Car shipping quotes in about a minute
The challenge they faced
An auto transport company was quoting every shipment by hand. People who want to ship a car expect a price right away, and waiting on a sales rep meant losing them to competitors who could answer instantly.
A simple price per mile wouldn’t work, either. Shipping costs depend on where the trip starts, how far it goes, the size of the vehicle and how hard the pickup and drop-off are to reach, and the going rate moves with the carrier market every day. Whatever replaced manual quoting had to be accurate, and the team had to be able to keep it accurate on its own.
The strategy we mapped
Accuracy came first. Rather than guess at a formula, we gathered a controlled set of real market quotes across regions, distances and vehicle sizes, then set rates that reproduce that market.
The result is a pricing model with eight regions of the country and six distance bands, adjusted for vehicle size, with floors and surcharges on top. Because the market keeps moving, every rate was built to be editable by the client’s team without a developer. We also kept the CRM clean by creating deals only when a customer chooses to book, not for every price check.
The solutions we executed
A quote form that does the work. A multi-step HubSpot form on the website autocompletes real addresses, calculates the driving distance in the background and pulls year, make, model and body type from a live vehicle database, saving every answer to the contact record.
A pricing engine the team controls. A custom WordPress plugin prices each trip by region, distance band and vehicle size, applies minimum prices and add-ons like inoperable vehicles or rush pickup, and adds surcharges for more than 5,000 hard-to-service ZIP codes and for seasonal routes. Every rate is edited on one settings screen.
An instant price, then a deal. The customer sees the full price with a breakdown of the route, vehicle and surcharges. Clicking Book Now creates a deal and a quote in HubSpot from their exact selections and routes it to the right sales rep.
Handoff documentation. We documented how to edit pricing, test changes on a staging page and maintain the tool, with ten test routes that confirm prices after any change.
See it in action.
Click through a working version of what we built — the same flow the client's customers use.
What changed after the engagement.
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