01 Starting point
An online plot service does not sell articles, it sells processing. What the customer is ordering sits in the file they upload: number of pages, formats, areas, ink coverage. Only from that does it follow what the job involves and what it costs.
A standard shop cannot represent that. The files are large and inconsistent, and every manual check costs time and does not scale with the number of orders. Without automatic analysis, the price is only fixed once someone has opened the file and measured it.
02 Solution
plotplus.de is built as a TYPO3 site with a processing chain developed for it behind. The upload takes large print files, puts them in a queue and shows the state of play while processing runs.
In processing, the application analyses each file: pages, dimensions and printed area go into a set of rules together with options such as material, output type and quantity, and the line items and the price come out of it. The rules are configurable, so new materials can be added without a code change.
Processing runs in background jobs, decoupled from the web server, so a large job does not slow the site down. Operation is on our own servers in Germany with Docker, MariaDB and Redis, and storage is sized for large volumes of files.
03 Result
The customer gets the price and the scope of the job out of their own file, with no follow-up questions and no waiting for a quote. In the business, orders arrive already checked and priced.
Because the pricing logic sits in our own code, price models, materials and processing steps can be changed when the offer changes. That is the difference between a shop with article numbers and software that sells a service.