Enhance your WooCommerce store with a measurement price calculator

Not all WooCommerce products are sold in simple units, and sometimes the standard quantity field isn’t enough for your customer. If you’re selling made-to-measure products that have prices calculated by area, volume, or other custom units, you’ll want your customers to be able to enter their desired dimensions and then have WooCommerce calculate the product price by a formula. That’s where a WooCommerce measurement price calculator comes in.

In this article, we’ll understand:

• Which are the top measurement price calculator plugins and how to choose the best one
• How a WooCommerce measurement price calculator based on measurements works
• How the price calculator works in conjunction with other add-on fields
• Some different real-life examples of products using a measurement price calculator

You can navigate through the article using the links on the left-hand side.

Why use a WooCommerce measurement price calculator plugin?

There is no default method in WooCommerce to help you create a custom price calculator. Therefore, if you want to sell products that are priced by a non-standard unit, like area or volume, you’ll need a measurement price calculator plugin. This will let you and your customers calculate the product price according to user-inputted measurements.

Real-world examples and industry-specific uses

To grasp the versatility of a WooCommerce price calculator, let’s delve into several real-world cases, some of which include:

• Tiles or wallpaper: Sold by area, with prices calculated for different box sizes.
• Mulch: Sold per cubic yard, with automatic calculation of quantity and price based on area and depth.
• Foam: Volume-based pricing for custom quantities.
• Fencing: Linear footage pricing, adaptable to specific requirements.
• Gourmet coffee: Weight-based pricing for various quantities.

While there are many more examples, these scenarios underscore how the measurement price calculator can serve as a bridge between complex pricing structures and a straightforward customer experience.

See this article for more tutorials on how to set price by formula calculator in WooCommerce.

Top 4 WooCommerce plugins for creating price calculators

There are many plugins available to help you display prices based on input from customers. So before we dive into the top WooCommerce Price Calculator plugins, let’s understand what you should look for in the first place. 

• Custom pricing variables: Depending on what kind of products you’re selling, choose a plugin that lets you calculate prices based on relevant factors like size, weight, area, dimensions, time, etc. For example, if you sell tailored clothing (or any other made-to-measure product), you should be able to show prices based on size and dimensions. But if you’re running a store supplying raw material in bulk (like a construction company), you should be able to show prices based on volume and weight.
  
• Relevant Integrations: You should be able to integrate the plugin with other relevant WooCommerce plugins that you may use to customize and enhance your user experience. This will help you stand out from the rest of your competition and offer flexibility to your customers.
  
• Value for money: Choose a plugin that is priced well – if it only serves the function of a price calculator, it shouldn’t be burning a hole in your pocket! Unless you have the need for high-level customizability for price calculations, you should pick a plugin that has multiple functions.
  

Based on these factors, here are our top plugins.

1. WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate

As the name suggests, this is the ultimate plugin for product customization and personalization. It comes with 15+ useful custom fields that enable your customers to personalize products according to their preferences, including a price calculator option.

The ‘Calculation’ field allows you to calculate part or all of the product price according to your own formula. It supports dynamic pricing based on multiple factors like length, area, size, volume, weight, etc.

If you want to enhance this functionality, the ‘Advanced Calculations for Add-Ons Ultimate‘ extension brings even more power to the table. This extension allows for more complex calculations by importing lookup tables via CSV, eliminating the need for coding. It’s perfect for creating detailed price matrices based on user dimensions and is compatible with the Pro version of Add-Ons Ultimate.

What makes this plugin the best is that it’s far more than a price calculator plugin. Add-Ons Ultimate also lets you add extra options to your products using input fields like text, number, select, etc; create custom pricing and discounts; and use conditional logic to customize what is shown to customers.

With the basic plans starting at $69/year and Pro plans at $119/year (which includes the calculation feature), it is the most price-optimal plugin on this list. The Advanced Calculations extension, available from $59, further enhances its capabilities, especially for complex pricing scenarios.

2. Measurement Price Calculator by Skyverge

Probably the most popular plugin on this list, this plugin enables you to display prices based on your customer’s choices and input regarding factors like volume, weight, dimensions, etc. It also comes with inventory management, dynamic price estimation, and pricing tables.

The only reason this plugin isn’t on top is because of its high price. At $129/year, this plugin is best suited if you’re a big store looking to display highly customized price calculations. 

3. WooCommerce Measurement Price Calculator Plugin, Price Per Unit

With this plugin, you can easily display prices on your product pages based on length, area (Sqft), volume, and weight. It also supports product variations and shows prices in a table format, with custom pricing labels and units.

This plugin is currently selling at $27 for six months of support – a worthy consideration if you’re looking for a straightforward price calculator plugin. 

