Listen to Novus CPQ Podcast Recording:
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:
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:
The result is friction during the most important part of the customer journey: when the customer is actually ready to buy.
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:
Then someone internally has to:
This creates operational complexity and slows down the customer experience.
In ecommerce, speed matters.
If a customer:
…that delay creates friction and increases the chance the customer shops elsewhere.
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:
But the important part is this:
The customer still checks out through Shopify.
That means:
This is incredibly important for growing ecommerce businesses.
We built Quotific CPQ specifically because ecommerce businesses using Shopify and HubSpot were getting stuck between:
Most businesses did not actually want a giant enterprise CPQ implementation.
They wanted:
Without creating yet another disconnected system.
Quotific CPQ allows sales reps to create Shopify draft orders directly inside HubSpot while leveraging:
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.
Historically, ecommerce and CRM platforms evolved separately.
Ecommerce systems focused on:
CRM systems focused on:
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:
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 not “ecommerce versus sales”.
The future is Unified Commerce.
That means:
Modern buyers expect:
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.