How to build a website with HubSpot Content Hub
May 14, 2024
B2B companies often juggle too many apps to manage their sales processes. Customer relationships live in one system, while commerce happens in another. This scattered approach slows things down, leads to disconnected data, and frustrates customers during purchases. HubSpot's Commerce Hub solves this problem.
Commerce Hub brings customer relationships and commerce into one unified platform. Teams can manage leads, deals, quoting, invoicing, and payments all in HubSpot's CRM. No more switching between multiple tools.
HubSpot's Commerce Hub is a lightweight eCommerce solution that's integrated into their CRM platform. It consolidates all the essential tools B2B businesses need to manage payments, invoices, quotes, subscriptions, and payment schedules – removing the need to juggle multiple systems.
Designed to streamline processes, Commerce Hub makes selling more efficient for teams while delivering a seamless purchasing experience for customers. With everything in one place, businesses can save time and improve productivity. It's particularly beneficial for small-to-medium enterprises, as the features are robust enough to handle all their commerce requirements without being overly complicated, ensuring operations run smoothly.
Commerce Hub also helps businesses save even more time through automation and reporting capabilities, allowing them to optimise their processes further.
Finance teams can even benefit from Commerce Hub's integration with QuickBooks, which syncs invoicing and payment data bi-directionally, ensuring accurate financial tracking. Commerce Hub offers an open API for companies not using QuickBooks, enabling integration with existing third-party tools to meet specific business needs.
With HubSpot's invoicing feature, you can seamlessly create professional invoices directly from quotes and deals within the platform. The user-friendly invoice builder allows you to customise and brand your invoices easily, you can even host these invoices on your own domain, adding an extra layer of professionalism.
Customers can also checkout and make payments directly through the invoices, enabling you to collect payments easily. This feature also provides valuable insights into outstanding payments, allowing you to track which customers owe you money and use automation to follow up on overdue payments.
HubSpot Payment Links let you simplify payment collection. After choosing a payment processor (HubSpot Payments or Stripe), you can embed payment links anywhere - emails, websites, and forms - to securely collect payments directly from customers.
When a customer clicks the payment link, they're guided through a user-friendly checkout experience to easily complete the transaction using their preferred payment method, including credit/debit cards, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more.
With HubSpot Quotes, you can generate professional, branded sales quotes directly from deals in your HubSpot CRM. The feature automatically populates quote details from your CRM data, saving time and reducing errors.
You can designate signers and counter-signers to gather legally binding e-signatures, eliminating the need for printing, scanning, or faxing. You can embed payment links within your quotes, enabling customers to conveniently make payments via card or ACH with just a few clicks.
HubSpot Subscriptions can manage your recurring billing requirements. When customers purchase products or services with a regular billing frequency, HubSpot automatically creates a subscription to charge them at the specified intervals - no need to generate multiple payment links.
Once set up, Commerce Hub handles all future charges automatically, ensuring timely payments without manual effort. You gain a centralised view of all recurring revenue streams, enabling easy tracking, modifying subscription details, and managing customer payments from one location.
HubSpot's Product Library lets you create a catalog of the goods and services you sell, then associate them with individual deals as needed.
This product association functionality allows you to easily keep tabs on what you're selling to each customer. Whenever you link a product to a deal, invoice, payment link, or quote, you're essentially adding a line item – a single instance of that product.
HubSpot's Commerce Hub offers seamless integration with Stripe, allowing you to use your existing Stripe account as a payment processor. By connecting your Stripe account, you can collect one-time and recurring subscription payments through Commerce Hub's invoices, payment links, and quotes, while Stripe handles the payment processing behind the scenes.
This lets you manage your commerce activities through Commerce Hub while leveraging the robust payment processing capabilities of Stripe, without the need for additional tools or accounts.
You can simplify the agreement process with HubSpot's integrated electronic signature (e-signature) capabilities. Powered by Dropbox Sign, HubSpot's e-sign feature seamlessly integrates with the quote creation process, eliminating the need for a separate Dropbox Sign account. When e-signature is enabled for a quote, buyers and countersigners can easily add their signatures directly within the document.
HubSpot offers its own payment processing solution, which enables businesses to collect one-time and recurring payments directly through invoices, payment links, and quotes within the Commerce Hub. This native payment processing option is currently available only for companies based in the United States and supports payment collection in USD via credit/debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and ACH.
Commerce Hub enables you to monitor your revenue through an intuitive, out-of-the-box dashboard. You get pre-built reports, including revenue over time, customer growth trends, revenue breakdown by payment type, and revenue performance by sales rep.
This bi-directional integration between HubSpot and Quickbooks ensures that your contact and product data remain consistently updated across both platforms, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing the risk of errors.
