Installation:
Download the file from Vendor Package Builder.
Go to WordPress Admin > Plugins > Add New.
Click Upload Plugin at the top.
Choose File and select the .zip file you downloaded in Step 1.
Click Install Now and Activate the extension.
Configuration:
Calculator Basics
Default Units
The first step in configuring the plugin is to select the default Dimension, Weight, Area, and/or Volume units in which you’ll define your products’ area and volume. This is done from WooCommerce > Settings > Products > General:
Configuring the Calculator
The plugin modifies the “Shipping” tab and adds a new tab named “Measurement” to the Product Data meta box in the product edit admin page. It’s best to start with the Measurement tab, as the way you use measurements can influence the information in the Shipping tab.
In the Measurement tab, you can select:
- Measurement – the measurement to calculate, for instance “Area”
- Show Product Price per Unit – Enable to display the product price per unit on the frontend for easy comparisons (e.g., $1.68 sq. ft.). When enabling “Calculated price”, the unit price will be the one you enter under the product’s price field. When disabling this (using quantity-based mode), this will calculate price based on product price and configured measurements under the “Shipping tab” (leave it disabled to simply show the product price, e.g., $27.48, which may represent a “price-per-box”).
- Pricing label – label to display for the product price per unit (defaults to the “pricing unit” if blank). For example, I could use “per m2” to override “sq m”
- Pricing unit – unit to display with price
- Calculated Price – leaving this disabled uses the quantity mode for the calculator; enabling it enables user-defined mode, and pricing per unit will be used instead of pricing per quantity.
You’ll also have additional fields to complete, which will correspond to the measurement selected:
- The label to display next to the input field(s) (ie “Enter Sq Ft Needed”)
- The input field’s unit to display on the frontend
- For the Dimensions, Area, Volume, and Weight calculators, you can choose whether a desired amount can be entered by the user, which will automatically update the selected quantity and price, or whether the value will be an informational display-only value that is dynamically updated as the product quantity is changed
If you’re not sure what to do with each setting, check out our demo setups to get a feel for how each setting changes the calculator. There will probably be a setup similar to what you’re looking for.
Available Units
The following units are available natively with the plugin:
Weight
- t (tonne/metric ton)
- kg
- g
- tn (short ton = 2000 lbs)
- lbs
- oz
Length
- km
- m
- cm
- mm
- in
- ft
- yd
- mi (mile)
Area / Surface Area
- ha (hectare)
- sq km
- sq m
- sq cm
- sq mm
- acs (acre)
- sq. mi.
- sq. yd.
- sq. ft.
- sq. in.
Volume
- cu m
- L
- mL
- gal
- qt
- pt
- cup
- fl. oz.
- cu. yd.
- cu. ft.
- cu. in.
Notes:
- SI (metric) and English units can be mixed, though a very small loss of precision may be experienced. Use a consistent unit system for all measurements and for defining prices for a given product for optimal results.
- As explained below in the FAQ, the display of units can be customized, i.e. “m2” rather than “sq m”
- Developers: Additional derived units, as well as completely new or even made-up units can be defined through the use of filters in the plugin. See the developer documentation for further details and sample code. Yes, you can even add the Smoot!
Create Measurement Products
Measurement Types
After you’ve set the default store units, you can start setting up products. The first setup option you’ll need to determine for any product is the Measurement type. You can choose any of the following measurement types:
- Dimensions: product length, width, or height
- Area: simple area, or length x width
- Perimeter: based on (2 x Length) + (2 x Width)
- Surface Area: based on 2 x ([LxW] + [LxH] + [WxH])
- Volume: simple volume, area x height, or length x width x height
- Weight: the product weight
- Room Walls: an area-type calculator intended for selling wallpaper
Note, for example, the two versions of “area” (simple and L x W). This affects the user input — do you want the customer to enter the square footage (or other area unit)? Use simple area. Want customers to enter the length and width and calculate area for them? Then you’d use the L x W version. This is true for volume as well.
For each measurement type, you can calculate price based on quantity-based mode (for example, measured objects that come in defined packages, such as flooring), or you can allow the user to enter the measurements, called user-defined mode, for which price is calculated (for example, purchasing an open-ended weight of coffee beans).
Calculator Modes
You can switch between calculator modes once you’ve determined measurement type for your product. Determine whether customers should be able to set price based on custom measurements (user-defined mode) or to only allow defined quantities (quantity-based mode). For quantity-based mode, keep the “Calculated Price” box unchecked; for user-defined mode, you must check the “Calculated Price” box:
Quantity Mode Configuration
The Quantity-based Mode (disable “Calculated Price”) is used to assist customers with determining the minimum quantity of product required to meet some measurement. For instance, the number of boxes of tiles needed to cover a given square footage would use an area calculator in quantity mode since the final price will be based on a quantity of boxes.
