What makes a good enquiry form

If you've ever filled in an auction house enquiry form, you'll know the format. Twelve required fields. A dropdown that demands you select a department before you've described what you're selling. A weird captcha. A submit button that looks like it was designed in 2008. Most regional house enquiry forms convert at 2 to 4%, meaning 96 to 98% of motivated sellers walk away.

The forms aren't bad because the people who built them were bad. They're bad because they were built once, five years ago, by whoever the website agency happened to be using, and nobody has touched them since. They were never optimised. They were never tested.

We've looked at the enquiry forms of around forty UK auction houses. The patterns are remarkably consistent, and almost all of them work against the seller. Below is what we've learned makes a form actually convert.

Ask only what you absolutely need

The single biggest predictor of form abandonment is field count. Every required field after the third one drops conversion by roughly 5%. By the time you've asked for postcode, phone number, preferred contact time, how they heard about you, and whether they've sold at auction before, you've halved your submissions.

What does an auction house actually need to start a conversation? Name. Email. A description of the item. One or two photos. Everything else is nice to have. Postcode helps you assess feasibility, but you can ask in your reply. Phone number is useful, but a third of sellers won't give it on a first contact, and you're losing them all to that field.

Make the must-haves required. Make everything else optional, and put it below the fold so it doesn't intimidate.

Mobile-first or you're losing 60%

Sixty percent of enquiry submissions come from a phone. Often the seller is standing in their dining room, taking a photo of grandma's tea set with one hand while typing with the other. If your form requires desktop, demands two-factor authentication, doesn't support pinch-to-zoom, or breaks on Safari mobile, you're losing them at the door.

The test is simple. Open your enquiry form on a five-year-old Android phone with patchy WiFi. Try to submit a real enquiry with two photos. If anything frustrates you, your sellers are leaving.

Photo upload that doesn't fight the seller

Photos are the highest-value piece of any enquiry. A specialist can give a meaningful indicative valuation with three good photos. They can't give one with a paragraph of description. So the photo upload is the most important part of the form, and it's the part most houses get wrong.

Three things matter:

• Take a photo right from the form on mobile. Don't make sellers leave the page to get to their camera roll. Modern HTML lets you trigger the camera directly. Use it.
• Multiple files, drag and drop on desktop. Sellers want to send four photos at once, not one at a time. They want to drop them in.
• Auto-rotate phone photos. Photos taken on phones come in with EXIF orientation that lots of forms don't handle, leading to the famously upside-down brooch. Test it.

And accept large files. Modern phone photos are 5 to 8 megabytes. If your form rejects anything over 2MB, you're telling sellers to compress their photos before submitting. They won't. They'll go elsewhere.

Match the brand, not the SaaS template

Generic-looking forms feel cheap. A jewellery house's enquiry form should not look like the same Stripe-coloured rectangle as a fast-food chain's contact page. It should feel like part of the house. Same fonts. Same colour palette. Same energy.

This is partly aesthetic and partly trust. Sellers are about to potentially give you a £20,000 item to sell. The form is a small thing, but it signals the larger thing. A polished form suggests a polished house. A generic form suggests an indifferent operation.

Show response time

One of the highest-impact additions you can make is a small line above or below the form that says: "Our specialists typically respond within four hours." This single sentence does more for conversion than almost any other change.

It works on two levels. First, it sets an expectation. Sellers who are deciding between submitting an enquiry to your house or going to bed will submit if they trust they'll hear back quickly. Second, it commits you. The line is on your website. Specialists know the standard. The pressure is healthy.

Don't put it up if you can't hit it. But if you can, put it everywhere.

Dropdown options should be your departments, not a generic list

Most enquiry forms have a single dropdown labelled "Item Type" with the same fifteen options every other house uses. Furniture. Jewellery. Watches. Paintings. The list is generic, exhausting, and almost always wrong for the specific item the seller has.

A better approach: make the dropdown match your departments. If you have a strong Asian Works of Art specialist, put that high in the list. If you don't do coins and stamps, don't list them. The dropdown should be a guided tour of what your house does, which is also a soft sales tool.

Better still: make "I'm not sure" a valid option, and route those to your most senior triage person. The seller who isn't sure is often the best lead. They have something interesting and unusual and they know they don't know its category.

Don't make sellers create accounts

Some houses try to make sellers register before submitting an enquiry. Don't. Account creation kills conversion. The seller hasn't decided to work with you yet. They're shopping around. Asking for a password and email confirmation is the surest way to send them to the next house in the search results.

If you want them in your CRM, capture them through the enquiry submission and add them automatically.

Confirmation matters

The screen the seller sees after they hit submit is your one chance to set the tone. Most forms show a generic "Thanks, we'll be in touch" message. Don't. Show them:

• A clear acknowledgement that you've received it
• What happens next (e.g. "A specialist from our [department] team will be in touch within four hours")
• The name or photo of the specialist who's likely to handle it, if you can
• A way to reach you faster if they have questions

Send a confirmation email immediately. Sellers expect one and feel uneasy when they don't get one. The email should match the on-screen confirmation in tone.

Test it monthly

Enquiry forms break. Browsers update. Image upload libraries change. The form that worked last year might be silently dropping every third submission today. Once a month, submit a real test enquiry from a real device and confirm you got it.

Better still: have someone outside the company do it. Their fresh eyes will spot what insiders miss.

The return on a good form

An enquiry form is one of the most leveraged surfaces in the whole house. Specialists, marketing, the saleroom: it all flows from there. A 5% conversion improvement on a form that gets 3,000 submissions a year is 150 extra enquiries. If 30% of those become consignments and the average lot hammers at £800, that's £36,000 in fees from a few hours of form work.

Most houses spend more time choosing a chair for the front desk than they do on their enquiry form. It's worth getting right.