We’re in the process of evaluating Commerce Hub for quote generation and have hit a wall with cost-plus pricing — something our sales reps rely on heavily.
The workflow they’re used to is simple: enter a margin percentage against a cost price, and the system automatically calculates and populates the selling price. Pretty standard CPQ behaviour.
We’ve explored a couple of approaches so far:
• Custom fields — we can capture the margin input and calculate the selling price in a custom field using a rollup, but we can’t find a way to write that calculated value back to HubSpot’s native Unit Price field.
• Line item workflows — this looked promising, but workflows don’t trigger on line items when a quote is in draft status, so that path is blocked too.
We’d love to know how others are handling this. It feels like a common CPQ requirement, so curious whether there’s a native solution we’ve missed or a workaround that’s working well for your team.
Hey @MarkCP and welcome, we are so glad to have you here!
Great question, thanks for asking the HubSpot Community!
Here are some articles around the topic for information:
- Create and manage products
- Use line items with deals
Hi @danmoyle, @HubDoPete and @karstenkoehler, we’d love to hear from you, how do you use Commerce Hub CPQ for this specific use case, please?
Looking forward to hearing your ideas!
Have a wonderful day everyone and thanks so much!
Bérangère
Welcome to Community @MarkCP! From what I’ve seen, you’re not missing anything. As Commerce Hub matures, I’m sure we’ll see features like this become more common and standard. But for now, I think other tools are just a bit more in-depth than HubSpot on these kinds of features. So I see two possible workarounds for now. The first is to investigate third-party tools like LinePilot or Mobileforce CPQ from the HubSpot marketplace. Not ideal, but HubSpot has become a very good integration partner because they don’t solve 100% of what businesses need.
The other option would mean including HubSpot’s Data Hub (fka Operations Hub) at the Pro level for custom-coded workflows. I believe you could use them to fetch line item IDs, calculate selling price via API (unit_price = unit_cost * (1 + margin/100)), and patch the Unit Price, then unpublish/republish the quote to apply changes.
One last thought to drop in, is a suggestion to look in the Community forum Product Ideas to see if anyone else is asking for this functionality. If they are, add your vote and use case as a comment. If not, submit your own idea. Product managers monitor those threads for improvements.
Hi Dan, thanks for taking the time — really helpful response.
We did explore the custom-coded workflow route, but as you noted, it comes with a couple of significant hurdles. First, it requires adding Data Hub (Operations Hub) which is an additional cost many teams won’t want to absorb just to solve a simple pricing calculation. Second, and more critically, the publish/unpublish mechanism breaks down entirely when a quote is subject to an approval workflow — which is precisely the scenario where pricing accuracy matters most.
I’ve taken your advice and submitted it as a Product Idea. Interestingly, there are a few older requests for similar functionality buried in the forum, but they were closed without resolution and never gained much traction — which is a shame given how fundamental cost-plus pricing is for resellers, MSPs, and distributors.
If anyone reading this shares the same frustration, please do add your upvote — the more voices behind it, the better the chances of it making the roadmap. Thank you.
Here is the link