Product Properties
After you’ve selected “Measurement” type, you can set the regular price for the product. For a quantity-based mode calculation, this should be the price of a quantity of “one” — using the tile example, this will be the price of a whole box. The price per square foot can be calculated from that if desired:
If you’re happy displaying the price per box/quantity, you can leave the price as is. If you want to display price per square foot (or per unit), you’ll need to take one more step. To enable calculation of price per unit, go to the “Measurement” tab under Product Data and enable the “Show Product Price per Unit” box:
This will display the price per unit (for easier comparison) instead of the price per quantity in the product catalog.
Next, you’ll need to define the product properties (Weight, Dimensions, Area, or Volume) in the “Shipping” tab of the Product Data meta box for your quantity. For my tile example, I need to set the area that represents a quantity of “1 box”. Since 1 box will hold 12 sq ft of tile, I enter 12 for my area value. This sets the quantity values so that no matter what length x width (or area) the customer enters, the calculator will include the correct number of boxes to cover at least the area needed. (For convenience with the area/volume measurements, you can set an exact value, ie 4 sq. ft. or 1.7 cu m, or you can set a length and a width, ie 2 ft x 2 ft to derive the area.)
After saving the product, the product page will include the quantity-based calculator (this example uses simple area and price per unit display):
Here the customer supplies the area of the floor they need to cover and the calculator determines the minimum quantity of product (boxes of tile) required to meet or exceed the area.
User-Defined Mode Configuration
Use the User-defined Mode (enable “Calculated Price”) to sell customizable products which are priced per measurement (i.e., fabric sold at $1.50 per yard). The pricing calculator is configured very similarly to the quantity-based calculator above, with a few exceptions.
First, dimensions are not required to be configured for a product (under “Shipping”) since there’s no quantity, and hence no defined properties. This calculator is intended for products with user-supplied measurements, such as a tarp with a custom length/width, or mulch sold by the cubic yard.
After selecting a calculator measurement type (dimensions, area, volume, or weight), you enable the “Show Product Price Per Unit” option, and then the “Calculated Price” option which reveals a few new fields: Calculated Weight, Calculated Inventory, Overage, and measurement options for the product measurements. The Pricing Label will be shown next to the product price, and the Pricing Unit is the unit the price is defined in.
Making these changes also allows you to configure an optional minimum product price (useful for products that have low costs so that some price is charged), as well as a price “per unit” in the “General” tab, which is reflected in the Catalog and Product pages:
When configuring options for a user-defined calculator, note that Overage can be used. You can leave this blank to accept exactly the values the customer adds for the product; otherwise, enter a percentage (e.g., “5”) to add as an overage. This will adjust the price of the product up by 5% (or whatever value you’ve entered) when calculating the totals for the customer. If you have enabled calculated weight or inventory, these totals will also be adjusted by the overage as well.
You can also adjust the way measurements are input by customers. You’ll be able to accept free-form input (and set optional limits on this input such as minimum value or increment / step), or require customers to choose from a pre-defined set of values.
- Using free-form input will let customers without a minimum value, maximum value, or increment will let customer enter any value for the measurement.
- Using a free-form input with min value, max value, or increment will let the customer enter a value, but limits the accepted input based on your min, max, and / or increment.
An increment is the “step” value for the input; for example, an increment of 0.5 would only allow values in multiples of 0.5, such as 1.0 or 1.5, but not 1.2.
From your site’s front-end, this field will rely on the browser to determine the decimal separator for number inputs.
- Only accepting a limited set of customer inputs will allow you to enter a list of comma-separated values. If your site uses commas as decimals, you can separate the list with semicolons (;). This will generate a select dropdown in the calculator form instead of an input:
With this calculator configured the customer enters the length and width in feet they wish to cover with the mulch, selects the depth from a list, and the calculator determines the total cubic yardage and thus price. The product dimensions are shown in the cart:
Remember, any of the calculator measurements (dimensions, area, volume, or weight) can be used with any combination of units and custom labels.
