Why most WooCommerce stores do not need a request a quote plugin
Request a quote plugins are one of the most popular tools in WooCommerce. However, I think most of the stores that use one are losing sales because of it.
Hiding your price behind a "Request a Quote" form asks the customer to start a conversation and wait for a price before they know whether they can afford you. In nearly every store I see doing this, the pricing could have been worked out on the product page instead.
Below, I'll explain why I think that most stores should delete their quote form and install a proper pricing calculator instead. (If you've already decided you want a quote form, we have a guide to setting up a WooCommerce request a quote plugin and another on adding quote buttons to a product table.)
Why quote requests cost you sales
WooCommerce request or quote plugins are hugely popular but I think that most people use them when they shouldn't be.
Contacting you for a quote can drastically hurt your conversions because it adds friction and slows down the process. Customers don't know if your quote will be competitive so when they see they can't get a price online, they'll either:
- Leave immediately and buy from a company who does publish their pricing in a more transparent way, or;
- Send you a quote request and then get bored of waiting and buy elsewhere.
Either way, you've lost the sale. Luckily, there's an easy solution.
Replace manual quote forms with a price formula
Think about the process that you go through when providing manual quotes to customers. Do you pick a number out of thin air, or do you have an internal formula that calculates the cost of meeting the customer's requirement and adds on extra fees to cover your time, profit margin etc. to reach the final cost? If it's the latter (and I hope for the sake of your business that it is 😅), then you can use this formula to skip the quote process completely.
The trick is to install a plugin like WooCommerce Product Options that adds custom price formulas to your products. Use it to define the exact logic and pricing rules that you currently use to send manual quotes to clients. That way, there's absolutely no need for customers to need to contact you for a quote.
It works like this
- You install the WooCommerce Product Options plugin and add all the fields that will allow customers to configure the custom product and enter their requirements. (Checkboxes, radio buttons, file upload fields, color swatches, and so on.)
- Next, you create the WooCommerce price formula or measurement price calculator by entering the rules that you use when sending quotes into the plugin's AI bot. This provides a finished price formula which you can paste into the WooCommerce Product Options settings.
- The customer visits your website and configures the product to their requirements.
- The price formula automatically calculates the correct price and displays it above the add to cart button.
- The customer checks they are happy with the price and immediately adds the customized product to their cart and orders online, paying the correct amount.
- You receive the order without having lifted a finger ☺️
As you can see, using a price formula to allow customers to get a custom price and order instantly is drastically better for the customer. It's also better for the merchant because you get more sales and don't have to spend time manually producing quotes. Everyone wins.
The trick is to make sure that everything in your usual quoting process is incorporated into the product options on the page and the pricing formula which works out the price. With WooCommerce Product Options, this is absolutely possible with no limitations. It supports all mathematical and logical operators like a spreadsheet, but you don't need to be a spreadsheet expert because the price formula AI does the work for you.
Start from the spreadsheet you already use to work out a quote. Every factor in it becomes part of the formula: The measurements the customer enters, the material, the finish, your minimum charge and your margin. Store the costs you reuse as custom variables. When a supplier puts their prices up, you then change one number.
When a quote request still makes sense
I can think of very few scenarios where it's necessary for ecommerce sites to provide manual quotes. There's one exception: Work where the scope has to be agreed before a price can exist.
Examples include a shopfitter pricing a refurbishment, an agency scoping a build and a fabricator quoting a one-off from a client's drawings. Nobody can price those from a form, because you only find out what is being bought by talking to the client. If a site visit, a drawing review or a specification call comes before every order, a quote request is the right tool.
Of course, that doesn't apply to most stores that use Request a Quote plugins. If your quotes come out of a spreadsheet then you're not in this category, however custom the product feels. For you, an online price formula can be hugely beneficial.
Final thoughts
Before you install a request a quote plugin, open the last ten quotes you sent. Ask how many of them could have been worked out from a formula. If the answer is most or all of them, your website could have calculated the price instead of keeping customers waiting.