Spotlight: Powering Up Cost Estimate Forms with Advanced Calculations

Stainless steel fixtures are no joke. These literal sheets of steel are often cut, shaped, and welded to order, particularly for commercial kitchens or medical facilities where custom sizing is essential. Based on this, Specialty Stainless, a New York-based provider of such stainless steel fixtures, created a free estimate calculator for their highly customizable countertops.

However, this important driver of conversions hit a snag and started causing headaches with intermittent submission issues. They called web dev Jessica Carter, founder of Quadrants Development, for help.

The form was highly complex and required numerous calculations using static fields populated by the client and a series of calculations.

When Jessica got started evaluating the situation, she discovered a “Frankenstein” setup: a custom-coded form leading to another, plugin-powered form. It handled the necessary math, but created clunky UX. Not to mention the unmonitored custom code posed a potential security risk.

Jessica rolled up her wizard-robe sleeves and offered a solution: scrap the Frankenstein and build a single form with Gravity Forms—then power it up with two Gravity Wiz perks:

• GP Advanced Calculations to handle dynamic pricing, and
• GP Populate Anything to pull a range of static formula inputs from Advanced Custom Fields.

The final product is a streamlined, secure, and efficient form that covers all the bases. Let’s check it out!

Calculations cladded in steel

The form is no lightweight—it has over 100 fields to handle the numerous calculations required to allow for:

• Three different design styles (straight, L-shaped, and island)
• Custom countertop measurements that correspond to the complexity of each design style (e.g. L-shaped needs the most specifications, island the least).
• Choice of backsplashes and wood backer.
• Up to three sink bowls of varying sizes.
• Different cutouts for sinks, stoves, and cooktops.
• Different shipping locations throughout the US.

That’s a ton of variables!

Here’s the secret: Advanced Calculations adds support for conditional statements in calculations. Conditional statements are “if-then” rules that apply logic to determine outcomes based on specific conditions. For example, “if the state is Alaska, charge X for shipping; otherwise, charge Y.”

Or in math-language:

if ( F1 == 'Alaska' ):
	8
else:
	2
endif;

The form has core variable calculations, which roll up into larger variable calculations, which roll into the overall cost calculation—so easy reference of variables [brought by formula shorthands] is critical.

For variables with more than two outcomes—like sink bowl sizes and states—Jessica expanded the conditional statements with elseif conditions. To illustrate, here’s how that’d look with our previous example:

if ( F1 == 'Alaska' ):
	8
elseif ( F1 == 'Hawaii'):
	5
else:
	2
endif;

The countertop estimates vary based on the style of countertop chosen and a range of options, such as counter size, backsplashes, and sinks-the conditional statements were essential to the formulas.

So, by using conditional statements, Jessica tied core variable values to customer selections, then factored them into calculations alongside proprietary static inputs from Specialty Stainless.

Those static inputs live in Advanced Custom Fields and are pulled into the form with our Swiss-army-plugin, Populate Anything.

Together, these dynamic and static factors shape the final quote, giving Specialty Stainless’ customers a clear picture of their future investment.

The client [Specialty Stainless] is very happy with the form and the results! They decided to add a few quote type options and have seen an increased number of form submissions in real numbers and as compared to previous periods.

Thank you for sharing, Jessica! You can check out Specialty Stainless’ beefy cost estimator here.

For a deeper dive on how a calculator like this works behind the scenes, check out our guide on dynamic pricing.