Alwan TechnologiesGlazing has a quirk that most trades do not, and it is the reason so many glazing websites give up on pricing entirely.
A casement window is priced as a unit. A bi-fold or a shopfront screen is priced by the metre of opening. A door is a unit with a hardware and glass specification hanging off it. Secondary glazing is different again. One trade, several pricing bases, and a customer who has no idea which one applies to what they want.
Faced with that, most glazing sites do the same thing: a gallery, a list of products with no prices, and a contact form. Which means every single enquiry starts with the installer working out what the customer is actually asking for.
Let the product decide the basis
The fix is not to simplify the pricing. It is to let the visitor pick the product first, and switch the pricing basis behind the scenes once they have.
Someone choosing casement windows gets asked how many and what size. Someone choosing bi-folds gets asked the width of the opening. They never have to know that those are two different calculations, because they were never asked an abstract question — they were asked about their own house.
That is exactly what the glazing example on our showcase does. Five products, priced per unit or per metre of opening depending on which is selected, and it shows a range rather than a single figure. You can click through it yourself; it takes about a minute.
Show a range, never a spot price
This matters more in glazing than almost anywhere, because the variables that move the price are invisible from a form. Frame material, glazing spec, whether there is a lintel involved, access, whether the old units come out easily or fight.
A range with the assumptions stated under it does the job a spot price cannot. It qualifies the enquiry, it filters out the person who thought a full house of sash replacements might be two thousand pounds, and it does not tie you to a number you have not surveyed. Nobody has ever been annoyed by a range that turned out to be accurate.
The accreditation question
If you are FENSA or CERTASS registered, that belongs high on the page and stated plainly, because a homeowner replacing windows has usually been told to check for it and often does not know what they are checking for.
If you are not registered, leave the slot empty. Our examples do exactly that — the accreditation space on the glazing example is deliberately blank rather than filled with a generic badge, because a trust mark that turns out to be decorative is worse than no trust mark at all. That is a rule we hold to on client sites too: nothing goes on the page that cannot be checked.
What it costs
Right now that is £99 to build and £35 a month to run — about £8 a week. That is a launch price for the first ten trades who take it, not a standing rate, and the site and the domain are in your name from the day it goes live rather than after some qualifying period.
That includes the estimator built around your own products and your own rates — not a generic calculator with your logo on it. When your prices change, we change the calculator, because a tool quoting last year's numbers is worse than no tool at all.