The sales role is changing, and changing fast. When I say fast, the ability of your sales team to take a prospect from an opportunity to bottom-line revenue has never been easier. With HubSpot’s Commerce Hub, your sales team will have the following features at their fingertips to help remove friction and keep them selling. Whether you need to charge for monthly memberships or subscriptions, collect one-time payments, unique product package payments through installments, you can customize how your sales teams sell, and how your customers pay with HubSpot Commerce Hub. The main benefits of HubSpot’s Commerce Hub are increased cash flow velocity, ease of use for your sales team, and a better customer experience. Below I’ll outline some of the tools and benefits that you should consider when determining if HubSpot’s Commerce Hub is a great fit for your business.
Payment Processors and HubSpot
The first thing you need to consider with HubSpot’s Commerce Hub would be the payment processing. Commerce Hub offers two different payment processing options, HubSpot Payments, and Stripe. Below I’ll outline some of the key differences between the two to help you understand which one may be best for you.
HubSpot Payments
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Available to all paid HubSpot Users
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Only available to domestic U.S. clients
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Payment types accepted - Credit and debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay (automatically enabled when card payment is accepted), Automatic Clearing House (ACH)
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Transaction fees will be 2.9% of all credit card transactions and 0.8% (capped at $10) of ACH payments, and HubSpot will charge a platform fee of 0.5% per transaction.
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Transaction Fees are automatically deducted from each transaction.
Stripe
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Available to all paid HubSpot Users
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Available Internationally
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HubSpot will charge a platform fee of 0.75% per transaction. You'll also pay the processing fee you have agreed to with Stripe.
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Transaction Fees are automatically deducted from each transaction.
Each payment processor may have benefits or concerns depending upon your company, but a great HubSpot Solutions provider will help you determine the best fit given your needs. Now let’s look at some of the product features, benefits, and use cases.
Payment Types in Commerce Hub
So now that you’ve decided to set up a payment processor, let’s look into the different ways you can collect payment in HubSpot, and when it’s the best to use each. In HubSpot’s Commerce Hub, there are three main ways that you can capture payment from your customers. These include invoices, payment links, and quotes. Below I’ll detail each respective element and their best use case.
Quotes
The Quote Tool will allow you to create custom-branded quotes within your hub. These quotes can be built for one-time payments, and also status payments, or invoice scheduling of multiple phases and timelines of a project. Another nice feature of the quote tool includes e-signatures for the ability to be notified when a particular quote is signed off on. Building quotes is a very easy template editor, and once they are built, you can make these available to your team in the quote library for particular products or services.
Invoices
The invoice tool within HubSpot’s Commerce Hub allows you to create invoices for clients directly from the deal or quotes tool within your CRM. HubSpot allows you to automatically collect payment through these invoices and also gives you the ability to manually move an invoice to pay if the payment is collected outside of the CRM. Once a payment is collected, both you and the customer will be notified via email that the transaction has been processed.
The main benefit of using the invoices tool is that you can now easily attribute revenue to your marketing and sales data. This data being paired, helps to complete the full picture of your customer journey showing you exactly what marketing and sales tactics, funnels, or products and services are directly generating the most revenue allowing you to grow your business faster.
Payment Links
The Payment Link feature is a unique way of keeping your product or services in front of your audience. Payment links can easily be shared for one-time or subscription-based transitions, embedded on your website, in emails, or even on meeting scheduling pages if you offer consulting services. Just as the quotes and invoice tools collect payment through a checkout page, payment links will do the same asking your client to provide their credit or debit card information or to set up ACH payment through their bank.
Subscription-Based Payments
HubSpot understands that with collecting payments, the need for flexibility is important. This flexibility allows you to collect ongoing payments that you can personalize and structure in monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, and annual payment collection types as you need to. These scheduled payments can be started immediately, or scheduled to start at a future date if needed. Once a subscription is in place for a customer, you’ll be able to view this within the contact and company records where at any time you can manage these as needed.
In addition, HubSpot Commerce Hub will give you the ability to view all of a customer's active subscriptions, as well as the ability to view all previous billed or paid invoices. This running total makes it incredibly easy to reference particular payments, and view a transaction history at a contact or company level. As payments are completed, HubSpot will once per day settle these transactions and notify you that the funds have been received via email each day and that they are being transferred to your bank account. At any time, if a refund is deemed necessary, you can access those in the payment record as well as their active receipts. This all makes managing any of your transactions extremely user-friendly.
Marketing Automation and Payments
The last and most beneficial feature of HubSpot’s Commerce Hub would be for users who are also using HubSpot Marketing Pro and above. This level of HubSpot will allow you to take advantage of the automation or workflow capability to generate ongoing communications with your prospects or clients to remind them of expiring subscriptions, trickle campaigns to nurture them into buying a product, service, or subscription, and also to notify internal team members on action items post-sale. This approach allows you, or any organization to get really creative with different ways of generating revenue across large audiences at scale while keeping your team nimble. In the end, this is a recipe for profitable business growth that you can use for years to come.
In summation, HubSpot’s Commerce Hub is designed to make transacting with your clients easy, while increasing your cash flow and ability to stay in front of your audience. These tools will help you do all of this, and to prove it, you’ll have access to amazing reporting tools that will help you understand your entire revenue operations, and improve it over time. If you have questions about how your organization can utilize a tool like HubSpot Commerce Hub, we’re always happy to help.
