Getting a car live

Cars are created in your partner account on the Zuruflex website. That is also where the registration, insurance and roadworthiness certificates are filed against the car, and those are documents you scan sitting at a desk rather than in a yard.

The app is for the car once it exists: finishing the photographs, setting it live, taking it down, and running the hires. A car you add on the website appears on the phone without anything else being done.

Your account has to be approved before any car of yours can be submitted at all — the API refuses the submission outright. If yours is not yet, start with verification and paperwork.

A listing cannot go live without all three of these. Between them they cover all four sides of the car and what the driver sees, which is the least somebody needs to choose one car over another.

Seats, boot, a feature worth naming, the odometer and any damage already on the car are all accepted and none of them hold the listing up. The damage shots are the ones that pay for themselves: a mark photographed before the car ever went out is a mark nobody argues about later.

Deleting a photograph that takes the car back below the three compulsory kinds pulls a live listing down to draft on the spot. That is deliberate — it goes back up with the replacement rather than staying live with a gap — so replace before you delete when you can.

A daily rate above zero is the other half of the gate: a listing without one cannot be quoted, so it cannot be published.

If the car is offered with a driver, the driver’s daily rate has to be set too. For a car that is only ever let with a driver that figure is part of the advertised price, so a listing missing it would be advertising the wrong number.

The deposit is set per car and is optional. It is quoted to the renter as its own line rather than folded into the daily rate, and it is not part of what you earn — see the payouts page.

Three documents belong to the car itself rather than to your account: the vehicle registration, the insurance certificate and the roadworthy certificate. Each one is filed with an expiry date — the API will not accept those three without one — and an expired certificate counts as a missing one.

The automatic gate on publishing is the photographs and the rates. The documents are what the review looks at, and a car submitted without them will not come back published. Filing them first saves you the round trip.

Submitting puts the car in review. Zuruflex either publishes it or sends it back with a note saying what to fix — a rejection cannot be recorded without one, so there is always a reason to read.

Published is not quite the same as visible. A car reaches customers when it is published and your account is in good standing — and a suspension does more than hide the fleet. Every car of yours that was live is written down to unlisted in the same moment, and lifting the suspension does not put them back up: you relist them yourself, one at a time, and a car that has been live before goes straight back to live.

Edits a customer would notice: make, model, year, plate, class, transmission, fuel, seats, doors, the daily rate, the deposit, the driver policy, the driver rate, the description and the pick-up point. Change any of those on a published car and it returns to the queue.

Photographs and the calendar do not. Blocking dates, adding pictures and taking bookings all happen on a live listing without interrupting it.

Taking a car down is reversible and cheap. One that has been live before goes straight back to live when you put it up again, provided it still clears the bar; one that has never been live joins the review queue for the first time.