The benefits of adding a cost calculator to your website
Instant, Personalised Quotes
A bespoke pricing calculator allows potential customers to get instant, tailored quotes based on their specific requirements.
They’re free for customers to use, and should be designed well enough that they can be used without confusion, and the results should also be easy to understand.
A good calculator can include helpful tooltips, guided steps, and can even allow the customer to send the quote to their email address whilst simultaneously sending the quote to the business owner or whoever handles quotes and follow-ups.
Lead generation
When cost calculators are able to be send quotes to the user's email address, they can double as powerful lead generation tools, because you as a business owner (or one of your team) can capture the details of the quote, and of course the email address that they have been sent to.
You can then, if you want, follow up with tailored offers, further information, or whatever works for you when following up on enquiries.
Sales team support and efficiency
Calculators can standardise the quoting process, ensuring consistency and clarity, whilst also freeing up you and your team to focus on other things.
Whether you have a dedicated sales team, or you or a member of staff spends a few hours a day, week or month dealing with requests for quotes and follow-ups, a cost calculator can save a lot of time.
A personal example was when an existing client was discussing his pricing structure for the purpose of me building a bespoke calculator for his potential clients to use, and he suddenly said Hey, could this be used by my guys when they’re on site and someone asks for a quote?
Well, yes...
I created a version designed for potential clients visiting his website, and another version which allows his team to provide accurate quotes on the spot. Both versions used the same back-end and formulas that I had created, and both allowed the customer AND the boss to receive the quote to their email addresses.
Automatically calculate optional payment plans
If you provide services or anything which is a significant cost, a good calculator (certainly some that Targa produces) can automatically calculate and display payment options.
You, as the business owner, set the terms...
- the deposit
- the number of payments (which could be based on the size of the purchase)
- whether it's interest free or with a percentage which you can decide on
- etc...
Payment plans can are usually displayed just beneath the quote price, and can also be included in the email which customers can send to themselves.
Here's an example...
Upselling and cross-selling opportunities
Your calculator might be the first time a potential customer learns that you also provide other services they’re actually interested in. This could lead to an automatic upsell when the customer selects the option, or you could trigger messaging of additional options based on the customer’s selection.
This is a good one which has happened to me from web design perspective...
In order to inform potential customers about some of the options available for selection on my first web design quote calculator, I included advisory overlays from little [?] buttons next to each option.
Some of my clients hadn't realised that adding a booking calendar or an FAQ chatbot was possible, and nor did most of them know what Open Graph tags and Schema Mark-up is, and the benefits they bring.
The beauty of the calculator was such that the potential customers learned about these (and other) options for the first time, and were easily able to add and remove the options to see what difference they made to the overall cost.
Data collection and insights
For some small businesses who simply want to increase the number and quality of enquiries whilst saving time on quoting, data collection might feel unnecessary.
But the fact is that the information can be obtained, and could be useful for gauging which features and options are the most popular. It could tell you where and when most of the enquiries come from, and the size of the quotes.
The data can be easily captured at your end on receipt of the emailed quotes, but Google Analytics can also provide useful insights too.
Brand differentiation
A well-designed calculator can demonstrate innovation and professionalism. It shows that you have invested time, effort and cost into helping potential customers conveniently find the information they're looking for.
This can set your business apart from competitors who rely solely on static price lists or manual quoting.
Engagement and conversion
Interactive tools keep visitors on site longer and drive conversions through user-focused UX for both the page and the calculator.
It also has the potential to help with your SEO efforts, because by keeping visitors engaged, your bounce rate*can be kept low.
* NOTE: The term bounce rate
is used to describe the length of time someone arriving on your website remains there before deciding that it's not for them, and they leave. People who leave a page within a few seconds could indicate to Google that the page was not relevant and useful enough to have been included prominently in its search results. That could contribute to lower search positions in the future.
Disadvantages of Bespoke Pricing Calculators
Potential for Error
Rubbish in = Rubbish out: From the most basic to the most elaborate off-the-shelf calculators, ALL of them will produce unsatisfactory results if the wrong information is fed into them.
The solution:
- Make it easy to understand and easy to use, and encourage users to input the correct information or select the correct options which most closely match their requirements.
- User testing can help to reveal things which your customers might not think are as obvious as you think they are!
Accuracy is Everything: If formulas or logic are flawed, your calculator could provide incorrect quotes.
The solution:
- Developers can make errors, and there can also be errors in the business requirements which the developers base their coded solutions on.
