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Calculators & storefront

Storefront Last reviewed Sat Jul 18 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) Edit this guide ↗

Calculators & storefront

What it is

The websites carry self-serve pricing calculators so a customer can get an instant price and add it straight to their cart — no staff involved. They all pull live prices from the PIM, so the number a customer sees is the same pricing you’d get in the PIM.

There are two customer-facing calculators:

  • Cut-to-size pricing calculator — /pricing-calculator. Price a plastic sheet cut to exact width × height.
  • Acrylic letters & stencils — split into two pages: /acrylic-letters-calculator (cut acrylic letters/numbers) and /stencil-calculator (stencils). The old combined /letters-numbers-stencils-calculator link now redirects to the letters calculator, so any old bookmarks still work.

These are the customer versions of pricing. The staff quoting tools (inside Pipedrive) are separate — see Quote a sign, Quote a tank and the general Quotes guide.

flowchart LR
  C[Customer on website] --> Calc[Uses a calculator]
  Calc --> PIM[Live prices pulled from PIM]
  Calc --> Cart[Add to cart → checkout]
📝 Note

Every price a customer sees while browsing — including in the calculators — is shown ex-GST and labelled “ex GST”. GST is only broken out at the cart/checkout. So a customer quoting “the website said $X” is quoting an ex-GST figure.

The cut-to-size pricing calculator (/pricing-calculator)

What it does: the customer picks a material, thickness, width and height (plus quantity), and gets a live per-piece price with a breakdown. They can add finishing options — drilling, polishing, corner radius, edge profile and cut-outs — and add the result to their cart.

How it prices (plain English):

  • Price per piece = the cut area × the material’s cut-to-size rate, plus a cutting fee.
  • On large cuts a volume rate kicks in once the area passes a threshold set per material in the PIM.
  • A small surcharge applies to very small orders and tapers away to $0 on larger orders — so tiny cuts aren’t sold at a loss.
  • Rates come straight from the PIM and refresh about every minute.
💡 Staff can use the same calculator at the counter

The PIM front desk (/pos) embeds this exact cut-to-size calculator. When you price a walk-in cut there, you’re using the same engine and the same live PIM rates the customer sees — so counter and website prices match.

⚠️ A material with no rates won’t appear

If a material has no thickness/rate data in the PIM, it’s dropped from the picker rather than shown with an empty list. So “the website is missing [material]” is usually a missing rate in the PIM, not a broken page — check the product’s cut-to-size rate in the PIM.

The acrylic letters & stencil calculators

What they do: price laser-cut acrylic letters, numbers and stencils. There are three modes across the two pages — Letters, Stencil only, and Letters + Stencil — and the customer can add the result to cart.

How they price (plain English):

  • Cutting is priced on machine time: thicker material cuts slower, so it costs more per character. That machine charge has a minimum (a floor), with the material (and optional mounting tape) added on top.
  • Config (fonts, tape, stencil options, thickness tiers) and the material rates come from the PIM.

Good to know for customer questions:

  • Laser bed limit — letters/stencils are cut on the Perspex laser, bed size 3000 × 1500mm (clear/coloured Perspex). Anything larger has to be split or quoted manually.
  • Custom fonts / logos — customers can email an SVG, AI or PDF wordmark and we cut to that exact path; image-only files attract a small vectorisation fee.
  • Smallest letter — reliable quality down to the calculator’s minimum height; below that, fine detail can chip and we flag it at quote.
  • Lead time — standard 3–5 business days.

TODO: confirm the exact minimum letter height, machine-charge floor and tape pricing shown to customers (these come from PIM calc_config.LETTERS, which has a code fallback — confirm the live values rather than quoting the fallback).

How these fit with the internal quoting tools

  • The storefront calculators are for customers self-serving a price and buying online. They’re the customer-facing front end.
  • The staff quoting tools live inside the Pipedrive deal and are for building a proper quote to send:
    • Quote a sign — the staff version of letters / numbers / stencils.
    • Quote a tank — custom tanks (there is no customer calculator for tanks; those are staff-quoted).
    • Quotes — sending any quote from the deal panel.
  • Both sides read pricing from the same PIM, so a website price and a staff quote for the same job should line up.

Common questions

  • “The website quoted me $X — is that with GST?” No — every browse/calculator price is ex-GST. GST is added at checkout.
  • A material is missing from the calculator. It has no rate in the PIM — the calculator hides materials with no thickness data. Add/fix the rate in the PIM.
  • Can I price a walk-in cut the same way? Yes — use the cut-to-size calculator embedded in the PIM front desk (/pos); same rates as the website.
  • Do we have a tank calculator on the website? No. Tanks are staff-quoted — see Quote a tank.
  • An old /letters-numbers-stencils-calculator link — is it dead? No, it redirects to the acrylic letters calculator.

TODO: confirm whether the Plastic Online storefront carries the same calculators (this guide is grounded in the Perspex Online storefront build; both sites read from the PIM, but per-site calculator parity isn’t confirmed here).

Who to tell if it breaks

Tell Daniel or flag in #whats-new. A calculator showing a wrong price (or a $0 headline price) is serious — stop quoting from it and escalate, since it’s usually a PIM rate/config issue behind the scenes.

Derived from: the Perspex Online storefront calculator pages (pricing-calculator.astro, acrylic-letters-calculator.astro, stencil-calculator.astro, letters-numbers-stencils-calculator.astro) and the storefront CLAUDE.md ex-GST rule. If this looks wrong, the source changed — update the source and re-generate, don’t just patch this page. See also PIM, Quote a sign, Quote a tank and Quotes.