Our 1st instant quoting tool was launched on metalpros.com in 2016. The quoting tool contains over 6,000 products and over 4,000 sheet/plate offcuts. Also displayed are inventory levels, pricing per unit of measure and cutting charges.
Functionality:
The quoting tool is very simple. 4 drop down menus and a search bar allow for the product to be filtered, found and selected, length size and number of pieces are added and sent to a virtual shopping cart that gets submitted in for an official quote.
User Feedback:
Feedback is overwhelmingly good. Despite the fact that there are no calculated totals and non-stock items are based on last price with only a a small disclaimer. A second disclaimer solves the issue of not displaying tier pricing by stating that "Top customers pay less". This allows sales representative to still have some flexibility regarding final price when submitting the official quote.
In the past 6 years, metalpros.com had over 151,293 new users of which 59 have visited our quoting tool more than 100 times (400 users visited more than 20 times). An average user would spend 5+ minutes on our website and interact with 6+ pages having only a 22% drop off rate. In total, there have been 1.8M page views. For a small business that did no spend any money on advertising in the last 6 years and very little time on SEO related activities, these are phenomenal numbers.
Cost-Effectiveness:
The cost for developing the quoting tool was less than $5K and took about 6 weeks. Embedding the quoting tool on metalpros.com generated estimated $3M in additional revenues and $600K in labor savings in the last 6 years.
Lets Build More Quoting Tools
The demonstrated results that an instant quoting tool with very simple functionality can generate for Metal Pros the overwhelmingly positive user feedback and cost-effectiveness that is has, and our passion for helping small businesses succeed, was the drive in wanting us to build more quoting tools for other products and services for businesses in and outside the metal industry.