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What your shop needs before it can text customers

US carriers no longer let a business text from a regular phone number without registering first — the system is called A2P 10DLC, and every software vendor that sends texts for you has to put your shop through it. The registration itself is paperwork we handle. What decides whether it sails through in days or drags on for weeks is whether your shop has four things ready.

Why registration exists at all

Carriers got buried in spam sent from ordinary local numbers, so they now split traffic in two: registered business texting, which gets delivered, and unregistered business texting, which gets filtered, throttled, or silently dropped. Registration is how your shop's number gets on the right side of that line. It ties the number to a real, verifiable business — which is why everything below is about proving your shop is exactly who it says it is.

There's no way around it and no vendor who can skip it. Anyone who says otherwise is sending your texts through a side door that the carriers are actively closing.

1. Your EIN, and the name that matches it

Registration starts with your federal tax ID. The reviewers check the legal name you submit against the IRS record — character for character. "Smith's 4x4 LLC" fails if the IRS letter says "Smiths Four By Four, LLC." Pull your EIN confirmation letter (the CP 575, or a 147C replacement the IRS will fax you if the original is long gone) and copy the name from it exactly.

A name mismatch is the single most common reason a shop's registration bounces. Every bounce costs a correction and a fresh review round, and that — not any slow approver — is how a one-week process turns into a month.

Operating as a sole proprietor without an EIN? A limited registration path exists for that, but it caps how much you can send and it verifies against your personal details instead. It works for a one-bay shop getting started; plan on the EIN route as the real answer.

2. Email on your own domain

The contact email you register should live at your shop's domain — owner@yourshop.com, not a free gmail.com or yahoo.com address. Reviewers read a free mail address as a business they can't verify, and it's a quiet, recurring cause of rejections.

If the shop has a domain but no mailboxes on it, your registrar or Google Workspace can fix that in an afternoon, and it's worth doing for reasons beyond texting — it's the same credibility signal on every quote and invoice you send.

3. A live website with a privacy policy

The reviewers visit the website you register. It needs to:

• Actually load, and look like your actual shop — a parked domain or a "coming soon" page reads as a fake business.
• Show the business name you registered, or close enough that a human reviewer connects them.
• Link a privacy policy that covers texting. Specifically, carriers want it stated that phone numbers collected for texting are not shared with or sold to third parties for marketing. A policy that's silent on this — or worse, reserves the right to share data — gets the campaign rejected.
• Have a terms-of-service page. It can be short; it has to exist.

A one-page site is fine. A Facebook page instead of a website is not — the reviewers want a domain that matches the business and the email from step 2.

4. How customers opt in — and out

Registration asks you to describe how a customer ends up getting texts from your shop. For a shop, the honest answers are the right ones: they give you their number at the counter, it goes on the work order, or they fill out a form on your site. Write it down plainly; made-up marketing-funnel language reads worse than the truth.

The other half is opt-out: a customer who replies STOP stops getting messages, full stop. That's a carrier rule, it's enforced at the network level, and your texting provider is required to honor it. Nothing for you to build — just don't fight it when a customer uses it.

How long it really takes

• Best case: everything above matches — EIN, name, domain, website, policy — and the whole thing clears in about a week, sometimes just a day or two. The business verification itself is often same-day when the name matches the IRS record.
• Worst case: something doesn't match, the registration bounces, and each correction triggers a new review round. Shops with a name mismatch plus a thin website can wait three to six weeks. Almost all of that time is avoidable — it buys nothing to submit early with mismatched details.

Where UpfitOS fits

Texting isn't an add-on module in UpfitOS — the unified inbox is the product, so getting your shop registered is part of onboarding, not an extra project. We file the registration with you, using the four things above, and your shop gets its own local number that your customers will come to recognize. Your job is the checklist on this page; ours is everything after it.

Not sure whether your EIN letter, website, or policy will pass? Email support@upfitos.com — a person will look at what you have and tell you what's missing before anything gets submitted.