How to collect quote requests in your store

You can allow your customers to inquire about prices for products in your Ecwid store. This option can be extremely valuable if you’re selling highly customizable goods or services for which it is difficult to name the price until you get to know more details about the order. Price requests also help increase conversion, provide individual discounts and make communication with your customers more personal.

Instead of using the traditional Add to Bag button that makes it possible to buy the product right away for a fixed price, customers will be able to place a quote request to get to know how much your product costs.

You can add a Request a Quote (RFQ) button to the pages of individual products or allow price inquiries for all the products in your store. Additionally, you can let your customers ask questions and write you any information that is necessary to calculate the final price of the product or service.

In this guide, we will tell you about the manual and automatic ways to collect quote requests in your Ecwid store.

Turning your store into a catalog
Turning your Add to Bag buttons into RFQ buttons
Adding RFQ buttons for individual products
Collecting quote requests using an app
Charging your customers

Turning your store into a catalog

Probably the easiest way to let your customers inquire about the prices in your Ecwid store is to turn your store into a catalog. The Buy Now and Add to Bag buttons will be disabled for all your products, as well as the payment and shipping methods, quantities, and prices. Your customers will see the products you offer without being able to buy them, and can contact you by:

• Email
• Phone
• Live chat
• Any other means of communication you specify

Make sure your customers find how to contact you. We suggest adding this information not only to the “Contact Us” section, but also to your legal pages and to the product descriptions. On top of that, you can add a note to your store front page informing customers about how and where to place quote requests:

You can choose the catalog option if you don’t sell products or services online via your store and only need your customers to get in touch with you (e.g., you want them to come to your offline store).

Creating a catalog with offline payment options

If you want to collect quote requests in your catalog at checkout, you can leave the prices and the Buy Now/Add to Bag buttons, add a note that the price is not final and that it will be settled upon discussion, and simply enable offline payment methods.

Let’s say you want to accept offline payment by invoice. Invoices are commercial documents that list products and services a seller provides to the buyer for a specific price, so an invoice is a secure and trustworthy way to charge your customers.

First, make sure that prices for your products are not “0” (this way, the payment option will be available at checkout). Second, create an offline payment option.

Here is how you can create a “Payment by invoice” method in your store:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Payment.
2. Find the Manual payment methods block.
3. Click + Add Manual Payment Method.
4. Enter “Payment by invoice” into the Payment method name at checkout field:
5. Enter instructions for your customers. For example, you can write that you will message them after you receive a quote request, and then, when everything is settled, you will send them an invoice that needs to be paid before you ship the product.
6. Save the changes.
7. Make sure the payment method is enabled:

This is how your new payment method will look at checkout:

After you receive a quote request, it will be created as an order with Awaiting Payment status in your Ecwid admin. As soon as you discuss everything with the customer, you can send them an invoice manually outside of Ecwid. For example, a PayPal or a NextPay invoice. Once you get the payment for such an order, you can set Paid status for it to mark it as such in your Ecwid admin.

Feel free to use admin notes to track the stages of your communication with the buyer. For example, you can leave yourself a note to an order for which you’ve already sent the invoice to the customer and now only wait for them to pay it.

Turning your Add to Bag buttons into RFQ buttons

Another option to collect quote requests for all the products in your Ecwid store is to turn all the Add to Bag buttons into the Request a Quote buttons. This way, your customers will be able to place quote requests at checkout.

There are two main steps that are necessary to collect quote requests at checkout.

Step 1. Removing extra blocks from checkout

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Catalog → Products.
2. Choose a product from the list and untick the Requires shipping or pickup box. Once you do it, the delivery options block will be hidden from checkout for this product.
   

   

3. Set the price for this product to “0”. Once you do it, the entire payment method selection block will be hidden from checkout, and no payment will be required to send the inquiry.
4. Repeat this process for all the products from the list.
5. In Settings → Cart & Checkout, make sure that the Ask for a billing address during checkout setting is disabled and Awaiting Payment is chosen for Default payment status for orders with zero total.
6. Hide the Free order block that appears for zero-priced orders from your store checkout. To do this, add to your CSS theme the following code:
   

   
   div.ec-cart-step__section, div.ec-cart-step__title.ec-header-h4 {display:
         none;}
       

Step 2. Changing the Add to Bag text

1. Change the Add to Bag text on your buttons into Request a Quote or other similar text using the Store Label Editor. The changes will be applied to all the products in your store.
   You can additionally change the Go to Checkout, Checkout and Place Order texts (as well as any other text that you feel needs changing, for example, rename Buy Now buttons if you’ve decided to keep them in the product list).

2. (optional) Enable order comments (you can also change the order notes field caption, e.g., into “Add info on your request”), or create a text field to allow your customers to ask additional questions about your products.
   
   Order comments are available on Ecwid Business and Unlimited plans.

