Showing coverage per box on a tile or flooring shop

Charge for the box, show the price per square metre

Set each product's price to the price of one full box. Checkout then only ever sells whole boxes. Beside it, show what that comes to per square metre.

Shopify has a unit price setting for this. You enter how much one box holds and the base measure, and Shopify shows the price per measure beside the box price. On Online Store 2.0 themes it appears on product pages, collection pages, the basket and checkout. Check Shopify's unit pricing help page for the units your shop's unit system offers.

Put the coverage on the product page

Write the coverage next to the box price, for example “1.44 m² a box”, and the tile size and tiles per box if they differ between products. Store the coverage in a product metafield, such as custom.m2_per_box, so one calculator and one line of text in your theme work for every product.

Turning square metres into whole boxes

Customers often know their area already and want the box count. Divide the area by one box's coverage and round up. Never round down, or the customer is short.

A worked example with 1.44 m² in each box and a floor of 10 m²:

• With no allowance: 10 m² ÷ 1.44 m² rounds up to 7 boxes, which cover 10.08 m², 0.08 m² more than the floor.
• With a 10% cutting allowance: the area to cover is 11 m², which rounds up to 8 boxes covering 11.52 m², 0.52 m² more than that.

Show the rounded figure and the area the boxes cover, so the customer sees why the total is more than their floor. Then let one button put that number of boxes in the basket.

The cutting allowance

Tiles and planks are cut at the edges and around obstacles, so customers usually buy more than the floor area. The example uses 10% because that is the figure a shop owner asked for. The right allowance depends on the room, the layout pattern and the tile size, so take it from your supplier or fitter for each product, and show it beside the result.

Google Shopping shows the box price

A shop owner selling 2.54 m² boxes of laminate found that Google showed the box price beside other shops' square metre prices. Google's product data has its own unit pricing measure for this. Give the box's coverage in sqm and a base measure of 1 sqm, and Google can show the price per square metre with the box price.

An app for the box count

LF Tile & Flooring Calculator, from Layout Foundry, is our Shopify app for this. Your customer types the size of the floor and gets the number of whole boxes from your own pack sizes, with the allowance, rounding and leftover shown beside the result. It is on our page for shops.