As well as syncing contacts and products, the integration also allows you to sync invoices from QuickBooks into HubSpot. Users can customise the sync settings to define how data flows between the two systems, ensuring a tailored experience that meets their specific business needs.
You can extends its capabilities through workflow automation. Users can automate the creation of QuickBooks estimates, invoices, and sales receipts directly from within HubSpot's workflow tool, triggering these actions based on customisable enrollment criteria.
There's no monthly fee for Commerce Hub, instead it uses consumption-based pricing.
HubSpot payments: 2.9% for cards, 0.5% capped at $10 for ACH.
Stripe: 0.5% platform fee + your agreed rates with Stripe.
The visual look and feel of both processors are exactly the same, but there are some variations and restrictions to be aware of.
| HubSpot payments | Stripe payment processing | |
| HubSpot tiers | Starter, Pro, Enterprise | Free, Starter, Pro, Enterprise |
| Location | United States only | Global (some restrictions may apply) |
| Supported Currencies | USD | USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, MXN, NZD, CHF, SGD, DKK, NOK, HKD, PLN, RON, CZK, BGN, HUF, PHP, SEK, and JPY |
| Fees | 2.9% for cards, 0.5% capped at $10 for ACH | 0.5% platform fee + your agreed rates with Stripe |
HubSpot Commerce Hub enables businesses to get paid in multiple ways.
Commerce Hub streamlines the entire quote-to-cash process by consolidating all payment-related documents into a single platform. Start by creating a product catalogue, then generate deals in the CRM, attach quotes with e-signature capabilities, and seamlessly convert them into invoices – all without leaving HubSpot, ensuring a cohesive and efficient workflow from initial sales engagement to final payment collection.
Using payment links, you can take one-off manual payments through HubSpot, either attached to an invoice or simply via a payment link that you send via email or on your website.
HubSpot's Commerce Hub enables businesses to create a basic eCommerce store within your HubSpot website itself by combining the Product Library and Payment Links. Simply create the required payment links and link them to the desired location on your website. Customers can then follow these links, browse your product offerings, and securely complete their purchases through your chosen payment processor, either HubSpot Payments or Stripe.
With Commerce Hub, you can set up recurring payments by creating quotes or payment links with recurring line items. After the customer's initial checkout, HubSpot will automatically collect future payments on the set schedule. No more manual work needed for recurring billing.
HubSpot Commerce Hub focuses on providing a streamlined solution for core B2B commerce activities, which means it won't be a good fit for some B2B eCommerce stores.
If you need a fully-featured online store with extensive product catalogues, promotions, reviews, etc., HubSpot won't meet your needs out of the box. It's product library is useful, but it's not designed to be a full-blown online store with multiple categories and typical online shopping experiences.
If you want to use HubSpot tools but also require an eCommerce platform, you can connect HubSpot to a dedicated e-commerce platform like Shopify or WordPress' leading e-commerce plugin, WooCommerce. You may require support from a HubSpot web developer to get your setup right.
This gives you the best of both worlds - HubSpot handles your CRM, marketing automation, contacts, and analytics, while the e-commerce platform powers your online store. This is a popular choice for businesses that have their main website on HubSpot CMS, but require an e-commerce store on the side.
For businesses that need to handle physical goods shipments with location-based pricing, HubSpot's Commerce Hub may not be the best fit. The platform lacks advanced shipping matrix capabilities that can dynamically update costs based on the customer's location.
Instead, Commerce Hub only allows for flat fees to be added to invoices and payment links. While this works well for software and other online purchases that don't require shipping, businesses that need to ship physical products would likely benefit from a dedicated eCommerce platform with more robust shipping management features.
HubSpot's Commerce Hub is designed for basic B2B eCommerce needs and doesn't include built-in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) capabilities for managing inventory and advanced administration functions. While some dedicated eCommerce platforms offer integrated ERP systems, which are often necessary for large-scale eCommerce operations, Commerce Hub's focus is on providing a streamlined solution for core B2B commerce activities.
Businesses requiring comprehensive inventory management and extensive administration features may need to explore specialised ERP software or more robust eCommerce platforms beyond what Commerce Hub offers.
While offering credit terms is a common practice in B2B eCommerce, enabling customers to receive products before making payment, HubSpot's Commerce Hub currently lacks the ability to facilitate credit-based transactions natively or through third-party integrations. Businesses that require this capability may need to explore alternative eCommerce platforms or solutions that support credit order management and delayed payment options.
Sometimes seeking the guidance of experts can be crucial in overcoming specific obstacles or positioning your business for long-term success. HubSpot is no exception. A well-chosen HubSpot partner has the potential to transform your business, allowing you to maximise the potential of this platform.