   Upgrade

This is how your product page may look like:

And this is how your product may look in the cart:

Now all your customer needs to do to request a quote is add the product(s) to the cart by pressing the Request a Quote button on the product page (like they do with the Add to Bag button) and checkout. At checkout, they will only need to provide their email address, and you will be able to get in touch with them to name the price and discuss any additional details. To access quote requests, go to the My Sales → Orders page in your Ecwid admin.

Adding RFQ buttons for individual products

If you need the possibility to request a quote only for some products in your store, you can add a special Request a Quote button to the description field on your product pages. After a customer clicks this button, they will be able to email you an inquiry on the price of the product and also ask other questions if they want to.

There are two main steps that are necessary to create the Request a Quote button for an individual product.

Step 1. Removing the Add to Bag button

First, you need to remove the Add to Bag button from your product details page.

That’s it! You have removed the Add to Bag button from the product details page for your product:

You may also want to hide other details for a product such as price and Buy Now button in your product grid, or its price on the product details page. For that, you can use CSS codes in your store theme (you can remove the unnecessary ones):

/*hide the price for this product from your product grid*/
.ec-size .ec-store .grid-product--id-12345 .grid-product__price {display: none;}

/*hide the price for this product on the product page*/
.ec-store__product-page--12345 .product-details__product-price {display: none;}

/*hide the Buy Now button for this product in the grid*/
.ec-size .ec-store .grid-product.grid-product--id-12345 .grid-product__buy-now .form-control__button {display: none;}

To apply these codes, copy them and replace all "12345" with the ID of your product, then add the resulting CSS code(s) to your CSS theme according to our instruction.

Step 2. Creating a custom button

Now you need to create a custom button to let your customers send inquiries:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Catalog → Products.
2. Choose your product from the list.
3. Open the General tab.
4. Find the Description field.
5. Switch to the HTML mode in by clicking the <> sign:
   

   

6. Сopy this code:
   

   
   <p>
   <a href="mailto:info@mymail.com">
   <img border="0" alt="Request a Quote" 
   src="https://dabuttonfactory.com/button.png?t=Request+a+Quote&f=Calibri-Bold&ts=24&tc=fff&hp=15&vp=11&c=11&bgt=unicolored&bgc=444" "="">
   </a>
   </p>

7. Paste the code that you copied into the Description field and change the info@mymail.com part in mailto:info@mymail.com into the email address where you want your customers to send their quote requests.
8. Save the changes.

That’s it! You have added the Request a Quote button to your product page. Now, when your customers click the button, they will be prompted to mail an inquiry to the address you specified.

This is how your product page may look like:

You can add the Request a Quote button to any other product in your store — just follow the steps once again.

Collecting quote requests using an app

If you want to collect your quote requests and general inquiries with less effort using an app, you can use one of the apps from the Ecwid App Market:

• Get an Offer
  
  or
• Request a Quote

With the help of these apps, you can create a special inquiry button for your store visitors. It will be displayed under the Add to Bag button. After a customer clicks the inquiry button, they are prompted to leave their contact information for you to get back to them. You can choose for which products the buttons are added.

This is how your product may look like with the Get an Offer app:

If you want to use only the Request a Quote button, you can hide Add to Bag buttons for specific products using a CSS code or Stock Control, or turn your store into a catalog.

As soon as somebody leaves an inquiry, you will receive it — along with the contact information they provided — to the email address that you specified in the app. With this information, you can contact the customer with an appropriate response.

The Get an Offer app gives you the flexibility to choose what information to collect from your customers: their name, email, phone number, address, company name, or some additional information. You can configure a form to your liking and include radio buttons, checkboxes, text fields, and text areas, so that customers are able to convey all the necessary information to you.

The Request a Quote app allows customers to form a quote list, edit it and request quotes for several products at once. You can export requests from the app if you need.

Both apps cost $9.99/month.

Charging your customers

No matter which of the above-mentioned options you used to collect quote requests, at that point you have not charged your customers. Once you get in touch with them, discuss all the details and finally fulfill their order, you will need to receive the payment. Depending on your store and products, you can choose various payment methods for that:

• Cash on delivery
• PayPal.me links
• NextPay invoices
• Paypal invoices
• Offline credit card payments
• Any other suitable payment method used in your country

If you have a physical store, and customers usually come over to collect orders, offline credit card payment will work just fine. In case you are delivering locally, you can use credit card payments to your couriers via Square reader. Just connect the card reader with the Ecwid mobile app for iOS.

On the other hand, if you are going to ship the order after you manufacture it (e.g., it’s some custom product like a hand-made pillow), you will probably want to get paid before you hand the package over to the carrier.

In this case, you can use invoices. For example, if you use PayPal invoices, you can send your customers a special link to an invoice by email. After that, they will be able to pay with a credit or debit card or PayPal.

Providing prices upon request may take money longer to reach your bank account, but this way you will be able to evaluate your expenses better. Not to mention the ability to provide exactly the product or service that your customers wanted to purchase, and build a trustworthy relationship when they contact you.