A square-foot pricing calculator behind a deliberately hidden shop
Stone is priced by the square foot with extras and colour choices, which no standard checkout handles. We built the calculator that does.
What they came to us with
Stone is priced by the square foot, with optional extras and colour choices on top, and no standard ecommerce checkout prices that way. They also did not want a public price list sitting on the website.
The problem, in business terms
Bespoke Stone Surfaces needed two things that pull against each other: a simple website that showed off the stone, and a proper quoting and payment system underneath it.
The awkward part is how stone is priced. It goes by the square foot, then varies by material, colour and whichever extras a customer chooses. Off-the-shelf ecommerce assumes a product has a price. This one does not until the customer has answered several questions. They also had good reason not to publish a price list, so whatever we built had to quote without putting numbers on the open site.
What we built
- A custom calculator that prices by the square foot and takes material, colour and optional extras into account.
- A hidden WooCommerce shop, so orders and payments run through a real ecommerce system without the public site becoming a price list.
- Klarna integrated partway through the project to widen how customers could pay, alongside Apple Pay and Google Pay.
- An admin panel for adding and amending products and product categories, and sending promotional email to the saved list.
- A gallery that does the stone justice, which for this business is a sales tool rather than decoration.
Hosted on our own servers with 24/7 monitoring.
The result
Customers configure what they actually want, by size, material, colour and extras, and get a price for it, without the business publishing its rates or quoting each one by hand. The shop and admin side are the client's to run.
Why a calculator is not a catalogue
The reason this could not be a standard shop is worth spelling out, because the same problem stops a lot of trades businesses selling online at all.
Ecommerce platforms are built on the assumption that a product has a price, or at most a small grid of variants. That model holds for a shirt in four sizes and three colours. It breaks the moment price is a function rather than a lookup: anything sold by area, length or volume, anything where an extra changes the maths rather than adding a fixed amount, anything where two options interact.
Firms in that position usually end up doing one of two things. They publish "from" prices, which invites the wrong enquiries and hands competitors their margins. Or they quote every job by hand, which caps how much work they can take without hiring, and loses the customer who wanted an answer at nine in the evening.
Building the pricing logic properly is the third option, and it is a small piece of software rather than a large one. The awkwardness is rarely the arithmetic. It is agreeing the rules, because the rules usually live in somebody's head and have never been written down in one place. That conversation is most of the work, and it is the same conversation whether the output is a calculator on a website or a full replacement for the spreadsheet doing the sums today.
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