Someone buying from an online building materials store thinks in jobs, not in items: a bathroom to tile, a house to insulate, a screed to lay. They arrive with a surface area and leave if the store makes them work out for themselves how many boxes, bags and pallets that means.
Builders’ merchants come to online selling with a catalogue exported from their stock management software, where floor tiles are listed by the square metre, adhesive by the bag and profiles by the piece, and delivery is arranged over the phone. An ordinary store, designed for parcels, trips over every one of these things.
Square metre, box, bag, pallet: the price in the unit the buyer thinks in
Floor tiles are priced per square metre but sold by the whole box. The store shows both: the price per square metre, how much one box covers and how much the box costs. When the buyer asks for an area, the quantity is rounded up to whole boxes and they are told how many metres they will actually receive.
The same logic applies to bags, rolls, linear metres and pallets. Each product has a pricing unit, a selling unit and the conversion rule between them, and the same figures appear in the basket, on the invoice and on the delivery note.
A trade detail we make room for on the page: ceramic tiles from different batches can vary slightly in shade. A warning next to the button (“order the full quantity in one go”) saves arguments when the buyer comes back later for more.
The quantity calculator
The calculator turns the dimensions of the job into a quantity of product. For tiling and flooring, the buyer enters the length and the width or the area directly, chooses an allowance for cutting waste and gets the number of boxes. For materials sold by the bag, the calculation starts from the consumption declared by the manufacturer per square metre and per layer thickness.
The formulas come from the technical data sheets, not from us, and the result is presented as an estimate: actual consumption depends on the substrate, the tool and the tradesperson’s technique.
- Tiling and flooring (floor tiles, wall tiles, wood flooring): area, waste allowance, rounding to the box.
- Adhesives, plasters, screeds: consumption per square metre and thickness, rounding to the bag.
- Related products: the right adhesive, grout and profiles, suggested with the quantities already calculated.
Heavy goods: delivery by weight and zone, collection from the yard
A pallet of cement does not travel by parcel courier. The delivery cost is calculated from the total weight of the basket and from the delivery zone, in bands you set, and takes the vehicle into account: van, lorry, crane lorry. So the weight of every product has to be in the catalogue; where it is missing, the calculation has nothing to rest on.
For orders that fall outside the pattern (very large quantities, remote places, difficult access), the store does not make up a price. It displays “delivery to be confirmed” and lets the order go through, and you come back with the amount before payment.
- Questions about unloading: lorry access, whether a crane is needed, who unloads.
- Collection from the yard: with a choice of day, so that the goods are waiting ready at the loading bay.
- Returnable pallets: the pallet deposit, shown separately from the price, if that is how you work.
Online building materials store and quote requests for large quantities
Builders and people building their own house do not buy at shelf price. For them, the basket has a second button: “request a quote”. The list of products and quantities reaches you as a request, you reply with prices and delivery, and the buyer receives a link from which they can accept the quote and pay.
The quote has a validity period, which matters for materials whose price moves often, such as steel and timber.
Technical data sheets, product data and the order of work
On each product page we attach the documents a tradesperson or a site inspector asks for: the technical data sheet, the declaration of performance, the safety data sheet for chemical products. Which documents are mandatory for each category is checked with the supplier and with a specialist; we link them to the product.
We build the store on WooCommerce, the commerce component of WordPress. Units with conversion, the calculators and delivery by weight are written as our own extension, in PHP, because they depend on the rules of your business. Prices and stock come from your stock management software, by file or through its API, as often as it allows.
- The catalogue: units, conversions, weights, documents. This is where most of the work goes.
- The delivery rules, checked on test baskets, from a single bag to a full lorry.
- The product page and the calculator, tried out on a phone, which is what people order from on site.
- Checking the figures: quantities, rounding and totals compared with the calculations of someone from the yard.
- Launching with one category, usually tiling and flooring, then the rest of the range.
Frequently asked questions
Can the store work out delivery by itself for any order?
For most of them, yes, if the products have their weight entered and the zones are well defined. Very large orders or those with difficult access go to manual confirmation, because there the cost depends on the vehicle available and on the route.
How do I keep prices up to date when suppliers change them often?
Prices are updated from the stock management software or from a file, not product by product. For categories with very volatile prices you can display “price on request” and leave the sale to a quote.
What does the time needed to build the store depend on?
Mostly on the state of the catalogue: whether the weights, conversions and technical data sheets already exist in the stock management software or have to be gathered. How complicated the delivery rules are matters too.
This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.