How We Built an Instant Quote Engine
J&S Transportation ships vehicles nationwide and has worked with us on their site for over a decade.
A custom plugin for instant shipment pricing opened a new line of business.
No Plugin Existed,
So We Built One
J&S wanted to open a direct-to-consumer channel. Customers needed an instant, guaranteed shipping quote and the ability to book online.
That meant calculating shipping costs automatically based on distance, vehicle type, weight, and the U.S. road network.
WordPress has thousands of plugins, but none could handle pricing this accurately.
ebusiness WP built a custom plugin that generates instant, accurate shipping quotes for any route in the country.
To make the pricing model reliable, we worked with an industrial mathematician to develop an algorithm based on the geography and road network of the United States.
The result is a proprietary solution for J&S. Every customer gets consistent, accurate pricing, whether they’re a dealership shipping multiple vehicles or an individual shipping a single car.
From Manual Pricing to a Fully Automated Business
Before the plugin, J&S created shipping quotes manually, one at a time. That worked for dealership contracts but made it impossible to serve individual customers at scale.
With instant, guaranteed pricing on the website, J&S launched a direct-to-consumer channel. Today, dealerships and individual customers use the same pricing engine.
The same focus on automation led to a second plugin. J&S manages thousands of route rates across dozens of Google Sheets. Updating those rates in WordPress manually could take hours.
When carrier costs changed quickly, J&S couldn’t update prices fast enough, and some orders had to be canceled.
ebusiness WP built RouteSync, a custom plugin that syncs pricing updates directly from Google Sheets to WordPress.
A sheet with 100 routes that once took one to two hours now syncs in about two minutes. If the market changes, J&S can update hundreds of routes in about 30 minutes.
A Decade-Long Partnership, Proven in the Numbers
A proprietary plugin is only as good as the team that keeps it running.
“This has been a huge time saver for us, what used to take hours now takes minutes, and if the market shifts again, we can reprice hundreds of routes across the board in about half an hour instead of days. That’s a massive difference for our business.”
Travis Van Slooten
J&S Transportation
We Build the Plugin That Doesn’t Exist Yet
ebusiness WP has spent over a decade building and supporting custom WordPress solutions for businesses whose needs go beyond what an off-the-shelf plugin can do.
When the plugin you need doesn’t exist, that’s the work we do best.
Have a Business Problem No Plugin Can Solve?
If your business needs something WordPress doesn’t already offer, we can build it, and we’ll be there to
support it for years to come.