Custom WordPress Development: Building WordPress Moving Cost Calculator Plugin

Like any other industry, technological advancements have led to a growth surge in the moving industry.

With more than 31 Million people moving in USA alone and an estimated of $86Billion in revenue, the moving industry is way larger than we can realize. – Move Buddha

With each passing year, the number of people moving from one location to another has been seemingly increasing. While the move can be residential, industrial, or office relocation, people either prefer moving on their own or hire a team of professional movers — local or long distance depending on the distance they are moving.

However, if you are an owner of an online moving company, you might be well aware of the potential roadblocks that come up as challenges.

One such problem is the lack of proper communication from moving company representatives or their salesperson as stated by 53% of respondents.

For each move that is conducted, the professional movers take special measures to address crucial issues of custom document preparation, weight estimation, and more that are necessary for ensuring a safe move. The professional movers work hard to mitigate all kinds of risks/problems during the move to keep their quality rating high and satisfying the customers by facilitating a painless and hassle-free move for the client.

Among the list of issues like legal issues, retaining clients, training the team, standing ahead of competitors, it is the ‘How much does it cost to relocate?’ that is the most commonly asked query by customers. Obviously, no one wants to get looted away by the fraudulent movers.

The customer would normally take a quote from 2-3 vendors to compare the pricing, ask their friends to suggest reliable moving services, go through the review websites, check their social media accounts for customer reviews in order to verify if they are authentic movers. And, even if the price is a bit more they would not mind the treasured items to be moved from one place to another.

As this industry hasn’t been left untouched by the claws of the Internet, many of the movers believe in selling their services online and providing moving estimates. However, this poses a great problem for the movers while calculating the accurate estimate.

The simplest solution to calculate relocation costs is to provide an accurate estimate to the clients and provide an in-house estimate. Otherwise, giving a non-binding estimate makes people pay more than the estimates provided by the movers which becomes a big problem.

But here is a solution. There are online moving cost calculators for providing estimates.

This article illustrates how the team of expert WordPress developers at The Brihaspati Infotech has developed a moving cost estimator plugin for one of our clients who owns a moving company.

Before proceeding towards our WordPress Plugin Development procedure, let’s throw some light on:

How is Moving Cost Estimation Done?

Generally, the moving expense calculation is based on multiple factors. These include the cost of moving supplies, packing services, size of the move, moving dates, moving seasons, liability and valuation coverage, storage, and moving add-ons. However, calculating all these costs manually take loads of efforts, so many professional moving websites provide online Moving Cost Calculator for Moving Estimates to budget effectively.

In the wake of this, our developers at The Brihaspati Infotech built a moving expense calculator which calculated the exact pricing of the moving supplies of customers on the move.   

Salient Features of our WordPress Moving Cost Calculator Plugin

Our WordPress Moving Cost Calculator is a smart way to provide your moving clients with moving estimates. Here are some of the important features of our online moving costs calculator.

• Accurate Moving Estimate

The estimates are being filled from the moving source and the moving destination. The application asks for the address people are moving from with the date of moving to. Providing all the moving details, customers can get precise costs of the move.

• Option for Adding custom items

The customer can add their own items. In case people want to move certain items that are not listed on the website, our WordPress plugin developers have provided an option to add custom items in each product category.

On clicking that, a pop-up opens where the customer fills in important details of the product name, width, height, depth (in inches).

• Geo-location for easy address addition

We used the Google API key to provide the user with an ease of autocompleting the addresses.

• Interactive User Interface

This WordPress moving cost calculator plugin has been designed keeping in mind the importance of providing an attractive layout for the users. It comprises textboxes and dropdown menus with images of icons.

• Guided Experience

This WordPress plugin provides easy navigation which provides customers with a seamless experience. The ‘arrow buttons’, ‘continue buttons’ and ‘submit buttons’ allows customers to navigate through the website with ease and simplicity.

Our Moving cost calculator plugin works in three steps:

In the first step, it includes the page where the source and destination address are provided by the customer where the storage, pick-up stop, and drop-off stop are to be ticked. The customer then is guided towards clicking the ‘Continue’ button. 

