Entrepreneurs across the world are in a daily competition to reach more customers thus growing their businesses and making a remarkable profit. This race is for the swift who will discover what their business needs and provide it immediately. You can’t afford to waste time!
If you have a business that offers services such as car rental, medical, delivery, booking, or venue rental services, then you need to get yourself a cost calculator. This plugin will help your customers easily calculate the cost of what they are buying from your website.
If there is one thing customers don’t like, it’s the shock of hidden costs while paying for a product or service on a website. Online businesses need to know that transparency plays a major role in attracting and maintaining your customers.
Providing your customers with an online calculator shows your willingness to carry out a transparent business. This is one significant way to attract and retain your customers.
How can a cost calculator widget boost sales on your website?
- The Cost Calculator
- Why Invest in a Cost Calculator
- Creating a Custom Cost Calculator
- Examples of Calculators
- Conclusion
The Cost Calculator
Online businesses keep growing each year and so are tools to enhance their operations. If you are a business owner, a Cost Calculator plugin allows you to build an interactive platform that easily creates price estimation forms, quote forms or any calculator on forms.
The plugin is designed for use in any type of website offering price structure on products or services. This calculator builder comes with effective features that include
- Estimation forms – for all estimates needed
- Calculation builder – a simple drag-and-drop feature
- Customization options – for color, fonts, and any other background options for your liking
- The calendar – Facilitates date-picking option for deliveries or orders, etc.
- Multiple other elements to build estimation forms.
Why Invest in a Cost Calculator
This calculator is an extension anyone can give offer customers as a way to calculate costs upfront. Adding this tool to your website is an excellent way to send more organic traffic to your website.
Here are just a few examples of how you can use this WordPress online calculator:
- Car rentals – help people make an informed decision of how much it will cost in advance.
- Online courses – allow the students to project the cost of the entire course and see if the course falls within their financing options.
- Venue rentals – bring to light all-inclusive costs for easier planning
- Booking websites – eliminate hidden charges that creep up in the last minute after you already committed with some money.
- Freelancers – Simply states the cost of certain services upfront enabling buyers to know what they are being charged.
- Delivery services – Give a clear figure of the amount charged for a particular type of delivery service.
- Health coaching – Offers opportunities for BMI calculators as the initial interaction
By adding a calculator for your business you get the advantage of getting more leads from the email addresses they share. You do this by requiring the customer to enter their email so they can get the results of the calculator. In the future, you can use these emails for email marketing and most probably get more return customers.
Creating a Custom Cost Calculator
If you use WordPress for your website, it will be relatively easy to put together a sophisticated cost calculator built right on the platform.
You can choose to use the free version or go for the PRO version, which has more enhanced features. Once you have installed this plugin, it’s time to create, edit and customize your calculator. We will highlight the right steps to follow as you create and edit.
With the plugin activated, your cost calculator icon will appear on the dashboard menu. Go to Dashboard >Cost Calculator menu.
To start you off, there are no forms on the list yet. To create your own calculators, simply click on Create.
You can also import prebuilt calculators. You can try the free version calculator and see if you like it before upgrading!
From the prebuilt calculators, you can choose any demo calculator and edit to fit your needs. Here is a prebuilt calculator you can edit.
For example, Let’s choose the Delivery Service calculator and see what it looks like before we edit. Click on Delivery Services>Preview.
The preview helps you view the available elements and choose what to add or remove to fit your delivery business.
You will get to see how the calculator looks like before you can edit anything.
You also notice the calculator gives you the advantage of viewing both the desktop and mobile preview. This helps you see exactly what your customers will see from both gadgets.
Let’s see how you can edit this calculator.
You will find the elements that need to change depending on the type of business you have and the services you offer.
In our example above, you will notice that the elements requires that you enter the correct details of the products. The height, width, distance, type of service – via road or air, and the total description.
All this information is critical in ensuring the correct details about delivering a certain product are captured clearly.
Each element opens up a dialogue box with information crated for the specific page including the measurements you would like to use.
For example, on the type of service page, you can choose to offer a choice of services with different costs for each as shown below.
Remember to save all the changes you make on each page and preview after every change to see the effects.
The Total description is the area where all the calculations for the different elements will happen. In the formula field, you will see a code that may look complicated but it’s not as challenging as it looks Its actually possible to recreate yours!
Under the name area, there are five fields to use in the formula. Click the first field and add an operator. The asterisk signifies that you want to add the five field values. Click on the other fields to add appropriately and voila your formula is complete.
Let’s see how you set up the rest of the features in your calculator – conditions, settings and appearance.
Conditions
Conditions are only available to you if you are using the PRO version. It is not a must use for every calculator but is an excellent feature to consider.
Settings
The settings feature is ideal in helping you adjust the currency and payment integrations you would like to use – PayPal, Stripe, Woo Checkout, etc.
The integrations on the settings page are ideal for almost all businesses as they make them work easily. Let’s learn more about these integrations:-
If you have activated woo commerce, the Cost Calculator automatically integrates with it. This makes it easy for your users such that when they click the submit button on the website, they land on the woo checkout page. Adding an Add to cart button helps complete transactions fast.
Send form integration allows you to connect with your customers through their contacts when they share them in order to receive the results via email. This goes a long way in producing leads for your business.
You get to choose to use one of the payment options – PayPal or stripe for your calculator.
Appearance
You can customize how you want your calculator to appear by changing any design aspect including the background color, box style, typography, borders, spacing, etc.
The appearance is the real deal when it comes to creating an attractive calculator. Let’s not get it twisted, colors do attract the eyes and if you use the best combinations you can attract your users to interact more with your website. You can also match the colors of your calculator with the website colors to form a certain theme.
Examples of Calculators
Having learned how to create, edit and customize your own pricing calculators, it is just the beginning of a happily ever after with your business. Whatever business you run, you can have calculators running efficiently to the advantage of the customer.
Here are examples of businesses you can incorporate an online calculator to help you boost your sales thus growing your business.
Make deliveries fast and efficient. Allow your customers to calculate how much it’s going to cost them for deliveries door-to-door or within a day or two.
Provide ample details for venue rentals. Offer your customers enough details to help book the venue of their choice – the kind of venue they want, how many guests you are expecting, food options per person, event timing, and any other extra servings.
Enhance your car wash services. The efficiency of having your customers choose the exact services they need and see how much it costs them is the best thing ever.
Help your customers learn of the best loan options. If maybe, you are in car dealership business, help your customers calculate their best financing options.
Help your students get a clear view of what its going to cost them for their studies. Most students will not enroll in schools that hide the exact fee they will pay. This is because most schools end up with many hidden fees that the student had not foreseen making it hard to meet their financial obligations.
These are just but a few examples of calculators you can add to your business for efficiency. This tool is a sure plug for the growth of your business.
Conclusion
Every entrepreneur starts a business to reach people who turn into customers and more so repeat ones. To attract the kind of people that need your services or products, it will take a serious investment on your end.
Starting a website is one thing but ensuring it’s efficient and friendly is another. Adding tools that help your users get what they need fast makes them come back next time they have the same need.
As we have seen above, the Cost Calculator is a plugin that anyone with an online business should incorporate into their website. It will not only boost your sales but it will make your website more interactive and friendly to every user who stops by.
You have finally learned how to create a custom calculator in WordPress for any type of business whether it’s a car wash, graphic design, e-Commerce, venue rentals, etc. You have an advanced level of knowledge that will not only drive more traffic to your site, but translate that traffic to higher profit margins.
