Powerful Automatic Pricing Calculator for Web-to-Print

Why Does a Web-to-Print Website Need an Automatic Pricing Calculator?

Some stores sell products that are straightforward: a shopper views it, likes it, and adds it to their cart. But for many other stores, especially web-to-print stores, shoppers have to make choices before that "add to cart" button can be clicked.

Whether these choices are simple color selections or multiple options for size, shape or material depends on the printing product being sold. Either way, product variations are what make viewing and selecting the right options a simple task for shoppers.

Creating the attributes for a variable product can be straightforward. For example, selling a T-shirt in a few sizes just needs size attributes: small, medium, large, XL, XXL, and so on.

But the need can grow more complex. A shirt might come in three shades of blue, or two versions of a print, one with a metallic sheen, or in three different cuts or fits.

For products such as business cards, posters and flyers, shoppers also tend to order in large quantities. To encourage larger orders, merchants often offer bulk pricing: a particular item or group of items at a lower price based on the quantity ordered. This matters to wholesalers and merchants selling items typically bought in bulk, which is why a pricing calculator needs to support bulk price setting, and why the same bulk pricing rule can be applied across multiple, similar products in one or more categories.

How Can I Customize My Pricing Calculator to Fit My Business Model?

Making all product variations easy to view, browse and buy matters for the user experience, which is why many store owners ask to customize the price calculator table on their product pages, aiming to make ordering and payment as simple as possible for online customers.

The following are examples of how other web-to-print stores display variable products, which illustrate some useful practices for displaying variable products online.

4over4.com

4over4.com displays product variants in a form that makes selection easier for shoppers. Users choose the product variation from a dropdown, then choose to upload a design file or design online, depending on how the admin sets up the product. Once all variations are chosen, the total price is calculated automatically, along with the product rates. Admins can set up dynamic prices based on categories, tags or product attributes, including special promotions tied to certain attributes.

Bannerkoenig.de

At Bannerkoenig.de, shoppers choose all product variations, enter a custom dimension, and click a calculate-price button to see the exact price, including the net price, price with VAT, and total price separately. Shoppers can also choose to upload a design file or design online.

Attributes should be clear and easy to understand at a glance, no matter how complex the underlying variations are. A plain dropdown list is often the first sign a customer has of their choices, and it is not very visual unless each variant has its own image. Being too vague can push shoppers away, but so can presenting too many choices at once. Color swatches, and similarly, image swatches for shape or label swatches for size, help display these choices more clearly than a plain dropdown.

Bestelprint.nl

Bestelprint.nl shows product variations in large thumbnails or dropdown boxes, which makes the product page look more visual and can help attract shoppers. Variation boxes can also be arranged in a logical order to avoid confusing shoppers, in whatever way best suits the products being sold.

There are many ways to design a price calculator box on a product page. Giving shoppers the practical information they need saves everyone's time, speeds up the purchasing process, and reduces the number of pricing questions a support team has to answer. Shoppers can calculate shipping costs, the amount they need to budget for a given quantity, and more, directly on the page.

How Printcart Helps Make Product Variations Easier to Preview and Sell

Transparency is key to building trust in online businesses. When shoppers know what to expect on delivery time, shipping conditions and order status, they are more likely to buy or place an order. That is why sharing clear pricing details, through a pricing calculator that lets customers quickly estimate the cost of the products and services they are interested in, makes a real difference in turning visitors into customers.

Printcart's team works with store owners to set up pricing calculators and product variations that fit their own business model, so variations stay simple to set up, browse and sell regardless of how many products a store offers.