into individual records which can then be associated with specific contacts, companies, and deals. Let’s go over these new objects in more detail:
Payment Object
The first object we’ll discuss is the Payment Object, which represents a single payment/transaction a contact, company, or deal completes with your business. Contact, company, and deal records can have multiple payment records associated with them, with each payment record containing specific information on the product or service that was purchased. The Payment Object also includes new default properties such as:
- Processor: The type of payment processor that was used to complete the payment (either HubSpot Payments or Stripe)
- Status: The status of the payment (“Processing”, “Failed”, “Refunded”, etc.)
- Gross Amount: The total amount the customer was charged
- Payment Method: The way that the customer made the payment (i.e. credit card)
Subscription Object
If your business offers subscription-based products or services, the Subscription Object can help you keep track of your customers current subscriptions and their recurring payments via individual subscription records. Just like with the Payment Object you can associate multiple subscription records with a specific contact, company, or deal, and you can also update the details of an associated subscription (such as the payment method or the payment date) directly from said records. The subscription object also comes with a variety of new default subscription properties such as:
- Status: The status of the subscription (i.e. “Active”, “Past Due”, “Canceled”, “Expired”, etc.)
- Start Date / End Date / Next Payment Due Date: Three different properties to help keep track of when a subscription started, ended, or when the next payment is due
- Annual Recurring Revenue: The annual recurring revenue from the subscription
- Monthly Recurring Revenue: The monthly recurring revenue from the subscription
- Total Collected Amount: The total amount collected from the subscription
Invoice Object
Finally there is the Invoice Object, which represents a record or request for payment such as through an invoice or a quote. More than one invoice record can be associated with contact, company, and deal records, and invoice records contain information on the invoice itself through a variety of default invoice properties. Some of these properties include:
- Invoice Status: The current status of the invoice (i.e. “Draft”, “Open”, “Paid”, “Voided”)
- Due Date: The due date of the invoice
- Amount Billed: The total amount billed on the invoice
- Invoice Source: The system that created the invoice, such as HubSpot or Data Sync
With three different objects to help you keep track of all of your products and services orders, HubSpot’s Commerce Hub can be a powerful tool for your business no matter what industry you’re in!
Connect Your Preferred Payment Processor to Commerce Hub
With Commerce Hub, you have the option to integrate one of two payment processors to your HubSpot account: HubSpot Payments or Stripe. This gives you the option to select the payment processor that works best for your business, however it should be noted that HubSpot Payments is only available for US customers at this time. Regardless of which payment processor you choose, you’ll be able to track and report on all of your products and services through HubSpot, allowing you to keep track of all of your reporting under one roof!
Use A Variety of Payment Processing Tools
With HubSpot Commerce Hub, you have a variety of ways to manage and collect payments from your customers, whether it’s a one-time payment or a multitude of subscriptions. There’s three different ways to do this: invoices, payment links, and quotes.
Invoices
Mainly used for one time payments, invoices can be created and sent directly to your customers all within HubSpot’s Commerce Hub. Invoices can be created for any products you add to HubSpot’s Commerce Hub, and can be associated with either a new or existing contact.
All invoices created are saved within the “Invoice” record page, allowing you to keep better track of all of your sent invoices and filter them based on certain criteria like due date, status, and much more.
All invoices are also associated with the contact you created for them automatically, allowing you to see how many invoices a contact has directly on their contact record. You can also create or add an existing invoice directly from their contact record as well!
Payment Links
Payment links are another great tool that allows you to collect payments from anywhere online, whether by sending the link directly to your customers or have it set up on your website as a checkout page. You can create payment links for either one-time purchases or for recurring payments, and you can even allow customers to choose what price they’d like to pay (which can be great for non profit organizations!).
Once the payment link is created, it will then generate a checkout page that will allow your customers to more easily submit their payment to you! And just like with invoices, you can also create payment links directly from a contact’s record in HubSpot.
Quotes
Sending customized quotes to customers has always been part of HubSpot’s sales tools, but with the new Commerce Hub you can now allow customers to check out directly from the quotes you send them! Once you’ve added your products and services within your HubSpot account you’ll be able to add them, along with other key information like buyer information and quote details, directly to your quote. From there you’re then able to give your customers the option to not only sign the quote but to also allow them to complete their payment of said quote via a corresponding checkout page, helping streamline the entire sales process and reduce any checkout friction.
Whether you’re selling a single product or finalizing an agreement with a sales opportunity, HubSpot’s variety of payment processing tools can help ensure a smoother transaction process!
Use Automation and Reports To Your Advantage
Alongside being able to better manage and make updates to individual payments, subscriptions, and invoices/quotes, HubSpot’s Commerce Hub also grants you the ability to automate certain portions of your sales pipeline when a record has a payment, subscription, or invoice, associated with them. This could be from sending an automated thank you message after a contact has completed a purchase, to notifying a customer that their subscription is coming up for renewal soon, to alerting a contact that an invoice’s due date has passed. These automations can work in a variety of helpful ways, allowing you and your team to save time to focus on other priorities and increase revenue by alerting customers of upcoming or late payments.
Commerce Hub also gives you the ability to track and report on how well your products and services’ sales are performing through out-of-the-box & custom reporting tools. These reports can help you see such information as how much revenue a specific product or service is bringing in, how many subscriptions there are based on their status, which invoices are still waiting for fulfillment, and much more! These reports can not only help you gain a better look at how well your business is doing in terms of revenue, but can also help show you potential growth opportunities that can help improve customer satisfaction and continued patronage.
Overall, HubSpot’s Commerce Hub can be a powerful tool for small to medium-sized businesses regardless of what industry you’re in. With the ability to save and organize a variety of commerce records, easily create and manage one-time payments and invoices, automate repetitive commerce tasks, and generate robust and informative reports, Commerce Hub can help improve the way your business bills and collects payments from customers while helping you find new opportunities to improve the overall experience for your customers. Try Commerce Hub today and see how it can transform your business!