New, improved calculation of our prices
Posted on Jan 30, 2018
We have changed the calculation for our plastic sheets to a new, highly complex procedure. Find out how you can profit from our complex price calculation in two ways from now on.
Plastic sheets are always subject to fluctuations in terms of the purchase price, which can sometimes even be quite high.
We have finally changed the calculation of our prices in the online shop to a very modern way that allows us to react to price fluctuations on a daily basis.
You as our customer will benefit from this change in two ways.
Variations in plastic prices
Responding promptly to the constant price fluctuations in the plastics market has always been very time-consuming up to now, because when prices increased or decreased, all our individual articles had to be adjusted to the new prices. However, since we offer a large number of plastic sheets in our online shop as standard sheets or cut to size, and these then partly also in different colours and a large selection of different thicknesses, adjusting the respective prices required an enormous amount of time and personnel.
Our new plastic price calculation
Without boring you with mathematical details here, we would nevertheless like to tell you what has changed for you in our new price calculation.
We had a mathematics professor create a complex formula that always calculates the current favourable price for our plastic sheets depending on the specific weight, the dimensions and the current purchase price.
However, the formula also necessitated some notable changes to the online shop itself, as it wouldn't have been much help if every single product had to be changed by the formula, meaning that all of our plastic sheets would have to be adjusted again when prices changed.
This is where our programmer comes in.
He not only programmed us an interface in which we can easily and efficiently adjust all the purchase prices of our plastics centrally in one place, but also integrated the complex calculation curve for the new price calculation.
This involved a lot of work and a necessary shutdown of the online shop, which we carried out during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday. During this time, our programmer made all the changes to the programme code of the online shop and shortly afterwards our team made the necessary adjustments to all the products in the item management of the online shop.
BUGGY DETAIL: Unfortunately, the changeover did not go entirely smoothly, so that in the meantime a small error crept in, which made it necessary to first add an adhesive to the shopping cart before it was possible to buy plastic sheets in the standard format or as cut-to-size, but we were able to fix this error relatively quickly.
Your advantages of the new price calculation
Daily updated prices for our plastic sheets guarantee fair and favourable prices
Because we can now adjust all purchase prices for our plastic sheets centrally in one place, it is possible for us to react very promptly to price fluctuations and so changing the values only requires a very small amount of time, a maximum of 5 minutes instead of several hours previously.
This means that you always receive the most up-to-date price, which is particularly noticeable in your shopping basket in the event of price reductions for plastics.
A weight-based calculation accurate to the milligram enables significantly lower prices, especially for larger order volumes.
As is usual in trade, a profit - the so-called margin - is added to the sale of goods and merchandise. Up to now, we have determined this margin using several fixed parameters, so that we could calculate our profit relatively accurately depending on the purchase price. However, this was too imprecise for us and led to comparatively high sales prices, especially for larger order quantities, because the fixed programmed parameters could not be extended as desired.
With our new curve calculation, we are able to determine the amount of the margin depending on the weight (to the milligram). The higher the weight of a plastic sheet, the lower the price increase for economic success. However, we do not refer to the weight of a single sheet or a blank, but to the total weight of each item in the shopping cart.
Our new price calculation in detail
The first picture shows a plastic sheet made of polyethylene in standard format with the dimensions of 2000mmx1000mm and 5mm thickness. From these dimensions, as well as the specific gravity, the total face of the blank is 9,600 grams.
The second picture shows the same panel, but with a thickness of 10mm. The weight doubles to 19,200 grams, but the price does not double.
This difference is even more obvious if you use two plastic sheets with a thickness of 5mm instead of one 10mm thick plastic sheet. The total weight remains unchanged at 19,200 grams and the total price does not change either. However, if we now compare the unit price of the panel from the first picture with the unit price of the panel from the last picture, we can see that it is reduced by more than 5.00 euros, which corresponds to a price reduction of about 7%.
This does not only apply to our standard sheets, of course, because this elaborate calculation is also carried out for the cuts of our plastic sheets. Here, however, other parameters are used for the calculation, such as the effort for the cutting and a calculation for the waste costs, insofar as these are not reusable and sortenrein collected and recycled have to be.
We would like to illustrate this by means of cuttings from our HPL sheets, where we have calculated the exact same cuttings for you, but in different quantities.
As you can see from the pictures, we have not changed anything in terms of thickness or dimensions and have only adjusted the number of blanks. However, the price per blank has changed significantly, even for small quantities. This means that graduated prices in our online shop - at least for our plastic sheets in standard format and cut to size - are no longer necessary and are a thing of the past.