Pros and cons of using deal line items

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
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Hi folks,

My company has an integration which uploads all of our offline (in-store) transactions to Hubspot as deals.

However every item in a transaction is uploaded as a separate deal. So if a customer purchases 5 items in one transaction, 5 deals are created in Hubspot.

I’d like your thoughts on whether using line items is a better approach.

We’ve recently added an ecommerce integration to Hubspot for our online sales, and for those we’re using line items which are linked to our Hubspot product catalogue. This is working well, and it’s a lot neater having a single deal per transaction.

I’m considering changing our offline deal setup to use line items, but I have some concerns:

  1. Unfortunately we can’t sync our offline product catalogue, so line items would not be associated with a product.
  2. Creating / editing / viewing line item properties is only achievable via the API (as far as I know). Whereas deal properties are fully accessible via the Hubspot admin.
  3. There may be less workflow functionality available for line items.
  4. There may be less reporting available for line items.

I’m also concerned that our current setup of creating separate deals for each item in a transaction is hampering us in unknown ways, such as attribution, reporting, workflows etc.

Thanks for reading this far, and in advance for your recommendations.

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Hi @WaydeChristie1,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! I wanted to share this Community post, where @darynsmith proposed using custom objects for more flexibility with products/line items.

I also wanted to tag a couple other subject matter experts so they can share their opinion:

Hi @jfreeman, @warrendavey, @himanshurauthan, @Josh, do you have any recommendations for Wayde?

Thank you!

Mia

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Thanks Mia.

I don’t think custom objects are what I want here - I want to keep things simple :slightly_smiling_face:

Being a retailer, line items are a natural fit for our deals, because our transactions all have line items.

Thanks again.

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Thank you @MiaSrebrnjak for counting me in,

Hello @WaydeChristie1,

If you are already using an integration that is uploading all of your offline (in-store) transactions to Hubspot as a separate deal, then I don’t think that you really need line item functionality. The reason is line item is something that associates products with that deal but in your case, each product is created as a specific deal so you will get to know which customer buys which product. But this is a disadvantage too because if a customer buys 7 products then for that customer 7 deals will be created. You can imagine after some time there will be a large number of deals on your portal which will take more space and make the filtering of deals more complex.

So according to me go with line items, this is must used option among all, it manages the deal’s product very well and it will create no confusion for you to search which customer bought which product

I would like to recommend you the Hubspot For WooCommerce integration. The integration will sync all your data between WooCommerce and HubSpot including the Customers, Orders, and Products of your site. Also, it’ll provide line item functionality in every deal so you don’t need to do anything, and the most important thing the solution is absolutely free.

Also, you get onboarding services where you just have to tell your requirements and sit back, and my team will do it for you? Doesn’t that sound smooth?

Regards,

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Thanks Himanshu,

We have over 2 million deals. We’re an enterprise retailer with over 100 physical stores.

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Ok great, let me know if you want to switch on our integration, just drop a mail on ticket@makewebbetter.com or umakantsharma@makewebbetter.com

We’ll get back to you asap!

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Thanks Himanshu,

We already have a custom built integration as I said, running on an enterprise ecommerce platform.

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Thanks for the ping, @MiaSrebrnjak .

Hi @WaydeChristie1 !

You’re definitely right to question the current setup. 1 deal per line item is going to create a mess over time.

Here are my thoughts…

  1. Unfortunately we can’t sync our offline product catalogue, so line items would not be associated with a product.
    1. Can you add some color here? Products are what you create in HS. Line items are what they’re called when a product gets associated with a deal. Though you CAN create custom line items directly from a deal record, that line item DOES NOT end up getting created as a new product. It remains unique to that deal record.
  2. Creating / editing / viewing line item properties is only achievable via the API (as far as I know). Whereas deal properties are fully accessible via the Hubspot admin.
    1. Sort of. You can create new line items in the HS admin directly from a deal. But in most cases you I don’t think this is best practice. Perhaps you don’t actually need to edit line items at all…just products.
  3. There may be less workflow functionality available for line items.
    1. Correct. Right now product/line-item manipulation via workflows is basically non-existent. There are some new features related to this that have seen some movement in the development roadmap (according to the forums), but I wouldn’t make any decisions right now banking on the fact that workflows will be able to help you much
  4. There may be less reporting available for line items.
    1. Actually, with the new custom report builder, you can pull some pretty robust reports that were not available a year ago. Here are all of the Line Item properties you have at your disposal via that reporting tool and you can run reports against Contacts, Deals, and Line Item ojbects with these…

Screen Shot 2021-08-11 at 2.37.34 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-08-11 at 2.37.34 PM.png258×736 46.8 KB

Screen Shot 2021-08-11 at 2.37.43 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-08-11 at 2.37.43 PM.png231×382 16.7 KB

I know this doesn’t really solve your problem. But, hopefully it gives you some insight into the next best steps to explore.

More than happy to hop on a call or screen share to dive deeper with you. You can use the booking link in my signature if you’re interested.

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Thanks very much Joseph. Appreciate your response.

Unfortunately we can’t sync our offline product catalogue, so line items would not be associated with a product.

Can you add some color here? Products are what you create in HS. Line items are what they’re called when a product gets associated with a deal. Though you CAN create custom line items directly from a deal record, that line item DOES NOT end up getting created as a new product.

We do have a product catalogue which is synced from our website via a custom ecommerce bridge integration. This is essentially our online catalogue. These products are currently being added to ecommerce deals via line items.

However, the vast majority of our transactions are offline, and our offline catalogue is equally vast and therefore impractical to add to Hubspot.

My thinking for offline deals is to add custom line items as you say.

Creating / editing / viewing line item properties is only achievable via the API (as far as I know). Whereas deal properties are fully accessible via the Hubspot admin.

Sort of. You can create new line items in the HS admin directly from a deal. But in most cases you I don’t think this is best practice. Perhaps you don’t actually need to edit line items at all…just products.

I’m referring to properties here. The only way to manage line item properties is via the API, unlike deals where I can fully manage deal properties via the admin.

There may be less workflow functionality available for line items.

Correct. Right now product/line-item manipulation via workflows is basically non-existent. There are some new features related to this that have seen some movement in the development roadmap (according to the forums), but I wouldn’t make any decisions right now banking on the fact that workflows will be able to help you much

I hadn’t considered manipulating/adding line items via workflows, but thanks for dev roadmap tip. Mostly I’m interested in triggering workflows based on line item properties, and my needs seem covered there.

Thanks again Joseph. I’m 99% sure I’m going to switch to using line items for our offline deals.

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Hi @WaydeChristie1 ,

Came across this post, not sure whether you have decided to use line items. If so, here is a tool that might be helpful for you to manage line-items on spreadsheet.

Best

SC