Adding a 3D printing quote form to Shopify, Squarespace or WordPress
If you sell custom printing, your website has a shape problem. A shop platform is built around products with prices, and a custom part has neither until somebody sends you a file.
Most shops solve it with a contact form, which turns every enquiry into an email thread and most of them into nothing.
What people usually try first
A product with options
Small, medium and large, at three fixed prices. It works for the parts you already sell and falls apart the moment somebody sends you something that is not one of them. You end up refunding the difference or absorbing it.
A contact form with a file upload
Honest, and slow. The customer waits, you open the file, you slice it, you work out a price, you reply, and about half of them have gone elsewhere by then. The work is the same whether or not they order.
A price-per-gram calculator
Quick to build and wrong in both directions. It overcharges for light parts that print fast and badly undercharges for tall thin ones, which are the jobs that tie up a machine all day.
What actually works
The price has to come from the file. That means slicing it against a real printer profile and real material, which is the thing none of the approaches above do.
PlateDock does that part and gives you two ways to put it in front of a customer: a page of your own at our address, and a script tag you can paste into a site you already run.
Pasting it into your own site
The widget is a script tag that writes an iframe. That matters because it means it works anywhere that lets you paste HTML, rather than needing a plugin for each platform.
- Shopify: a Custom Liquid section on any page, or a custom page template.
- Squarespace: a Code block. Available on the Business plan and above.
- WordPress: a Custom HTML block, or the theme editor.
- Wix: Embed, then Embed a widget, then paste the code.
- Webflow: an Embed element.
It resizes itself to the space you give it, so it works in a narrow sidebar and across a full-width section. You choose which in your dashboard.
Or just send people a link
Your page works on its own. If your website is a Facebook page, an Etsy shop or nothing at all, a link is the whole setup, and it is the same page either way.