- Rigid functional testing and user acceptance testing is crucial, as so is regression testing for when further updates are made.
Development and maintenance costs
Bespoke calculators require an initial investment and are likely to require a level of ongoing maintenance to ensure accuracy and compatibility with your website.
Bespoke tools, including bespoke calculators, involve a degree of upfront investment in planning, design, and testing.
How to turn it into an advantage:
- The costs and the development time can be kept to a sensible level if the developers are efficient, and do not attempt to reinvent the wheel at every single stage of the process.
- If that efficiency is also applied to maintenance, testing, and to any changes, updates or additions you might want them to make at a later date, the costs don’t can be kept quite manageable.
- After all, if the costs are too high for you to make any return on your investment, then you’ll be wasting your money on something which costs more than it’s worth to you.
The calculators might be too complex for some users
Overly complicated calculators may overwhelm users or produce inaccurate quotes if not carefully designed with the user experience in mind.
How to turn it into an advantage:
- The solution to this is to focus on making the calculators as user friendly as possible, regardless of the level of complexity that might be required behind the scenes to crunch the numbers based on the selections made.
- User testing AND functional testing is crucial.
Functional testing should include testing and monitoring the results of each component in isolation of the other components, and then in conjunction with the other components.
This is not only from the perspective of the accuracy of the numbers, but also the accuracy of the messaging and descriptive summary which will confirm to the customer in simple language what they have selected.
Here is a real example from a calculator for a domestic and industrial window cleaning company.
Potential for competitor scrutiny which might reveal too much
You might be concerned that competitors can figure out your pricing strategy based on the logic in the calculator.
This is a valid concern, and is just a relevant to anyone displaying prices on their website.
Why you shouldn't be too concerned:
On one hand your calculator could crunch the numbers in the background and then present a simple explanation of what the customer has selected, and a cost. That is usually the preferred method of communicating the cost to a customer, and is typically what a competitor would see if they were to try your calculator.
Alternatively the cost could be broken down into a detailed list of separate charges, and a final total at the bottom. That method of display is usually not something you would provide to a customer, but could be perfect for you and your staff when using a staff-only version of the calculator which the public would not have access to.
Either way, it wouldn’t be possible for a competitor or their web developer to copy or steal the code and the logic behind each of the calculation methods.
A calculator might not suit all businesses and industries
In industries where pricing is highly negotiable or dependent on factors not easily captured online (e.g., creative agencies, legal services), calculators may oversimplify or misrepresent the true cost.
It very much depends on your pricing model and the ability of the calculator developer to understand your pricing structure and bring it to life with as little compromise as possible.
It’s also true to say that a bespoke cost calculator is not a viable alternative to a simple price list.
For example, if you run a hair salon which charges £X for a wash and trim, and £Y for a wash and trim for senior citizens on Wednesday mornings, you don't need a calculator to communicate those prices to potential customers. It simply wouldn't be necessary!
What cost calculators are useful for:
- If you run services which are priced based on time, area, length, volume, frequency, distance, etc., and those prices can be impacted by tiered pricing based on quantity, combinations of options selected, price caps, minimum charges applied, discounted rates, etc., then a bespoke calculator is perfect.
- Just imagine how cluttered a static price list would be if you needed to explain all of those options to someone who is then expected to go and figure it out for themselves... even if that someone is one of your sales team!
My website hardly gets any visitors, so what’s the point?
This is a real life problem which a lot of businesses face with their websites...
Even if you have the most incredible website, without visitors it is of little use, and so you need to put effort into getting more people to visit it!
How to turn it into an advantage:
- The solution to the problem is to drive more traffic to it, through conventional SEO methods, paid search (is Google Ads), and other online and offline promotions, social media activities (not the picture of your cat or a cocktail on the beach), etc.
- If you can fix your lack of visitors problem, the next thing to focus on is providing visitors with a compelling reason to stay on your website… assuming that they haven’t arrived there by accident.
I must be careful not to shift the focus of this article over to SEO and website usability, but I would genuinely consider that a well designed calculator for the right type of business is a really good way of keeping visitors engaged with a website, and with the potential for many of those visitors to become paying customers.
But… as already stated, if you’re getting very visitors, it will be difficult for a calculator to provide a good return on your investment.
I'm Daron Harvey, founder of TargaWeb, specialising in web development and bespoke online cost calculators. I am now in my 29th year of professional website production and management, and still loving every minute of if (well... nearly every minute!)
I'm Daron Harvey, founder of TargaWeb, specialising in web development and bespoke online cost calculators.
