If you supply screed through WooCommerce — sand and cement screed, flowing screed, or self-levelling compound — you’re serving a slightly different buyer than a general concrete customer: often a trade buyer or contractor pricing a floor build-up before a job, who needs an accurate volume figure fast, not a rough estimate.
Like concrete, screed is priced by volume, and the same “customers know length, width, and depth, not cubic metres” problem applies — but the accuracy bar is often higher, since screed depths tend to be smaller and more precisely specified than a typical concrete base.
This guide covers the volume calculation screed needs, and how to set it up in WooCommerce.
Why screed pricing needs tighter precision than concrete
The underlying calculation is the same shape as concrete, but a few things matter more here:
- Shallower, more precise depths — screed depths are often specified in millimetres (e.g. 50mm, 75mm) rather than the broader tolerances typical of a concrete base, so the calculator needs to handle decimal depth entry cleanly and accurately
- Lower wastage than loose aggregate materials — screed is mixed and poured/pumped similarly to concrete, so it typically doesn’t need the compaction allowance that loose materials like gravel or topsoil require
- Trade buyers pricing multiple rooms or zones — a contractor may be calculating several separate screed pours for one job, making a fast, accurate per-area calculation more valuable than for a single-project domestic buyer
The formula
Using the Volume calculator type, the same one used for concrete, topsoil, and gravel:
Volume = Length × Width × Depth
Price = Volume × (1 + wastage %) × price per m³
For example: a room measuring 6m × 4m at 0.05m (50mm) depth, with 5% wastage, at £85 per m³:
Volume = 6 × 4 × 0.05 = 1.2m³
Price = 1.2 × 1.05 × £85 = £107.10
The 5% wastage figure matches concrete’s typical allowance rather than the higher figures used for loose materials like topsoil or gravel, since screed is mixed and applied in a broadly similar way to poured concrete.
Setting this up in WooCommerce
The usual approaches:
1. Manual quoting. Very common for screed, especially multi-room or larger commercial jobs, but still needs someone to calculate volume for each area and respond before an order can be placed.
2. Generic quantity-input plugins. These leave the volume calculation entirely to the buyer, who — even a trade buyer under time pressure — may not have an exact figure to hand while pricing up a job.
3. A purpose-built volume-based pricing calculator, taking length, width, and precise decimal depth to calculate volume and price automatically.
This is what Woo State Calculator‘s dedicated Screed preset is built for — the Volume calculator type takes length, width, and depth (with clean decimal precision for shallow measurements), applies 5% wastage by default and fully adjustable, and updates the price live as each dimension is entered, recalculated server-side at checkout. It’s built on State.js, so there’s no jQuery dependency — useful for a trade buyer quickly pricing several zones back-to-back without waiting on page reloads between each calculation.
What to check before you buy any calculator plugin for screed
- Does it handle shallow, precise depth entry (millimetre-level decimals) accurately?
- Is the wastage default appropriate for a poured/pumped material, rather than reusing a loose-aggregate figure?
- Does the price update live and quickly, useful for a trade buyer pricing multiple zones?
- Is the price recalculated server-side at checkout?
FAQ
Does this work for both traditional sand/cement screed and flowing/self-levelling screed? Yes — the underlying volume calculation is the same regardless of screed type; the price per m³ and wastage percentage can be set differently per product to reflect material cost and application differences.
How should I handle a job with multiple rooms at different depths? Each room or zone is best treated as a separate calculation (either separate products or the same product ordered multiple times), since volume depends on that zone’s specific length, width, and depth.
Can I offer trade pricing for larger commercial orders? Yes — conditional pricing rules can apply a discount automatically once the calculated volume or order value passes a threshold, useful for rewarding larger commercial screed orders without a manual quote step.
Supplying screed, self-levelling compound, or another volume-priced product through WooCommerce? Woo State Calculator includes a ready-made Screed preset to get set up in minutes.
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