Situation

Working with the client’s agency, we needed a custom pricing mechanism for this leading calendar printer. The printer used a tiered pricing mechanism with a fixed price for a specified quantity with an additional per-copy charge for each item over the minimum.

Action

I first created a custom panel extending WooCommerce to allow the client to enter their pricing tiers ( the model allows for unlimited tiers).

Secondly, we built the front-end mechanism for a site visitor to select their quantity and see a price. The visitor can set the quantity by either adjusting a slider or directly entering the amount. In WooCommerce, there isn’t a mechanism for updating the pricing from the back-end. So I created the pricing calculator in Javascript. When the page is loaded, the pricing tiers are passed to the page and the calculator dynamically updates the total price as well as the price per piece.

For security reasons, we don’t pass this calculation to the back-end when placing the order, so the order is repriced in the backend. To the client ordering the calendars – it appears that they are ordering a quantity of calendars. To the printer, in the backend, the order is expressed as an order of quantity 1 in the calculated amount for a quantity of calendars (quantity is actually a note). The communications to the client placing the order as well as the communications to the printer maintain this dichotomy.