Automating Emails with Product-Specific Assembly Instructions (Line Item Challenges)

[kmacpherson2]

Hi HubSpot Dev Legends!

We’re an eCommerce business that sells timber build kits for products like cubby houses, shade areas, and more. Our orders come through from Shopify and sync to HubSpot, where our products are synced as well. Recently, we’ve started using HubSpot Marketing to automate parts of our communication with clients, including emails.

One of our goals is to automate the emails we send to customers with links to assembly instructions specific to the products they’ve purchased. Currently, we send these emails manually, attaching unique links to online assembly instructions stored in Google Drive.

To solve this, we set up a custom single-line text field in the HubSpot Product Library to store the URL for each product’s assembly instructions. The idea was to reference this field in an email module by looping through the line items of a deal to dynamically insert product names and their respective URLs.

Unfortunately, we’ve hit a hurdle:

Line Items Don’t Sync Fully: We’ve discovered that while our line items are pulling some product details (like placeholders for product name and description), they don’t seem to include custom fields like the URL for assembly instructions.
Debugging the Data: When we use 'deal line items  jsonify' in our email module, the data doesn’t show the expected custom fields from the Product Library, like the URL field for assembly instructions.
We’ve reached out to HubSpot support, and they’ve been very helpful, but their advice was to bring this question here for additional insights.

Our Key Questions:
Is there a way to make custom fields from the Product Library (e.g., the assembly URL field) accessible in the 'deal line items' object for emails?
If this isn’t supported natively, what’s the best workaround?
Would we need to set up a custom integration (e.g., using APIs) to pull and attach product-specific data to the deal or line items?
Are there other HubSpot-native solutions to achieve this goal?
Additional Context:
Security Concerns: We want to avoid sharing our assembly instructions for all products, as we see it as a potential IP issue. While we considered using password-protected Knowledge Base articles linked to automated emails, it feels like a workaround we’d prefer to avoid if the custom field method can be resolved.
Our Tech Stack: Orders come from Shopify to HubSpot via Unific, which syncs products and deals. Products have their assembly URL stored in a custom single-line text field in HubSpot’s Product Library.
We’re hoping someone here might have encountered a similar challenge and can share how they tackled it.

We’d love any advice or ideas on how to approach this problem. Thanks so much in advance for your help!

[MHoekstra5]

Hi,

We had the same issue with the limited amount of properties being synced from Shopify to Hubspot under order > line items. You cannot add any properties. But you can add new properties with Deal line items in HubSpot.

Solution we had:

1. Create extra line items properties under deals in Hubspot
2. Setup a sync using Zapier: Shopify > Zapier > HubSpot
3. New order is being synced using the Shopify App as an HubSpot order with a contact + (with a small delay) through the Zapier connection
4. We let Zapier also associate the correct contact, order to the new deal (these were created by the Shopify app)
5. That's it!

With this setup it also becomes possible to create contactlist based on other Shopify order / product details.

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hey, @kmacpherson2 👋 Thanks for the interesting and through post. I don't have a solution for you, and I am happy to brainstorm alongside you. 

One possible approach that came to mind:

• Send a webhook for when a Deal moves to `closed`
• Webhook received by middleware (Deal closed)
    - Contains Deal ID
• Middleware queries Line Items API
    - Gets list of products in the deal
    - This gives you the Product IDs, but not the custom fields like assembly URLs
• Middleware queries Products API
    - For each Product ID from the line items
    - This is where you get the assembly URLs (stored in your custom product property)
    - Now you have both the product info and its assembly URL
• Middleware formats data & updates Deal
    - Combines the product info and assembly URLs
    - Updates the deal custom property

In summary — the middleware would listen for the webhook, query the Line Item API, query the Products API, formats data, update the Deal using Deal API and your custom Deal property.

Have fun testing! — Jaycee