A Website for a Removals and Transport Company: Quoting Before the Phone Rings
The phone rings at half past seven in the evening. „Hello, how much would you charge to move some furniture from one flat to another?” You ask which floor, whether there is a lift, how many rooms, whether the wardrobe needs taking apart. You hear hesitation on the other end, because it had not occurred to the caller that any of this affects the price. It ends with „oh, just a normal flat”, you throw out a range based on instinct, and they say they will think about it. That was the third call like that tonight.
A removals firm has a different problem from a hairdresser or a plumber. When a tap is leaking, the hourly rate is known in advance. In your trade every job is different, and the customer cannot describe theirs, because they are moving house for the first time in their life. A website will not price the job for you, but it can gather the facts before you pick up the phone. Then the conversation starts with a number instead of an interrogation.
Your customer has no idea how many cubic metres they have
Ask an average person how much volume their flat adds up to and you will get silence. They also do not know how much their washing machine weighs, whether a van may pull up to the door of their block, or that taking three wardrobes apart and reassembling them is two extra hours for two people. That is not their fault. They book a move once every seven years.
Which is why a „describe your job” box in the contact form is the weakest option available to you. The customer types „move, 2 rooms, Bemowo, end of May” and hits send. You have to call back, ask six questions, they do not know the answer to three of them, and meanwhile two other firms have already replied. The website should be asking those questions, in a form the customer can actually answer: by ticking boxes, not by writing prose. The general shape of a site like this is something I covered in the piece on the website for a service business.
A quote form instead of a blank box
The form exists to extract what changes your price, and nothing beyond that. Every unnecessary field is one abandoned enquiry.
| Field | How to ask | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| From and to | two addresses or districts | mileage, traffic, city-centre access |
| Floor at both ends | dropdown, ground to tenth | the priciest factor after distance |
| Lift | yes, no, passenger only | a passenger lift takes a few items at a time |
| Size | number of rooms or square metres | volume and crew size |
| Dismantling | wardrobe, bed, kitchen, desk | hours of crew time |
| Awkward items | piano, safe, aquarium, appliances | kit, straps, a fourth pair of hands |
| Packing | I pack, send boxes, full service | materials and half a day |
| Date | a date or „I am flexible” | Friday, end of the month |
| Photos | attachment, a few files | the answers you forgot to ask for |
Photos change the most. Four pictures, living room, bedroom, kitchen and stairwell, and the quote stops being a guess: you can see whether the wardrobe is a three-door, whether the stairs have the kind of turn a sofa gets stuck on. So the form has to accept attachments, and the message has to land in your inbox straight away rather than in a panel you log into at the weekend. What actually breaks forms like this, I wrote up separately: the contact form that gets enquiries.
Split the services up, because each one is its own search
A single „Services” page with seven bullet points loses to a firm that gives each of those things a section of its own. This is not about word count. People type different phrases and expect different answers.
| Service | What the customer wants | What has to be written down |
|---|---|---|
| House and flat moves | „removals Warsaw price” | a price range, how many people turn up |
| Office moves | a weekend slot, a contract, an invoice | out-of-hours work, server room, archives |
| Single-item transport | „move a sofa”, „transport a washing machine” | minimum charge, whether you carry it upstairs |
| International runs | the country and the timing | routes, how often, groupage |
| Clearance and disposal | getting rid of old furniture | whether you take it and for how much |
| Storage | the gap between two completion dates | price per month, minimum term |
Every row is a different customer. Someone with one sofa from a classifieds site will not read a page about full-service relocations, and the reverse holds too, so if you handle both, say so in two separate places.
Service area: name the places, not „the whole country”
„We operate nationwide” sounds serious and means nothing. A customer in Wołomin learns nothing from that sentence about whether you will come out for free or with a travel surcharge, and Google has nothing to match against a local search.
Write it out: your base town, the districts, the surrounding municipalities, the radius you cover with no surcharge, the per-kilometre rate beyond it. For international work, give specifics: Germany twice a month, groupage loads to the Netherlands and Belgium. Sentences like these do double duty: they answer the customer and they hand the search engine the place names people actually type.
Insurance and a contract: proof you are not a van from an ad
Customers in this trade are afraid of one specific thing: that two people will turn up in an unmarked van, snap a leg off the dining table and vanish. The market is full of offers like that, so a firm with paperwork has an easy advantage, provided it writes the paperwork down.
Four pieces of information will do it: goods-in-transit insurance with the sum insured and what it covers, a written contract before the van leaves (without one, an office move will not get past the client’s accountant), an invoice for private customers too, and a settled crew rather than day labour hired off an ad. A firm that says nothing about this looks like a firm that has none of it.
Price ranges: silence costs you more than a low number
I understand the reluctance. Moving a studio flat with a lift and a house with a loft conversion and no lift are two different worlds, and a number pitched too low comes back as an argument beside the van. But a customer who finds no figure at all does not conclude that you are being careful. They conclude that you are expensive, and they click on.
The safe way looks like this: publish a starting rate for a crew and a van (two people, one van, up to three hours), your minimum job value, the rate for each additional hour, and the list of things that push the bill up: no lift, nowhere to park, dismantling, packing, a piano, the last weekend of the month. The customer gets a reference point and can see for themselves why their job might come out dearer. When prices on a website help and when they hurt, I weighed up here: should you publish prices on your website.
Dates, because half of all enquiries turn on one
Removals are seasonal down to the day: month ends, Fridays, July and September. A customer with a completion date of 30 August is not looking for the best firm in town. They are looking for a firm with a free van on 30 August.
One sentence somewhere visible does the job: „next free slots: from 12 October, weekends booked until November”. If updating that once a week is realistic, turn it into a small table of open dates. If it is not, say how much notice you need and that urgent jobs get taken when a van is free. Either beats silence, after which people ring you only to hear that August is gone.
How this works at our end
This is my own service, so read it with that in mind. With Sitario you fill in a form describing your company, tick the services, your area and the routes you run, and about an hour later you look at a finished site with copy, an enquiry form that takes attachments, your Google reviews and a map. You pay after seeing the preview. Don’t approve it and we refund you.
The Start plan is PLN 249 one-off, including the first year of hosting, the SSL certificate, backups and the editor. From year two, renewal is PLN 149. Enquiries from the form go to your email and are stored in the panel. Free dates, price ranges or a new route you edit yourself by clicking the text on the page. Once a week a short summary waits for you: how many people visited, what they searched for, how many enquiries came in. Market-wide figures for having a site built I gathered in the piece on how much a business website costs.
Who this is not for
If you drive exclusively on jobs from freight forwarders or a load exchange, your customers do not arrive from search. The platform and your rating history on it allocate the work, so a website is a business card for contractors rather than a sales channel.
If what you need is route planning, driver payroll and GPS fleet tracking, that is a different category of software and no website replaces it. And if you run one van, have a full book of word-of-mouth customers and will not take a single job more, a Google Business Profile covers you.
In short
A removals website has one job: to turn the „how much for some furniture” phone call into an enquiry with a floor number, a size, a date and four photos. The quote then takes five minutes instead of three conversations, and the customer hears back from you before anyone else.
Do one thing this week: write down everything you ask on the phone before you give a price. That list is your quote form, and the headings above it are the skeleton of your site.