4. Flexible Quantity – Measurement Price Calculator for WooCommerce

This is a good plugin for adding a simple measurement price calculator on a WooCommerce store selling products based on weight, volume, dimensions, and area. That’s where the functionality ends in its free version. The Pro version includes custom pricing labels, dynamic calculations, and pricing tables and is available at £79/year. 

Now that we’ve identified the top plugins and their strengths, let’s take a closer look at Product Add-Ons Ultimate’s price by formula functionality, followed by how to set it up as your WooCommerce measurement price calculator of choice.

Calculate WooCommerce product price by formula

Using the calculation field of Product Add-Ons Ultimate, you can set complex prices based on multiple factors using mathematical formulas. It’s perfect if you’re selling goods in quantities that are based on dimensions, for example:

• Length
• Width
• Area, e.g. square feet or square metres
• Volume, e.g. cubic inches, cubic centimetres or cubic metres
• Weight by volume

Note that you can also calculate product prices based on a pricing grid or lookup table. See this article for more information.

Tags

The calculation field uses the concept of ‘tags’. These are pieces of text that you can insert into a formula that will later be replaced by a numerical value.

For example:

• The {field_932} tag will be replaced by the value of the field with the ID 932
• The {product_price} tag will be replaced by the price of the product

You can also enter numbers as well, so your formulas will most likely be a combination of tags. In this article, we’ll look at loads of examples.

It’s possible to use tags for the following:

• Number field values input by users
• The price of a specific add-on field
• The value of an option selected in a dropdown field
• Product/variation price
• Product dimensions like weight, length, height and width
• Global variables that can be set once and used through multiple calculation fields and products
• The number of files uploaded to an upload field
• The selected product quantity

How to add a measurement price calculator to your WooCommerce products using WooCommerce Add-Ons Ultimate

For the purpose of this guide, we’re detailing how to set up a measurement price calculator using the WooCommerce Add-Ons Ultimate plugin.

Here’s a video that guides you through how to add a price calculator to your products using the plugin.

If you’d prefer to get set up following written instructions, follow our guide below.

Example: WooCommerce product price calculator

As an example, let’s say you’re selling windows. You can create a standard WooCommerce product for your window product, then, use the Add-Ons Ultimate plugin to add a couple of number fields where your customers can enter the height and width of each window.

Now, using the calculation field, you can decide how to price the product based on the area, calculated by multiplying the height by the width, plus any other factors that you want to include, such as:

• Cost of goods
• Mark-up or margin
• Base product price

The customer enters the height and width that they require and the calculation field takes care of the rest.

There is a more detailed walkthrough of a window measurement calculator product below.

Works with simple and variable products

The calculation field works with simple or variable products. In our windows example, this means you can include variations for different frame styles or glass types.

Using multiple calculation fields

You can use the results from calculation fields in other calculations. This means that you can easily build up complex formulas.

Create global variables

If you’re using calculator fields on multiple products, you might want to be able to set some variables in one place. Let’s say your calculations allow for a 50% markup or margin. Then, one day, you decide you want to increase this to 60%. You don’t want to have to go through every product and change each formula. It’s too painstaking and painful.

Instead, you can set a value for your markup in the settings and use a tag, e.g. {variable_1}, in all your formulas. If you need to change this value, you only have to change it in one place.

WooCommerce product price calculation formulas

The WooCommerce product price can be calculated using formulas which are simple or complex.

Formulas can include:

• Add-on field values
• Product price
• Preset variables
• Other calculation fields
• Product dimensions (length, width and height) and weight

Formulas also allow you to use standard operators:

• Plus
• Minus
• Multiply
• Divide

You can also use the result of calculation fields to set other parameters including:

• Field price
• Product price
• Product weight
• Child product quantities

And finally, you can specify how many decimal places to return results to. Or you can decide whether you want to round the result up or down.

Expanding possibilities with WooCommerce Add-Ons Ultimate: Beyond basic price calculations

Because the calculation field is part of the Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, you can do much more than just simple product price calculations.

You can create products that allow your customers to specify their precise requirements. Creating a customizable product in WooCommerce helps you boost sales, sell unique products and increase customer loyalty.

As I mentioned before, because the price calculator is just one feature of the Add-Ons Ultimate plugin, you get loads of powerful extras. For example:

Conditional logic

Product Add-Ons Ultimate allows you to use conditional logic to decide which fields should be displayed to users. You can set conditions on most field types so you could include calculations based on:

• Whether or not a checkbox is selected
• If the user has chosen a certain option from a select field or radio button group
• Only if the user has entered certain text in a text field
• If the cost of the product is above or below a certain threshold

Variation specific fields

Maybe you only want to trigger a calculation if the user has selected a certain product variation. Add-Ons Ultimate allows you to display fields only when specified variations are selected.

Minimum and maximum values

The calculation field can look for the value of other add-on fields. In our windows example above, this would a number field for height and a number field for width.

