Using ESP and commonsku Together

ESP is where a lot of promo shops search product and build the pitch. commonsku pulls ESP products in and runs the job from there. A former promo rep on how the two fit, the handoff that's still manual, and how SIPS carries commonsku order details into your pipeline.

Has this ever happened to you? You find the perfect insulated tumbler in one tab, build the pitch, the client says yes, and then you sit there copying item numbers and decoration notes into another screen while your coffee goes cold.

So was I. I ran my desk on commonsku, I searched product like everybody else, and for a long stretch I was the cable plugged in between my tools. Here's how ESP and commonsku fit together, where the copying still hides, and what you can tighten this afternoon without buying anything.

Where each one fits

ESP is ASI's platform, and most reps know it for product search and presentations. It's where a lot of shops go when a client says "here's the budget, what could we do."

commonsku runs the job. Presentation, estimate, sales order, purchase order to the supplier, proof, invoice, with the supplier inside that loop. It also describes itself as CRM plus order management, and it connects out to tools like QuickBooks Online, Xero, ShipStation, HubSpot and Zapier.

Here's the part a lot of shops miss. commonsku's own integrations page says its product search can "pull in products from ESP" for presentations. So these two were built to work side by side. You don't have to pick a lane.

The boundary: I'm describing what each company says about its own product. Features and plan details change, so confirm anything you care about in a demo, on your own jobs, with your own account connected.

The handoff that's still manual

Even with the catalog connection, a lot of shops still have a human seam somewhere. Maybe the reps who started in ESP never switched on the commonsku connection. Maybe the pitch got built somewhere else and then rebuilt. Maybe the job lands in commonsku clean, and then somebody retypes it into a CRM, a pay sheet and a reporting spreadsheet.

That last one is the one I lived. The order was right where it belonged. Then I copied it three more places, by hand, and every copy was a fresh chance to fat finger a quantity.

Nobody budgets for that time because it never shows up as a bill. It shows up as the wrong ship-to on a Friday.

Tighten it today, for free

You don't need my software for this part.

Start with the settings. Check that your ESP account is actually connected inside commonsku, and ask commonsku what else your plan already includes. If half your team is still copying product in by hand, you've got a settings problem, and settings are free. A connection you already pay for beats one you're thinking about buying.

Then count your copies. Pick one job from last week and write down every place a human typed its details after commonsku had them. Most people guess one. Most people find three or four.

How SIPS connects to it

Disclosure so this stays clean: I built SIPS, so I'm not a neutral voice on this section.

SIPS is a promo-focused CRM built to manage the client's whole sales life. The relationship, the pipeline before a job exists, the follow-ups, and what the job made you after it ships. It works with commonsku and for commonsku users, and the whole point is that you stop typing the same job twice.

Here's the mechanism. Paste a public commonsku share link, the same one you already send your client. SIPS reads the page and the job lands as a deal: client, contact, line items, SKUs, quantities, cost, sell, margin per line, decoration detail, artwork, in-hands date and ship-to. No double entry and no data migration. commonsku keeps running the job.

Paste the estimate, then the sales order, then the invoice, and they land on one job, because SIPS matches on the exact job number commonsku already assigns. Stages only move forward, so an old estimate can't drag a finished job backward. It works the same on Essentials, Advanced or Enterprise. No login, no credential, nothing to configure on commonsku's side.

The boundary: SIPS doesn't read ESP. Products you pulled from ESP into a commonsku presentation come across when that commonsku document does. Anything else comes in by hand, by bulk import or by paste. When commonsku changes a share page layout, the parser breaks loudly and shows an error instead of importing a wrong number. And SIPS is a CRM. It isn't accounting, inventory or an ERP, and I won't pretend it is.

If you want to see it, paste one of your own commonsku share links and watch the job land. Nothing is stored. The longer story is in how I built a CRM that reads commonsku, and the product page is here.

Next step

Do the copy count on five jobs this week. Write the number down.

If it's zero, congratulations, your stack is wired right and you can close this tab. If it's three per job, you're paying a person to be an integration, and that person might be you. Fix the free stuff first. Then, if the CRM retype is what's left, you know where I am.

For the bigger picture, here's my guide to getting more out of commonsku by connecting it to your pipeline.

Stout Intel is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by commonsku, ASI or ESP.