What we are building
One form. Four photographs with angle guidance, a registration, a postcode, the insurance question and a mobile number. It works on mobile data in a car park, and the submission lands as a lead with images attached in Autoflow, Garage Hive, Shopmonkey or Tekmetric. Build order below.
1. Fix the field list first
Photographs — four slots, two required. Registration. Postcode. Are you claiming, paying privately, or unsure. Mobile number.
That is the list. Resist name, email, address, vehicle make, model, colour, preferred date and description of damage. Every one of them is either derivable from the registration or answerable in your reply, and each costs you completions.
2. Guide the angles with pictures, not words
Four upload slots, each with a small example image beside it:
- Straight on to the damage, close.
- At forty-five degrees, where the crease shows depth.
- Something for scale in shot — a hand, a coin, a card.
- The whole panel and its neighbours, from further back.
People copy example images and skip instructions. This single decision improves the quality of what arrives more than anything else on the page.
3. Resize in the browser before upload
Four phone photographs is thirty megabytes, and on a weak signal that will stall. Before sending, draw each image to a canvas at around 1600 pixels on the long edge and export at about 0.8 JPEG quality. You get a few hundred kilobytes per image, still easily good enough to estimate from.
Show real progress per image. On failure, show a message with your phone number, never a silent reset.
4. Keep the registration field forgiving
Uppercase automatically, strip spaces on submit, accept anything. Personalised plates break patterns and a validation error on a real registration ends the enquiry. If you look up the paint code from it, do that after submission, not inline.
5. Ask the insurance question as three options
Claiming, paying privately, not sure. "Not sure" will be the largest group, and it tells the estimator to put the excess arithmetic in the reply. Link the insurance-or-private page from beside the question.
6. Put the promise above the submit button
The sentence that makes photo estimating work: this estimate is based on your photographs, and if we find anything more when the car is in we will stop, photograph it, send it to you, and not continue until you have approved it.
Add the response time — most estimates go out the same working day — and one line about courtesy cars.
7. Land the submission on a job record
Post into your shop management tool as a lead or estimate, with the images attached to the record. Autoflow, Shopmonkey and Tekmetric all take this natively or by webhook; Garage Hive needs a little more work and is worth it.
Notify yourself by text as well as email. A body shop enquiry has three competitors working on it.
8. Confirm properly
The thank-you page repeats what happens next and the response time, and gives the phone number. Send an immediate text confirmation. Somebody who has just uploaded four pictures of their damaged car wants proof it arrived.
9. Route the jobs that do not fit
Two exceptions worth handling.
Smart repair and PDR. Small, standardised, often priceable firmly from one photograph. Give those pages their own shorter form, two images, and quote a firm price.
Possible structural damage. If the wide shot suggests it, the reply should say so honestly and invite the car in. Do not try to hold that inside the standard flow.
10. Test it the way it will be used
Outdoors, on mobile data, on an old Android and a current iPhone, in bright sun, in the Facebook in-app browser. Submit a real job with four large photographs. Check the images are legible on the job record, not just that the email arrived.
Then break it: submit with two images, with a thirty-megabyte set, with a personalised plate, with the signal dropping halfway. Fix whatever fails quietly.
Where this sits
Our body shop websites ship with this form built, resized client-side and wired into your system, at a fixed price. The wider trade version is on the automotive page. Four photographs, one registration, a same-day figure. That is the whole advantage.