With Add-Ons Ultimate you can specify minimum and maximum values for number fields – so if your windows can’t be bigger than a certain size, you can enforce this.

Examples of WooCommerce product price calculators based on different characteristics

Now we’re going to look at a number of examples of product price calculators. We’ll walk through how to set each one up and link to a working demo product.

In total, we’ll look at:

• A wallpaper roll calculator which calculates the number of rolls of wallpaper you’ll need depending on the dimensions entered
• How to create a product for windows which allows you to specify the exact height and width
• Simple products that are sold by length or meterage, like fabrics
• Selling products by volume, e.g. gravel, pebbles, aggregates

All the products will have some additional options so you can see how the calculation field interacts with other product options.

Recommended reading: Adding extra product options to create customizable products in WooCommerce.  

Example one: How to build a wallpaper roll calculator

Let’s look at how to create a WooCommerce product price calculator for rolls of wallpaper, or similar products. You can view the full working demo here.

Note that this is an example of a wallpaper calculator – but could work equally well for wall tiles, flooring, carpets, or any other product where you want to calculate an item quantity based on area.

The requirements here are:

• Allow the user to calculate the area of the room to be wallpapered by entering the width and height of the walls
• Factor in some contingency for the area – so allow an extra ten percent added to the user’s dimensions
• Calculate the number of rolls, then round up to prevent the customer from trying to purchase part rolls
• Automatically setting the quantity field so that we can still track inventory and know how many rolls we’re selling

This sounds quite complex – but in fact it’s really easy with the calculation field.

1. Creating the calculation field for the wallpaper product

We need two user input fields – one for height and one for width. Make sure you specify the field type as ‘Number’.

For now, let’s assume you’re familiar with adding groups and fields in the plugin. Here’s our ‘Width’ field for the wallpaper price calculator.

It’s pretty simple – just a Number field with a label.

We can duplicate it for the Height field.

2. Adding the calculation field

Now we can add the WooCommerce price calculator field.

Our formula is relatively simple:

• Essentially it’s the width multiplied by the height to get the area the wallpaper will need to cover
• Then we multiply the area by 1.1 to give an additional 10% contingency
• Finally, we divide by 3.5 (which is the area of one roll of our wallpaper). Obviously, it’s likely to be different for you.

The field looks like this:

Note the Height and Width fields above the calculation field. We can see the field IDs for each.

The calculation formula is written like this:

( {field_907} * {field_908} * 1.1 ) / 3.5

Note that I’ve used some tags, e.g. {field_907}. That just means that the formula will grab the value of Field #907 (the Height) and use it in the formula.

Parentheses are allowed, so I’ll calculate the area first, then multiply by 1.1, then divide the whole lot by the area of a single roll.

3. Rounding the result

Because we want a whole number as our result and because we want to make sure our customer has enough wallpaper to finish the job, we set the ‘Round Result’ field ‘Round up’.

This will round the result of the calculation up to the nearest whole number.

4. Updating quantity

And because we want to use this field to specify how many rolls the customer will be buying, we set the ‘Action’ field to ‘Update Quantity’.

This means that when the user enters their height and width, the calculation will trigger an update in the Quantity field so that the user will purchase the correct number of rolls.

5. Upselling additional items

The calculation field is part of the Add-Ons Ultimate plugin – so you can include more options on the product page than just an area calculator.

You can encourage upsells by offering some typical equipment customers might need when they’re doing their wallpapering, like adhesives or tools.

These can be simple options or you can include other products on this page.

6. Change the price label

As a finishing touch, we’ll want to change the product price label so that the user understands the price is per roll.

Add-Ons Ultimate gives us a couple of extra fields on the ‘General’ tab of the Product data section.

You can enter some text in the ‘Price label’ field that will accompany the product price. Then you can decide where to display the text in the ‘Price label display’ field.

Take a look at the demo here.

Example two: How to sell WooCommerce products by the meter

Many products may need to be sold by the meter or the foot (or the inch, centimeter, or mile – who knows?). In this example, we look at setting the price of lengths of fabric by using a simple calculation. You can view the demo here.

1. Create the add-on fields

Because we’re selling by length, we only need one user input field. Create a Number field and label it how you wish, e.g. ‘Length’.

Now you can create your WooCommerce price calculator field. The formula is simpler than in our wallpaper example:

The formula is simply:

{field_932} * 5.95

Where {field_932} is the value of the input field (i.e. the number of meters of fabric that the customer wants) and 5.95 is the price per meter.

2. Display as cost

Unlike the wallpaper rolls, where we were calculating the number of rolls and then setting the quantity field to match, here we are setting the price directly.

To do this, set the ‘Action’ field to ‘Display as Cost’. This will return the result of the calculation as a price value and update the total product price accordingly.

