Shopify offers a straightforward draft order system with three basic stages: Open, Sent, and Completed. While these stages work well in Shopify, the reality of B2B sales is far more nuanced. A typical customer journey involves a range of pre-sales activities—quote requests, follow-ups, internal discussions, sales calls, and more—long before a draft order is created.
This complexity highlights the importance of mapping Shopify’s draft order stages to personalized HubSpot deal stages. Enter Quotific, a tool designed to streamline and automate this process, ensuring that deals move seamlessly through your pipeline while staying aligned with your sales process. This leverages HubSpot amazing tools as well, with custom pipeline automation and stages that other platforms don't easily allow, specially for e-commerce.
Pre-Sales Complexity: Creating a Deal Before the Quote
In B2B e-commerce, the customer journey often starts well before a quote is created. HubSpot deals play a critical role in managing these pre-sales interactions. Stages like “Requested Quote,” “Follow-Up Needed,” or “Sales Call Scheduled” reflect the reality of complex sales cycles.
Traditionally, sales reps manually move deals through these stages all the way from beginning to end, even needing to replicate a draft order that exists in Shopify, increasing the amount of error and duplication problems. However, this process becomes more efficient with Quotific. The tool integrates directly into your HubSpot deals, allowing sales agents to initiate the quote creation process without disrupting the pipeline, creating a draft from an existing deal in HubSpot . Once the quote is ready, automation ensures the deal advances automatically when possible, reducing manual errors and saving time.
Let's take a look at an actual example of a sales journey, which starts with a client requesting a quote for a few products with some personalization. STAGE 1: QUOTE REQUEST
Your sales agent will create a deal in HubSpot (or a workflow can do this for them) at this moment, to associate it with the right client and to start adding information they gather in the next step. They will now move the deal to STAGE TWO: CALL FOLLOW UP.
Depending on your process, they may now need to do some digging and researching, maybe internal approvals needed, check with inventory, there are an infinite number of stages that can be unique to your business. But for the sake of the example, we'll say the next stage is the actual draft order creation. STAGE THREE: OPEN QUOTE
Key Automation 1: Moving Deals with Open Quotes
When a sales agent creates a quote using Quotific (this occurs within the HubSpot Deal Record directly so this can even happen during a sales call), it immediately registers as an Open draft order in Shopify. However, in HubSpot, this stage can represent whatever your sales process requires—whether it's “Draft Pending Review” or “Quote Under Review.”
With proper deal stage mapping, automation takes over. A deal tagged with an open draft is automatically moved to the next relevant stage in your pipeline. For example, if your sales process defines the stage as “Draft Created,” Quotific ensures the deal transitions seamlessly. This automation eliminates friction, keeping your pipeline updated in real-time.
Going back to our example, all your sales agent needs to do is create the quote, and it will automatically be moved to STAGE 3: OPEN QUOTE.
Key Automation 2: Sent Quotes and Client Engagement
Shopify by default provides 3 stages for Draft Orders: OPEN, SENT AND COMPLETED. It's up to your team to define stages between them and to define what they mean in your process. The difference between an Open and Sent draft is critical at this stage: who holds the next action? Open drafts are often in review, requiring INTERNAL edits or approvals. Once sent, the ball is in the client’s court, signalling the need for follow-up instead.
With Quotific, sending a quote—whether from Shopify or directly within Quotific—triggers an automatic stage update in HubSpot. The deal moves the deal to STAGE 4: QUOTE SENT, allowing you to trigger workflows for follow-ups or reminders. If quotes are sent manually from HubSpot, the deal stage must be updated by your team or through a custom workflow, ensuring every stage reflects the latest activity.
Let's quickly go back to our example, our sales agents have created a Draft Order from a deal in HubSpot and it immediately goes to STAGE 3: OPEN QUOTE.
Your sales agent does not need any extra approval so they send it right after creation, from Quotific itself, which immediately updates and moves the deal to STAGE 4: QUOTE SENT (Awaiting for customer completion or feedback).
Nurturing and Beyond: Following Up and Closing Deals
The journey doesn’t end at “Quote Sent.” From nurturing leads to resolving client questions, these mid-stages can vary widely based on your process. Creating additional deal stages in HubSpot, such as “Follow-Up 1” or “Clarifications in Progress,” ensures clarity in your pipeline and better tracking of client interactions.
Finally, the ultimate goal: moving deals to Completed. When a client accepts and pays for their order, Quotific automatically updates the deal in HubSpot to the appropriate stage, such as “Deal Closed” or “Order Fulfilled.” This real-time syncing ensures your pipeline reflects the latest status without manual updates.
Back to our merchant, after 3 days of inactivity while the deal sits in STAGE 4: QUOTE SENT there is another stage called STAGE 5: QUOTE FOLLOW UP, which triggers a task for your sale agent to reach back out. After a quick call and feedback, your agent makes a quick edit to the quote (in Shopify) and the client is happy. Ready for closing, but they will do so in their own time as they are running into a meeting!
Whenever they do, even if its midnight, the status of the order will be updated to COMPLETED and the Deal will be automatically moved to STAGE 6: QUOTE SIGNED. At this moment a couple other changes occur within the Draft Order, the main one being, it is no longer considered a Draft Order but a CLOSED DEAL. The name will change and new stages will be unlocked within Shopify.
This stages allow you to keep track of the Order after purchase, so they are all about fulfillment. We will cover that in a different article!
Back to out imaginary store, the client got out of their meeting and paid, immediately the Draft Order changes and its stage reads STAGE 7: CLOSED WON!
Let's Recap!
Customizing your HubSpot deal stages to align with Shopify Draft Orders isn’t just a best practice—it’s a necessity for managing the complexity of B2B sales. Quotific bridges the gap, automating transitions and keeping your pipeline updated at every step. With the right stage mapping and automation in place, your sales team can focus on closing deals instead of managing them.
The three main Shopify stages are truly key to keeping track of your Draft Orders while maintaining your personalized process, which goes well beyond them! Quotific automates them based on your behaviour and your client's, so you can focus on unique stages and you can even automate many of those through HubSpot workflows! Let's get a more automated journey set up!
