Hi! Thanks to those that are taking the time to read.
We run a family-owned bookstore that recieves a large number of book requests each day: in person at the store, over the phone, through emails, and through messages. (I understand these are called “leads.”) We currently use an excel sheet that basically has the customers phone number, their name, the book they want, and the distributor of the book. Whenever we want to call the distributor to order books, we do an excel filter and read off all the books under that distributor. This form has color coding etc based on if a book has been picked up by the customer or not, and notes for if the customer has been called, or if its arrived in the shop etc.
I am looking to both consolidate this process and to automate it. The HubSpot rep over the phone suggested i use “deals” for this but it doesn’t seem that that will work. I’ve seen people on the forum advice against it. The lead management on Hubspot all seems super clunky for this specific thing, and I can’t find a page just called “Leads”, which would probably work perfect. What I really need is an Order Form of some kind, where people can fill out a form and the other end I have a spreadsheet with orders, whether they’ve been ordered to the shop, or picked up, or whether the customer was called, etc, and the ability to filter this by supplier, and also the ability to link this to contacts and therefore build up a visual purchase history.
Finally, I’d really love it if the front end of this on my phone would be very simple: I take down someones name, phone number, the book title, and the supplier, hit submit, and afterwards I can go on the computer and manage all the data. (Maybe there is some kind of google form integration?? Idk)
What do I do? I’m at a complete loss. This is the central aspect of our business model and I can’t figure out how to configure it for HubSpot. Any help will be super-appreciated. Thank you
PS I am super-open to upgrading to “Starter” if that’s what needed. Right now I just can’t figure out how to do it either way
Hey @PBookseller for capturing contact or other object data in HubSpot I’d definitely recommend using HubSpot forms, it’s super simple to setup, you can even get a URL to visit it on or add it into any page you wish.
So HubSpot has a lot of different records, we would call them “objects” so a “contact” record is one object, a “company” is another, a “deal” another etc. For simplicity the easiest way of thinking of these is different “profiles”.
For things like Phone number, name, address, I’d always recommend using the contact record. So you could set your form to log all of these to a contact record. For example if I fill out a form saying:
Name: Tom
Phone: 555-555
Address: 123 fake street
This will then either create a new contact record for “Tom” which will be in your HubSpot CRM, you can then access this at any time through the “contacts” tab, you can also use it in your lists, automation, email marketing etc. at any point. You can also filter by any of the properties (HubSpot’s term for fields) in the contacts view: View and filter records
One thing to bear in mind is that a form submission updates the contact properties included in that submission when HubSpot matches the submission to an existing contact. Matching is primarily based on email address, or, when email is unavailable, browser cookies. Therefore, do not store book-order details in contact properties: use a separate record for each order instead.
For this reason the contact record might not be best to store the order specifics. I’d recommend “deals” for this, which is a separate object, but can be associated with that contact record. The current form editor documents contact, company, ticket, and custom-object fields, but not deal fields. For this use case, a ticket is the more directly documented option for creating one record per book request from a form. A ticket could represent each book request. You can create custom ticket properties such as book title, supplier, ISBN, quantity, customer-contacted status, arrival status, and pickup status. A form can include ticket properties, but automatic ticket creation requires connecting the form to an inbox or Help Desk channel. When configured this way, the form submission creates a ticket and can be managed in the ticket workspace.
You could then use the ticket to manage the order itself, so you can log the fulfilment, any updates, any notes information required etc. The ticket index page supports filtering tickets by ticket properties, so you could create a saved view for each supplier, for example, all tickets where Supplier is Penguin. You can then use that view when placing a distributor order.
There’s some great Knowledgebase articles which might be helpful here too!
I’d definitely advise using the contact record to store any consistent contact information (such as email, name, phone etc.) and then using a different object for orders, if you were to use contact properties for the orders, they would be overwritten every time someone makes an order. With something like tickets it will create a new ticket for each order.
Also, one thing to bear in mind, if you plan on filling out the form yourself. The “Always create contact for new email address” setting only helps when each submission contains a different email address; it is not a general fix for phone-only submissions. Without email, HubSpot may use browser cookies to deduplicate submissions. If the same device is used for different customers, test the workflow before relying on it operationally.
Because staff may enter several customers from the same phone or browser, be careful with a form that does not collect email. HubSpot says submissions without email are deduplicated using browser cookies, so multiple customers using the same device could be associated with the same contact. If you use a shared device, test this carefully and consider using the HubSpot mobile app or another entry method for staff-created requests. See “Allow form submissions without email addresses to create contacts”
Hope this helps! Please do let me know if you have any questions!
Moderator Note: this post was reviewed for relevancy and optimized for clarity on August 28, 2026. Thank you for your contributions to the HubSpot Community!
Thank you for the suggestion. I am trying to make it work with forms—i
don’t think it will do the trick. For one thing, some contacts will have
multiple orders and i can’t have them getting overwritten.
For another thing, when i make a smart list based on form inputs, editing
that data after the fact is super clunky. there aren’t simple or quick ways
of me changing order status, for example.
Hey @PBookseller using another object instead of contacts in forms will avoid an overwrite, for example you could store the consistent contact info in a contact record (phone, email etc.) then use ticket fields for all of the order info, this will create a new ticket for each of the order info and associate them with the contact record.
If you have multiple tickets you can then just filter them in the tickets view and bulk update them from there if you need to!
Interesting. So right now, my tickets are being used for specific customer service issues.
But perhaps if i upgrade to Starter, I can create a new ticket pipeline called “Orders”? And then would i be able to customize it to the point that is 100% usable as an order form?
And then my question is, would it be possible to submit new “Order Pipeline” entries into a form?