Example three: How to creating a WooCommerce measurement calculator to calculate price by volume

Let’s add another dimension now – depth. If you are selling materials that are measured by volume, equal by cubic metre or yard, you will need a measurement calculator.

In this example, we’re selling aggregate – i.e. pretty pebbles or gravel that we might use as a decorative feature in our garden. Your customers won’t necessarily know how much they’ll so we’ll provide them with a neat calculator.

As a bonus, we’re also going to give the customer the opportunity to add a shovel to their cart directly from the aggregates page.

You can view the demo product here.

1. Add the calculation fields

As before, let’s add our calculation fields. We need Number fields for Length, Width and Depth.

Just to throw a spanner in the works, the Length and Width fields will be in metre units; the Depth field will be in centimetres.

Note that I’ve indicated the units as part of each field label.

2. Create the product calculation formulas

In a similar way to the wallpaper calculator above, we’re going to create two calculation fields:

• One field will calculate the volume based on the user inputs
• The second field will calculate the number of bags of aggregate required based on the calculated volume and a global variable that we’ll set to indicate the volume of each bag

Note that we’ve accounted for the fact that the depth unit is centimetres by multiplying that field value by 0.01 to convert it to metres.

We return the result to 2 decimal places.

Then we use the result of the volume calculation in the next formula. We multiply the area by 1.1 to add a 10% contingency then we divide it by the value of a global variable.

3. Global variables in calculations

We can set global records to use in any formula by going to WooCommerce > Settings > Product Add-Ons. In the Calculation section, there are fields for three variables. Enter values here and they will be available to all your measurement price calculators.

4. Upsell some more products

Finally, we can use another feature of the Add-Ons Ultimate plugin to encourage the customer to purchase a related product.

We’ll add a ‘Products’ field so that the customer can buy a shovel to help with their aggregate delivery. Even better, we’ll give them a 10% discount. Wa-hoo!

For more information on allowing customers to purchase multiple products from a single product page, take a look at this article.

Example four: How to create a WooCommerce product cost calculator for windows and doors

In this example, we’re going to create a customizable window where the user can specify their dimensions, choose some extra options, and the whole price is calculated dynamically.

There’s a detailed tutorial for creating a custom window product in WooCommerce here.

You can view the demo here.

1. Create the user input fields

As before, let’s create two Number fields so that the user can enter the dimensions of their window.

Note that we’ve set some minimum and maximum parameters to ensure that customers can’t specify windows that are really tiny or absolutely massive.

2. Create the area and cost calculator formulas

Now we’ll create two calculation fields: one to calculate the area of the window based on the user’s data, and a WooCommerce product price calculator to calculate the cost.

The area calculation formula just multiplies the Width and Height fields, which are entered in millimeters, then divides by 1,000,000 to produce a result in square meters.

We return the result to two decimal places.

Then we add our price calculation:

This multiples the result of the area calculation by a factor to obtain our price. Your price calculation might be a bit more complex than this.

3. Adding calculation fields with conditional logic

Sometimes you’ll want to offer your customers optional extras in your products that will affect the price. We can do this here by creating calculation fields that will only appear if certain conditions are met.

In our window product, we’re going to give the customer the option to select frosted glass. To do this, we create a checkbox called ‘Frosted Glass’.

Then we create a calculation field with another cost calculation that will only display if the checkbox is selected:

Now, there’s an additional cost if the user chooses to have frosted glass. If they deselect the option, the cost is removed.

Bonus: Use Advanced Custom Fields in your calculations

Advanced Custom Fields is used on over a million websites as an easy way to add custom fields to WordPress posts, pages, and custom post types.

Using Add-Ons Ultimate and the Advanced Calculations extension, you can also use the values of ACF fields in your calculation fields. When you create a number field using ACF and assign it to products, it will automatically become available to be used in calculation fields.

This is ideal if you need to add extra fields to the back-end using ACF for additional product information.

There’s more information on the support doc here.

Final thoughts on the WooCommerce measurement price calculator

WooCommerce’s array of measurement price calculator plugins offers a versatile range of solutions for e-commerce stores. Whether your focus is on customizing product prices based on dimensions, weight, volume, or any other specific criteria, there is a plugin tailored to your needs.

However, from its versatility in unit-based pricing and user-friendly inventory management all the way to its ability for precise cost calculations and advanced price calculation formulas, WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin provides a competitive edge in measurement-based product pricing.

The calculation field in the plugin is incredibly powerful, especially when it’s combined with other features of the plugin. You can:

• Create calculators that set a dynamic product cost based on user input
• Include other product options, including upsells
• Use conditional logic to make calculations only when certain conditions are met
• Chain calculation fields so that you can use the results from other calculations in new formulas
• Set the WooCommerce product price by formula

If you need to include a measurement price calculator in your WooCommerce store, you should get the Product Add-Ons Ultimate plugin.