How Commerce Hub’s New Stripe Integration Modernizes B2B Commerce

[JackCoopersmith]

Historical context

HubSpot has been hard at work at improving our billing and commerce functionalities, notably focusing on a massive improvement of our Stripe integration…

HubSpot has offered a Stripe integration for many years, allowing users to select “Stripe” at the end of the quote creation flow in HubSpot which simply led to the addition of a “checkout” button on the quote that routed buyers to a Stripe checkout page to manage the rest of the process. This integration allowed HubSpot quotes to be payable which is certainly a step in the right direction, however it didn’t truly unify commerce data and efforts in the CRM where it belongs. 

Enter Commerce Hub, one of HubSpot’s big initiatives over the past few years that’s transforming the way organizations think about their commerce process…

How the legacy Stripe integration functioned

The HubSpot platform is world class at helping organizations generate and manage leads, then convert them to opportunities that can be easily managed through the deal cycle to eventually become customers. HubSpot also helps delight those customers, turning them into evangelists and promoters for your organization and thus driving your business forward.

Before Commerce Hub, there was one particular part (arguably the most important part) of the customer journey that was managed completely out of HubSpot - the commerce and billing process that actually turns a given opportunity into a paying customer. With the legacy Stripe integration, you could manage some of the commerce process, specifically the CPQ/QTC portion, within HubSpot, however that truly was the “water’s edge” when it comes to commerce in HubSpot - as mentioned above, the checkout button took the transaction and everything within/after it completely outside of HubSpot.

The legacy Stripe integration was certainly useful, however the disconnected nature of it had a few impacts on organizations:

• All commerce and transaction data was separate from your customer data in your CRM
• Multiple different tools and platforms were involved in the commerce process, leading to a bloated and cobbled together tech stack
• Teams were disconnected and looking at different data
• Disconnected data, leading to a lack of true reporting insights
• Efficiencies and automation opportunities were left on the table

We’ve built Commerce Hub to solve those problems with the ultimate goal of helping organizations get paid faster, increase revenue and save time. How, you may ask?

Commerce Hub vs the legacy Stripe integration

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Commerce Hub allows you to do a lot more than just add a checkout button to a quote. You can still absolutely create payable quotes in the exact same way, in fact you can also create payment links and invoices that are payable as well. It’s great to be able to create multiple different payable artifacts directly within HubSpot (via HubSpot payments or your Stripe account), but it’s what happens after the transaction where the magic happens. 

Once a given buyer pays with Commerce Hub, data isn’t sent to a completely separate and disconnected system. Instead, we’re representing commerce data within HubSpot in the exact same way that we represent your customer data - CRM objects! Specifically:

• The payment object represents a transaction with properties such as gross amount, net amount, fees, etc
• The subscription object represents (you guessed it) a subscription with properties such as start date, end date, number of expected and completed payments, MRR, ARR etc
• Pro tip - you can now create subscriptions that not only automatically charge a payment method, but also create and distribute invoices automatically to be paid (aka recurring invoices)
• The invoice object represents a record of payment (and is also a payable artifact) with properties such as invoice number, due date, balance due, etc

This unifies your commerce and customer data in a consistent way, giving you all of the information you’d ever need about a given customer in one central location. But there’s more…

Because HubSpot has simply built commerce objects in the CRM, you can use that centralized data with the power of HubSpot. For example, do you want to manage all of your renewals or failed subscription payments? Go ahead and create a subscription-based workflow. Do you want to follow up on overdue invoices automatically? Go ahead and create an invoice-based workflow. Do you want to visualize all of your commerce and customer data holistically? Go ahead and create a custom report, just as you would with any other data within HubSpot.

None of the above is possible with the legacy Stripe integration. As HubSpot has continued to invest in our commerce offerings to help millions of organizations grow better, we’re about to say goodbye to the Stripe integration of the 2010s on 11/4/2024 and hello to a new era of B2B commerce with Commerce Hub.