The price turns on how much work the site does
What a body shop site costs depends on how much of the job it finishes before a driver speaks to you. A shop living on insurer and dealer referral needs a credible shopfront. A shop chasing retail work — the crease in a door, the car park dent, the scuff before a lease return — needs the site to put a figure on damage from photographs, settle the claim-or-pay question, and prove the colour will match. That is not styling: it is pages, a form that carries phone photographs, and a gallery that grows.
Essentials, $500: the referral-led shopfront
Essentials covers eight pages, live in roughly two weeks, with two rounds of changes. On a body shop that stretches to a home page, what you repair, the workshop and technicians, the guarantee, an area page, reviews, contact and one estimate enquiry.
It will hold your own name in search, but not the retail route: eight pages are spent before smart repair, paintless dent removal, an insurance explainer and a gallery sorted by damage type have anywhere to live.
Complete, $1,500: the shape this trade needs
Complete is the tier we put body shops on, for a plain reason: the estimate flow, the insurance explainer, the gallery and a page per repair type carry a site past eight pages before anything unusual is asked for. It runs to twenty pages in about four weeks, with four rounds of changes, price lists you can edit, and booking wired into a calendar rather than an inbox.
The extra pages go somewhere specific here:
- The photo estimate route, a slot per angle, registration captured for the paint code
- Claim or pay privately, on its own URL
- A before-and-after gallery held as records and filtered by damage type
- Paint matching and the guarantee, in plain language
- Smart repair and PDR, priced apart from panel work
- Courtesy cars, collection and delivery, and reviews pulled from Google
Booking, when the thing booked is a drop-off
Booking setup comes with a new Complete build. What gets booked here is rarely the repair: it is the inspection confirming a photo estimate, or the morning the car goes in. So setup covers the slot types you genuinely keep, your calendar, reminders, and confirmation mail tested so it lands. On an existing site, booking is quoted in a day and takes about a week.
When there is already a site
If a site is already live, the first spend is finding out whether it is worth keeping. Diagnosis is $299, report in three days: what is broken in plain English, the cost of each fix, and a straight answer on repair versus rebuild. Diagnosis and fix is $799 over about two weeks. The recurring findings here: gallery photographs nobody compressed, an estimate form failing quietly on mobile data. A rebuild is priced after that report, never before it.
What carries on costing
- The domain, annual, in the shop's own name
- Hosting
- The workshop system subscription, paid direct: Autoflow, Garage Hive, Shopmonkey, Tekmetric or Workshop Software
- A care plan, if updates, backups and edits should be somebody's job: Basic at $99/mo, Growth at $249/mo with four hours of changes, Scale at $499/mo
- Photography — a habit rather than a purchase: four frames per finished job
Five things that move a body shop quote
- Whether private retail work is part of the plan, or the book stays referral only. That decides whether an estimate flow exists.
- How many repair types earn a page and a price: bumper scuff, car park dent, alloy refurbishment, panel replacement, respray.
- Whether the gallery is records you add to from your phone, or a page somebody has to edit for you.
- Where a submitted estimate lands: an email, or a job record with the images attached.
- Whether courtesy cars, collection and delivery need pages, or one line covers them.
None of the five is about how the site looks. A quote built mostly around design prices the part that matters least.
Where this sits
Our body shop websites are built to the Complete shape at a fixed price. Before spending, run the six phone tests for a body shop site, and if traffic arrives but estimates do not, read why the enquiries are missing.