Room Walls Calculator
The Room Walls calculator is simply an Area (length x width) calculator that is tailored for wallpaper sales with length/width labels pre-defined for you. The wallpaper product must have an area (either length x width, or simple area) defined so that the number of rolls required can be calculated. The calculator prompts the customer for the distance around the room and the height of the walls, those values are used to determine the total wall area of the room regardless of shape, and thus the quantity of wallpaper rolls required:
Features Supported
Inventory Support
Product inventory can be managed “per unit” by enabling the “Calculated Inventory” option if you’re using the user-defined mode. Doing so adds the configured pricing units to the Product Data > Inventory – Stock Qty input, meaning that if you sell for instance fabric by the foot, you can configure the number of feet currently in stock:
If the customer orders 2 x 10 foot products a total of 20 feet will be deducted from your available inventory.
If you also use Product Add-ons, please note calculated inventory is not supported by default.
As Product Add-ons tries to adjust price for each quantity, when using calculated inventory, the quantity manipulation required of MPC cannot be compatible with the Product Add-ons Price adjustments. Please see our notes here for further assistance if you muse use this setting.
Dynamic Weight
Product weight can be configured “per unit” by enabling the “Calculated Weight” option in user-defined mode. Doing this adds the configured pricing units to the Product Data > Shipping – Weight field, allowing you to set the weight “per unit”, (ie lbs / sq ft) for your customizable product:
Thus when your customer orders 2 square feet of a product weighing 5 lbs per sq ft, the product weight will be set to 10 lbs and accurate shipping prices can be calculated.
Product Shortcodes
Please note that the Measurement Price Calculator is not compatible with product shortcodes. The calculator has some pretty intensive javascript to run to modify the product price, which requires the product page to be loaded. The calculator cannot be used with product shortcodes, and only supports being used on the single product page.
Pricing Tables
Please note that you must enable Show Product Price Per Unit and Calculated Price to enable the Pricing Table. Pricing Tables are only compatible with variable parent products, not specific variations.
The Pricing Table feature allows you to create product prices that vary based on the product measurement: dimension, area, volume, or weight, depending on the measurement calculator in user-defined mode. Pricing table rules can be configured by clicking the “Pricing Table” link found next to the “Calculator Settings” heading on the Product Data > Measurement tab:
Defining a pricing rule is easy with the following fields:
- Measurement Range – you need at least a starting value (which can be 0). Configure an ending value to create a closed range, or leave the end value empty for the last rule to create an “open” rule that will match all measurements greater than or equal to the starting value. The start/end range is inclusive, so 0-10 will match from 0 up to and including 10.
- Price per Unit – a pricing rule must have a price per unit
- Sale Price per Unit – set a sale price for this range
These pricing rules will be automatically applied on the frontend as the customer configures their product. If you’ve set a minimum or maximum measurement within your pricing table, customers will see a notice to contact the store because they’re trying to purchase an unavailable quantity:
This can be adjusted if desired by using something similar to this code snippet (be sure you know how to add code to your site):
// Changes the error message when attempting to order an unavailable measurement amount
function sv_change_mpc_price_notice( $message ) {
return 'My custom message text';
}
add_filter( 'wc_measurement_price_calculator_no_price_available_notice_text', 'sv_change_mpc_price_notice' );
A customized message will be displayed instead if the customer tries to purchase a quantity outside of your range:
Note: Everyone’s pricing breaks will be different, so this plugin respects pricing you set. Depending on your pricing breaks, higher quantities of product may result in cheaper pricing. For example, lets assume that you have a product that is sold by the foot:
0-10 ft: price $1/ft → if 10ft ordered, price = $10
11-20 ft: price $0.75/ft → if 11ft ordered, price = $8.25
You can easily list the full set of prices with the shortcode [wc_measurement_price_calculator_pricing_table]. When used on a product page, this will display the pricing rules for that product. The shortcode can be used anywhere on the site by simply providing either a product_id or product_sku: [wc_measurement_price_calculator_pricing_table product_sku="ABC123"]. The pricing rules will be displayed in a table which can be styled to match your site:
This can be really helpful for displaying product information within a blog post or on landing pages. We recommend using the WooCommerce Tab Manager to create a custom product tab to display this information.
Window Blinds Sellers: A note for window blinds sellers: this feature will probably not allow a window blinds pricing table to be configured as they generally require a price based on the width and height of a window. The pricing table works only with the product total measurement, for instance the total Area rather than the width/height.
Variable Products: Although the pricing table can be used with product variations, these rules can currently only be defined at the parent product level, meaning that all product variations will share the same set of rules.
Product Variations Support
The Measurement Price Calculator quantity and user-defined calculators are compatible with product variations – product measurements from the selected variation are used if defined. The user-defined calculator is also fully compatible with variable products.
Pricing table rules can only be defined for the parent product. All product variations will share the parent product’s rules. If you need to use the Pricing Table with variations, please consider creating separate simple products rather than a variable product.
For additional Product set up info, please visit the plugin documentation page.
