Aptavo

Removals is a market built on a phone-call. And four wildly different quotes.

The UK removal industry runs on word-of-mouth, paper invoices, and three-line emails. A homeowner moving from Manchester to Bristol calls four firms, gets four wildly different quotes, and books the cheapest, often a single van with no insurance, no deposit protection, and no recourse when the family piano arrives in two pieces.

Aptavo's brief was to bring that market online without flattening it. Pricing must reflect distance, volume, and timing in real time. Providers must compete on more than price, so we built Bronze · Silver · Gold tiers tied to verified insurance, fleet size, and review history.

Every booking takes a 14% upfront deposit via Stripe, ringfenced until the move completes, the move-day equivalent of escrow. The deposit isn't punishment; it's the leverage that gets both parties to the table within 48 hours when something goes wrong.

The first job is to feel safer than four phone calls.

The landing page leads with the quote engine, not a hero photo. Three fields, origin postcode, destination postcode, move date, return a price in under a second, fed by a model trained on ~12,000 historical quotes the founding team imported from their previous brokerage.

Below the fold: how the deposit works, what the tiers mean, and a strip of verified provider badges. The page is built to convert before the user has spoken to anyone.

A profile that earns the booking, not a payment that buys a badge.

Provider profiles are the conversion screen. The hero strip carries the firm's logo, tier badge (Bronze/Silver/Gold, earned, not paid for), insurance status, and average response time. Beneath: fleet photos, verified reviews with move-type tags, service area map, and a transparent pricing summary.

The Gold tier requires £1M public-liability cover, a fleet of 3+ vans, 50+ verified reviews, and 4.7+ average. Tier upgrades trigger admin verification, not a payment, so the badge means something.

List the job, read the bids, take the deposit.

From the homeowner's quote, a job listing opens to all eligible providers in the catchment, filtered by tier, distance, and date availability. Providers respond with a fixed bid (no haggling, no surprise charges); the homeowner sees responses ranked by tier first, price second.

Accepting a bid triggers Stripe to capture the 14% deposit and lock the booking. From that moment, both parties have skin in the game, the move-day equivalent of escrow, held until completion.

Disputes don't reach Trustpilot first.

Most removals platforms outsource disputes to small-claims court. Aptavo doesn't. The admin desk surfaces every flagged booking, late arrivals, damage claims, no-shows, with the full chat thread, deposit status, and tier history of both parties on one screen.

Admin can refund partially, escalate to insurance, or release the deposit with a click. The 14% deposit isn't punishment, it's the leverage that gets both parties to the table within 48 hours.