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I recently joined the Novus CPQ Podcast to talk with Frank Sohn about Quotific CPQ, Shopify draft orders, HubSpot, and the future of ecommerce sales workflows.

One of the biggest themes that came up in the conversation was this:

Modern ecommerce businesses are no longer purely “self-service”.

Especially in B2B wholesale, high-ticket ecommerce, and businesses with customer-specific pricing, the buying journey almost always includes both:

  • ecommerce
  • sales-assisted buying

That creates a major operational challenge because most systems were never designed for both. Traditional CPQ systems were built for enterprise sales teams. Traditional CRMs were not built for ecommerce.

And ecommerce platforms historically focused more on self-service checkout experiences.

Businesses end up stitching together:

  • spreadsheets
  • PDFs
  • disconnected quoting tools
  • manual order entry
  • email approvals
  • custom pricing workflows
  • disconnected attribution data

The result is friction during the most important part of the customer journey: when the customer is actually ready to buy.

The Problem With Traditional CPQ in Ecommerce

One of the challenges we see repeatedly with Shopify and HubSpot customers is that the quoting process often lives completely outside the ecommerce platform.

A sales rep creates:

  • a PDF quote
  • a spreadsheet
  • a manual order
  • or uses a traditional CPQ system

Then someone internally has to:

  • recreate the order in Shopify
  • verify pricing
  • check inventory
  • manually associate attribution data
  • and coordinate fulfillment

This creates operational complexity and slows down the customer experience.

In ecommerce, speed matters.

If a customer:

  • requests pricing
  • talks to sales
  • receives a quote
  • then waits days for internal coordination

…that delay creates friction and increases the chance the customer shops elsewhere.

Shopify Draft Orders Are Quietly Becoming a Sales Platform

One of the most interesting shifts happening right now is that Shopify draft orders are evolving into a lightweight sales platform for modern B2B ecommerce.

Why?

Because draft orders solve real operational problems:

  • customer-specific pricing
  • negotiated pricing
  • wholesale workflows
  • sales-assisted checkout
  • approvals
  • manual adjustments
  • invoicing workflows

But the important part is this:

The customer still checks out through Shopify.

That means:

  • the ecommerce platform remains the source of truth
  • fulfillment workflows remain intact
  • analytics remain connected
  • attribution remains connected
  • customer history remains connected

This is incredibly important for growing ecommerce businesses.

Why We Built Quotific CPQ

We built Quotific CPQ specifically because ecommerce businesses using Shopify and HubSpot were getting stuck between:

  • traditional ecommerce tools
  • and traditional enterprise CPQ systems

Most businesses did not actually want a giant enterprise CPQ implementation.

They wanted:

  • Shopify draft orders
  • Create Shopify draft orders (manual orders) without giving sales reps access to Shopify
  • HubSpot visibility
  • customer-specific pricing
  • sales workflows
  • attribution visibility
  • and faster quote turnaround

Without creating yet another disconnected system.

Quotific CPQ allows sales reps to create Shopify draft orders directly inside HubSpot while leveraging:

  • Shopify products
  • Shopify inventory
  • Shopify pricing
  • Shopify Plus company pricing/catalogs
  • customer context inside HubSpot

The goal is not to replace ecommerce. The goal is to extend ecommerce into sales-assisted buying journeys and shorten the communication gap between ecommerce prospects and sales reps.

The Bigger Problem: Ecommerce and CRM Systems Were Never Fully Unified

Historically, ecommerce and CRM platforms evolved separately.

Ecommerce systems focused on:

  • checkout
  • fulfillment
  • products
  • payments

CRM systems focused on:

  • contacts
  • deals
  • sales pipelines
  • marketing automation

But modern commerce businesses need both.

That’s why at Unific we’ve focused heavily on connecting ecommerce data into HubSpot in a way that is actually useful operationally.

For years we’ve worked on solving challenges around:

  • reliable ecommerce syncing
  • webhook/event-streaming architectures
  • abandoned cart visibility
  • customer lifecycle segmentation
  • RFM analysis
  • scalable ecommerce workflows inside HubSpot

CPQ is really the next extension of that idea.

If ecommerce activity, customer activity, quotes, abandoned carts, and orders all live in disconnected systems, businesses lose visibility into the customer journey, and worse, customers get a bad experience.

 

The Future Is Unified Commerce

The future is not “ecommerce versus sales”.

The future is Unified Commerce.

That means:

  • self-service and sales-assisted buying together
  • ecommerce and CRM working together
  • attribution connected to revenue
  • personalization connected to commerce behavior
  • sales reps operating directly inside ecommerce workflows

Modern buyers expect:

  • ecommerce convenience
  • personalized pricing
  • fast responses
  • seamless checkout experiences
  • continuity across channels

The businesses that deliver that experience will win.

Thanks again to Novus CPQ for having me on the podcast and allowing us to discuss where ecommerce-native CPQ is headed next.