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How SAQUA unified pricing and order operations across five countries — with HubSpot at the core

Written by uspeh | Jun 23, 2026 9:42:29 AM

Category: Technical Expertise

SAQUA sells fresh and frozen seafood across five countries and five languages. Behind the scenes, that meant 26 pricing tiers, 126 SKUs, two currencies and VAT rules that change by route — all spread across Shopify, Cin7 Inventory ERP, Google Sheets and WhatsApp, with HubSpot in the middle trying to hold it together. We rebuilt the operation into a single, reliable system. Here's how.

The transformation at a glance.

The challenge

The problem wasn't simply that work was manual — it was that the manual work created real operational risk. The wrong price list could reach the wrong customer, and a contact could hold a different pricing tier than the company it belonged to.

The root cause was structural. Pricing logic lived at contact level, even though the commercial relationship sits with the company account. Distributing prices meant a weekly ritual: a Google Sheet of 126 SKUs fed a script that produced PDFs, which the team then spent three to four hours each week cropping, formatting, uploading to HubSpot and sending as 26 separate emails on a bi-weekly basis. Every price change had to be reconciled by hand across systems and templates.

Service had the same fragility. Customers raised avoidable "where is my order?" queries because status updates weren't flowing into HubSpot, while staff chased logistics partners and cold stores for ETAs manually — absorbing volume that better orchestration could prevent.

The strategy

We treated this as a data-governance and systems-architecture problem, not an automation brief — and it sat well outside a standard HubSpot implementation. Over roughly six weeks of workshops with SAQUA's UK and European teams, we mapped every pricing, order and service process and documented the target state in detail.

The defining decision was to reverse the data model so the company became the single source of truth for pricing, with controlled inheritance to only the right contacts. 

The core technical decision: tiers move from the contact to the company, inherited only by contacts flagged to receive them.

We also concluded that standard configuration couldn't deliver the reliability SAQUA needed: the native Cin7 integration was inconsistent, and native HubSpot–WhatsApp messaging can't send personalised rich-media attachments at scale. So we designed a dependable multi-system architecture around HubSpot — and earned approval to do it through trust built on previous work, while respecting a real constraint: the team's reliance on their Google Sheet, which we kept as the data entry point rather than forcing a migration.

The solution

With HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional at its core, the build combined a data-model redesign, custom integrations, API orchestration and custom logic.

Two pipelines — pricing and orders — both anchored on the company as the source of truth, orchestrated through n8n where native connectors fell short.

  • Data restructuring — pricing tier, fresh/frozen flag and currency are governed on the Company object; a contact-level "receives price list" property drives controlled inheritance, eliminating the tier mismatches that broke segmentation.
  • ERP integration — Cin7 order data is pushed into HubSpot through a custom integration that replaces the unreliable native sync, each order carrying warehouse, logistics partner, customer and SKU data via dedicated association labels.
  • Proactive service automation — order-stage changes trigger workflows that update the customer at received, dispatched and ETA stages; the system automatically chases logistics partners for an ETA, then a property update fires the customer notification.
  • Pricing-to-WhatsApp pipeline — custom logic matches the right PDF to the right contact and delivers it as a WhatsApp attachment, something native HubSpot can't do.

The matching logic that guarantees a customer only ever receives their own tier, currency and VAT.

HubSpot developer tooling spanned the API, webhooks, custom properties, association labels, list segmentation and workflows, bridged across Shopify (with Matrixify), Cin7, Google Sheets and WhatsApp through n8n. Next on the roadmap: AI-assisted ticket categorisation and a custom service agent.

The results

  • ~15% more orders year-on-year (Q1). Freed capacity let SAQUA take on more business — the work enabled growth, not just savings.
  • ~1 working day per week saved across departments, by removing manual checks, repetitive follow-up and admin.
  • ROI within ~3 months — roughly £5k of development versus an estimated £7–8k to do the same manually across multiple people, delivered in a 6–8 week build.
  • Fewer reactive queries. Proactive order updates intercept the highest-volume, most repetitive "where's my order?" issues before they're raised.
  • 360-degree visibility. Order, pricing and communication data now live in HubSpot, with stronger reporting for faster, data-driven decisions.

Where AI came in

AI shaped the design rather than serving as a headline feature. We ran AI analysis on historical support-ticket themes to find the highest-volume customer queries, then prioritised the proactive order-update journey around those patterns — directing engineering effort at the issues that drove the most service load. AI-assisted ticket categorisation is the next planned step.

 

The bigger picture

What began as a fix for a manual pricing chore became a redesign of how SAQUA’s entire commercial operation runs. By making the company the single source of truth and orchestrating five systems around HubSpot, SAQUA now sells across five countries and four languages without the manual risk that used to come with it — on a foundation built to scale as the business grows, not slow it down. It’s the kind of operating model that turns HubSpot into the centre of a complex business, not just a CRM running alongside it.

These Guys Can Do Anything!

Partnering with uspeh to integrate HubSpot with Cin7 has completely transformed our operations. We now maintain a single source of truth for inventory and orders - our price lists are updated automatically, and order statuses flow seamlessly between systems. On top of that, the consolidation of our customer service desk into HubSpot has given us a 360° view of every client interaction, dramatically improving response times and customer satisfaction. The enhanced reporting dashboards provide real-time insights that empower our team to make faster, data-driven decisions. We couldn’t be happier with the results!” — Jamie Angus, Owner, SAQUA Seafood.