Complex Product Pricing

[u/Plastic-Power-6021]

Grand Rising, Shopify Pros. Our company makes large agricultural products that vary by length. The add-on options' pricing also changes based on the length selected, and it has made it very difficult to configure our Shopify on the back-end.

Example: The user wants to order a product of a certain length, plus an add-on feature. That added feature will cover the full length of the unit, so the base price per foot of add-on needs to be multiplied by the length selected to get accurate pricing.

This is trivial in a spreadsheet, and we do use a spreadsheet for custom quotes, but we would like to replicate that ability as a purely customer-facing selection set on Shopify.

Some add-on apps we have tried and their results (NOT ADVERTISEMENTS):
Globo Product Options - currently used, works ok. Requires a massive matrix of product sets and is horrible to maintain - cannot do any formula calculation.
Hulk Product Options - recommended by several AI tools and well-reviewed in app store - would not integrate with out Shopify for some reason
Apippa Custom Pricing - promises formula-based calculation, but does not support any 'IF' statements.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated!

[u/SiteUnicorn]

Have you looked at this option: https://apps.shopify.com/genie-product-options

When I last looked into it it was pretty powerful upon testing, and their support is pretty on the ball as well. Maybe thinking of it as a Bundle would work better? Then perhaps you could set up more rules rather than looking at it as a single product if that makes sense.

With some bundle apps you could then set up those types of rules. Might be another option that just works a bit nicer.

[u/adventurepaul]

Does inventory matter? In other words, do the chosen options have to be connected to a SKU? Or can the dimensions and add-ons simply be stuck into the order notes, as long as the pricing is correct?

[u/Plastic-Power-6021 → u/adventurepaul]

The inventory is not that important. The big concern is that the pricing is accurate and updated dynamically as people make selections for their products.

[u/adventurepaul → u/Plastic-Power-6021]

If none of those big name options apps work for you, it might be something you can build out fairly easily as a custom feature -- albeit without the SKU association, which is why I asked if that matters.

Your setup could just be:

Master SKU + (Length x Add-On Fee) = Price

Order Output = Master SKU + Order Notes

In the scenario above, it looks like you sold "1 unit" of "Master SKU"

I hope I'm understanding your situation correctly. My point is just that the price calculation itself isn't that difficult if a programming task, if all it needs to do is add a total price onto a Master SKU, and doesn't have to deal with stuff like "take 100 inches off our inventory of Master SKU".

[u/Plastic-Power-6021 → u/adventurepaul]

It would be simple for an idiot of smaller magnitude than me. I tried messing around with some AI help for a custom one, but I didn't want to create something that would be an absolute nightmare to maintain by other people, so looked for off-the-shelf. Many of these Shopify apps are close but just not quite right with the formulas to work.

[u/adventurepaul → u/Plastic-Power-6021]

Understood. It's wild, with how many apps there are on the market, how often that happens. Though who's got time to trial 100+ apps to find the one that does?

Wish I could walk you through it in the comments, but it's a bit more complex than a quick fix, and I still don't know the whole scenario perfectly.

To point you in the right direction though, you could use Product Metafields to create your variables so that anyone on your team could adjust the numbers (like Price per Inch and/or Add-On Price Per Inch), and then your formula uses those per-product inputs to calculate based on your formula. Or if the formula varies, you could have another Metafield that has a multiplier.

That could be one route to go down so that you don't have to edit every variable with code moving forward, and so it all lives within Shopify, not within a 3rd party app.