In the next step, the customer enters the individual items that he wanted to move by clicking the ‘Add Items’ button. After adding, he is asked to again ‘continue’ the button.

In the last step, the customer adds comprehensive details of their move and then clicks on ‘submit’ button. The mover then calculates the price of the move and informs the customer through an e-mail. 

• Easily Customizable

This WordPress plugin is easily customizable. The developers can change the color, font size, and font style of the plugin. Moreover, the color of the titles, checkboxes, slider, and drop-down menus can also be customized.

How we developed a Moving Cost Calculator plugin in WordPress?

Our team of developers was highly excited when one of our clients who owns a moving company asked for a cost calculation solution for his WordPress website. It had different categories with a list of products in each category.

We avoided integrating any third-party plugins as a cost estimation tool because of many reasons. Using these plugins increase the vulnerability to hack websites and lack some of the important features that are required for functionality. Moreover, these plugins are likely to increase the subtleties of your websites’ original code.

So, our expert WordPress developers built this WordPress plugin through a custom approach wherein we customized the client’s website as per the required code.

• We used PHP for the front-end development of the plugin to make it simple and interactive.
• For an easy flow of communication from and to a server or database, we used the Ajax which is a programming tool or a language.
• We used a fast and feature-rich JavaScript library called jQuery. It makes event handling, animation, Ajax, and HTML document traversal/manipulation simpler with its easy-to-use API. This works across a great number of browsers.

Our WordPress plugin developers created a section for adding individual product pages in the WordPress admin, wherein the mover can add as many products as he wants. So, by implementing the custom coding, our team was able to build an efficient moving cost estimator.

How does our WordPress Moving Cost Calculator Plugin Work?

When a customer adds his moving source address and destination address, he is taken to a page from where he can choose the type and number of items that he wishes to move. He is provided an option for adding custom products too. Lastly, he is required to add the complete details of his move with full addresses, email id, and phone numbers. On successful submission, he is presented with a ‘Thank you’ page.

Benefits of our Custom WordPress Moving Cost Calculator

• Our moving cost calculator provides simplicity and ease for the movers to budget people’s move effectively. Apart from planning the budget, it helped in engaging the customers.
• This straightforward tool provides users with a reliable and accurate estimate of how much a move will cost, based on the distance of their move and the number of products they wish to move.  In a way, this plugin helps movers to gather vital information about the move in an interactive and progressive manner based on which the movers can present a more precise quote to the client.
• A hassle-free process for the customers to ask for a moving quote by adding the exact products that they wish to move.
• Minimizing the chances of fraudulent while getting online moving quotes.
• Mover gets an opportunity to capture the leads.
• It eliminates the communication problems that occur between the moving company and customers by providing a precise estimate. Thus, the issue of communication breakdown is resolved to a greater extent.

Challenges we faced

There were many challenges that we faced during the development phase of the WordPress Moving Cost Calculator Plugin:

Displaying the categories on the left sidebar dynamically in the accordion was one of the major challenges that we faced. To overcome this, we added the bootstrap accordion and fetched the categories from database dynamically on it.

• While we were planning to add the popups for different category sections like custom items, another challenge came up. For this, we added the bootstrap model to display the popups.
• In order to display the items dynamically on the popups as well as append them on different pop-up upon selection, we fetched the items from the database and appended on popup using jquery.
• Yet another challenge was to calculate the units of “Cubic feet” and “Prices” in real-time while letting customers add their custom products. We fetched data from hidden fields and then calculated it using jquery and at last, appended results in that section.
• To create the multi-steps tabs, we used the bootstrap.
• While getting the form data and sending the emails to the client as well as admin, we faced troubles. To solve this, we created a template where we collected all the form submission data and then used the WordPress mail function to send those data to clients as well as admin.

The plugin currently serves more than 50 global moving agencies across the globe in its vanilla as well as customized form. By May 2021, the plugin has been updated several times to align with the client’s business.

Final Thoughts on Moving Cost Calculator Plugin Development

Though building a moving cost calculator plugin for WordPress was not an easy task, our experts with their years of experience successfully added a customized plugin to the client’s WordPress website.

In case you wish to hire WordPress development services from our experts, feel free to reach us for consultation.