Troubleshooting formula-based pricing

Are you using (complex) formulas, but your product’s grand total is incorrect or remains zero? Then there is a high chance your formula is wrong. Below are some tips on finding the issue.

The basics

1. Make sure your formula really is a formula. If your formula is just a simple number, then it is not a valid formula. If you want your product price to increase with a number, you should select “flat fee” or “quantity-based flat fee” as the pricing type.
2. If you’re using functions inside your formula (such as round or ceil), make sure the functions are available in your version of the plugin. We have a “Pro” and “Extended” version and most functions are only available in our Extended version. You can see the complete list of available functions (and in which version they’re available) here.

Dive deeper

If the above basic checks didn’t fix your issue, you can do the following checks to further debug your formula:

1. Make sure you are using sufficient brackets to group certain operations. If you don’t do it, your formula may produce unwanted results. For example, 2 * 4 + 1 is dubious because it can have 2 different results. Depending on which operation the system does first (2*4 or 4+1), the result of the operation can be 9 or 10. You should instruct the system which operation to perform first by using brackets. For example 2 * (4 + 1) results in 10 because you instructed the system to calculate 4+1 first. This way, there are no unwanted results.
2. When using functions inside formulas, make sure you use the semicolon ; character to divide parameters. Do not use a comma.
3. Make sure there are no typos in the formula. A common mistake could be using spaces in shortcodes. For example, the shortcode to get the base product price [price]. Make sure it doesn’t have any spaces inside, like this [ price ]. It’s subtle, but notice how it has spaces around the square brackets. That’s not allowed.
4. Make sure your shortcodes to grab field values ([field.ID]) are pointing to fields that have a number value. For example, say you have a field of type Select that has a few options like this: 10 sqm, 20 sqm, 30 sqm, etc… Then pointing to this field with the shortcode [field.ID] will not work because 10 sqm is not a valid number (it is text). Leaving out sqm from the option text will work as the options become valid numbers then. If you can’t change the option to a valid number, you will need to use our plugin’s Variables feature to assign numbers to the different field options.
5. If you’re using long & complex formulas, try breaking it up in smaller parts first and see if that works. If a smaller part works, you know the whole formula is at fault and you can start to fine-tune which part has an error. For example, if you have a complex formula (A + B) * (C + D), you can first try the formula (A + B). If that works, you know the error is somewhere in the other part (C + D).

Have you checked the above list but are still getting an error? Please contact support so we can help you out!