Is there a 'calculated price' addon?

Store Builder Questions
1

I have a client that sells gold plates, etc., for the jewelery business. The prices depend on the going rate for gold.



Suppose the price per ounce of gold changes again today. What I currently see with CS-Cart is each gold product has to be manually updated.



If the price were calculatable, such as “1.3 * (gold per ounce)” then resetting (gold per ounce) in one central place would make daily updates easy.



What’s more, there are places that have a web service that tells you the gold price, making an automatic update possible.



This seems an obvious enough need that I figure an addon already exists. Has anyone heard of one for CS-Cart?



Thanks,

Jerome.

2

Have an addon that will adjust all prices by group. But that won’t solve your problem.

You would have to determine how you would identify which products to adjust. Then you’d need to know if you want to adjust from a base-rate or make an adjustment of the current price (would suggest a base). But then you wil probably also have to factor in weight and have to separate out the gold weight from the item weight.



Etc, etc, etc… As you can see there are probably a lot more conditions and “state” to consider than is first obvious. You will probably want to keep your critical factors (base price and weight) in hidden Product Features so you can more easily determine what products need to be adjusted and by how much.

3

Suppose I have an item called “gold chain, 20 gauge”. It weighs 1 oz. per foot, and I sell it by the foot. I’m making up the details, but the calculation remains the required thing.



So I’d like to sell this chain for 10% more than market price. Perhaps, if that is available, I could sell it for market price + $10. So I have two ways of possibly pricing it:



item_weight * gold_price * 1.1



item_weight * gold_price + 10



So I give the item a hidden feature “calc_by_gold_price”, another param “method=weight” (as opposed to “method=surcharge”) and “value=1.1” (for surcharge, “value=10”).



Then the addon would look for products with “calc_by_gold_price”. Finding it, for a “weight” it would take the gold price, add to it the item weight (another param?) and multiply by “value”. Similar thing for the surcharge method.



All that said, do you have an addon that would let this occur? And for what price?



Thanks,

Jerome.

4

Well, if I were to develop an addon to do this, I would do it differently than described, but essentially it would work similarly.



When I do an addon for sale, I usually price it at 1/10 the development cost (assumes I will sell 10 to get my investment back). However, recently this hasn’t been working very well. Problem is that everyone is interested util it’s time to ante up. So I would simply do this as custom development and you would pay the development time.



You can contact me at tonybXX@ez-msXX.com (remove X’s) and I’ll give you a quote. You could then resell it to others to recover your investment if you are able to.

5

is anyone solve this??