HubSpot WooCommerce native integration offers a certain data flow that meets most of the standard business scenarios.
WooCommerce Contacts – HubSpot Contacts
WordPress User Meta Fields – HubSpot Contact Properties
WooCommerce Orders – Deals
WooCommerce Products – HubSpot Products
WooCommerce Order System – HubSpot Ecommerce Bridge
WooCommerce Order Fields – HubSpot Deal Properties
The custom integration project that Computan received had a different goal. The goal was to sync HubSpot Quotes with WooCommerce Orders which obviously was not available in the standard data flow shared above.
When a salesperson creates a quote in HubSpot it should be created as an order in WooCommerce. The complete data flow is shared below.
Create HubSpot Orders/Quotes – Become Order in WooCommerce
The above WooCommerce Orders – Become Products in WooCommerce
Products in WooCommerce – Products in HubSpot
There were some data flow routes that were possible only through custom integration that made it slightly different than the WooCommerce HubSpot integration done through MakeWebBetter. Although we have assisted our clients before with integration through MakeWebBetter, this one had its challenges and complexities that could be dealt with using custom integration.
When would a custom integration work better than a marketplace plugin or vice versa?
In general, whenever you look at the integration documents/features on the integration provider’s website or on a connector’s website, you usually see the data flow examples that are possible through that integration. If your business processes have similar requirements of data and information flow and your goal is getting achieved through that, then your integration requirements can easily be met through the marketplace plugin.
Even if there’s one requirement in the data flow that does not align with the plugin’s standard data flow, then your integration goals can't be met through native integration. Custom integration is the way to go in that case.
The connectors such as Celigo keep the most popular data flow requirements as default to meet the standard requirements of most of the business processes. They also offer to customize the template data flow a little to expand the accessibility of their services. But they too miss a point here and there.
We, at Computan, tried to achieve a complex goal through Celigo HubSpot integration which seemed doable at the first, but it was so complex that even Celigo’s customization couldn’t help it. We didn't get complete platform support to meet the integration requirements.
The HubSpot WooCommerce integration wasn't possible through the built-in plugins because HubSpot Quotes API doesn't provide Webhook action so we had to use our custom AWS solution, SNS services architecture, and a WordPress plugin. Hence, we took the custom integration route.
