Let the customer price it themselves.
An illustration of what I build, not a client project. For anything configurable — printing, apparel, signage, framing, cabinetry — the quote request is where most of the business quietly leaks away.
"Call us for a quote" loses the half that won't call.
Somebody lands on the site at nine in the evening, ready to spend money on forty shirts for a fundraiser. They cannot find a price, so they fill in a contact form — or, more often, they don't, and go to the shop whose site showed them a number.
The ones who do get in touch send a message with no size breakdown, no deadline and a logo in the wrong format. Two days of back-and-forth later, the job finally starts.
- Who it fits
- Print, apparel, signage, framing, cabinetry — anything with options
- First version
- One product family, your real options and pricing, artwork upload
- Time to live
- 3–6 weeks
- Typical range
- $1,500 – $6,000, driven by products and pricing rules
What happens while you are asleep.
- 01
They arrive
From a search, a Facebook post or a business card. They want forty shirts and they want to know what that costs.
- 02
They configure
Garment, colour, sizes, quantity, print positions. The preview updates as they go, so they can see what they are buying.
- 03
They upload
The artwork goes in with the request. Resolution and format are checked there and then, before it becomes your problem.
- 04
They see a number
From your real rules: quantity breaks, setup fees, rush charges. Not a final invoice — an honest estimate that stops them phoning around.
- 05
You get a job
It lands in the queue in the same shape as every other order, with the file, the sizes and the deadline already attached.
The customer did the data entry, at a time that suited them, and they did it more accurately than a phone call would have.
The parts that matter
- See it
- The artwork placed on the actual product, at roughly the right size and position
- Price it
- A live number from your real rules — quantity breaks, setup fees, rush charges
- Send it
- The request arrives with the file, the sizes, the quantity and the deadline already on it
- File checks
- Resolution and format flagged at upload, while the customer is still there to fix them
- Not a store
- It requests a quote rather than taking payment, unless you want it to take payment
- Into the queue
- Straight into order intake, in the same shape as every other job
The site it lives in, and the check that saves the job.
It is the pricing. Quantity breaks, setup charges, what happens with four colours instead of one, and the discount you always give the hockey club because you always have.
Those rules have to come out of somebody's head before anything gets built. Start with the product family you sell most of, go live, and add the rest once you can see what people actually ask for.
Roughly what a build like this involves.
Your pricing rules, product photographs, and an hour on the awkward cases — the four-colour print, the rush job, the school order that always gets the same discount. Everything after that is assembly.
If you already sell on Shopify, some of this can sit on top of what you have rather than replacing it. I will tell you which half of the work is new and which half already exists before quoting anything.
- From you
- Pricing rules, product photos, an hour on the exceptions
- From me
- Customiser built, pricing wired in, upload checks, request routed to your queue
- Live in
- 3–6 weeks
- Starts at
- $1,500
How many quotes start with a call you have to return?
Tell me what you sell and how you price it, and I will tell you in writing whether this is worth building for you and what it would cost.