If you are considering selling auto parts online, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start. The key to success is knowing what you’re looking for in an eCommerce site. Before you get caught up in the whirlwind of vendors, sit down and answer these three questions:
- What’s your competitive advantage?
- What’s your marketing strategy?
- How well do you know your costs?
These questions will help you better understand the finer details of the parts site you want to build, and this will allow you to easily find the parts eCommerce solution that has exactly what you need.
What’s Your Competitive Advantage?
First, ask yourself what your parts department has that others don’t. What, specifically, makes your department the best?
In our experience, these are some of the most popular ways to approach and answer this question:
• Lowest price
• Best service
• No hassle return policy
• Free shipping or free second day shipping
If you’re having difficulty deciding, remember–you can have multiple competitive advantages. And, in fact, combining several differentiators generates a powerful value proposition for your customers and gives your dealership the edge.
What’s Your Marketing Strategy?
How do you plan on marketing your eCommerce parts site? It’s important that you understand one thing before selling parts online: if you build it, they will not come. As with most things online, it takes effort to drive traffic to your parts website and get online shoppers to know you exist. These are the top marketing tactics you can use to drive traffic to your site:
1. Pay Per Click
Pay per click is a fast approach to generating traffic, and is exactly what it sounds like–paying every time a customer clicks on your online advertisement.A lot of the time, this means Google Shopping campaigns or Google Search campaigns, which can help you reach customers when they’re actively looking to buy.
2. Social Media (including popular forums)
Social media and popular forums can provide excellent leads and help you build a brand connection with the community, and banner ads help increase your visibility online.
3. Banner ads
Banner ads are great at catching the attention of your customers.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO provides some of the best traffic, so when you’re looking for an eCommerce solution for your online parts business, make sure your choice takes SEO best practices into consideration.
Funding your Marketing Strategy
You’ll need to work with your General Manager to get funds set aside specifically for marketing the parts site, no matter which method you decide to focus on. Without a dedicated marketing push, it will be tough for online shoppers to discover your site.
Start with a small budget for Google shopping campaigns which have some of the lowest costs and highest conversion rates. Prove to your GM that you can deliver a positive ROI and then you can increase your budget and pour gasoline on the fire to rapidly grow your online parts revenue.
If on the other hand, you have no marketing budget, no staff at your dealership to help you with marketing and no time, then building a parts website that competes nationally is probably not the best move for you.
You could instead start off by replacing the parts request form on your existing website with an online parts and accessories catalog that makes it easier for your customers to find the part they need and request it. If a customer doesn’t know the part number then they will have to go research that elsewhere and will most likely never come back to your site and complete the form. Adding a parts catalog is an effortless way to recapture dollars that otherwise would be spent on a competitor’s site.
How Well Do You Know Your Costs?
By now, we’ve talked about figuring out what makes your site stand out from the other parts sites, and ways to get customers to notice your competitive advantage.
However, making money is the real goal here. This means that you need to keep a close eye on costs. If you don’t, your marketing techniques won’t matter, because you’ll be operating at a loss.
For example, let’s assume you make a 12-15% margin and you sell a $50 part. This means on a good day, you would make $7.50 from that sale.
Unfortunately, there are two big ways that this profit could quickly become a loss:
- The cost of the part has actually risen since the last time you imported it into your system.
- You overpay for shipping.
It is all too common for that $50 part in your DMS to suddenly cost $55 a week later. And if you don’t keep an eye on these prices, you could find yourself taking a $5 hit on an already thin margin.
The good news is that out-of-date prices can easily be avoided with regular system updates. This process can even be fully automated on many eCommerce sites, which will guarantee that your prices are always accurate.
Make sure this update doesn’t require manually inputting price changes. If you have a manual system, your prices are guaranteed to be inaccurate most of the time.
Another way to easily lose money is by paying too much for shipping.
Let’s look at that $50 sale again as an example. Your system billed the customer $50, and your staff loosely estimated a $3 shipping cost, which brought the total to $53. This estimation is fine if shipping cost you less than $3. If not, your margin just took another hit
In many cases, seemingly small things like this can be the difference between steadily making money or quickly losing it. RevolutionParts has accurate weights and dimensions for parts so you can make better shipping estimates and maintain profitability.
The Bottom Line on a Parts eCommerce Site
Adding a parts eCommerce site to your existing web presence can be highly profitable. Before pulling the trigger, you need to make sure you have a solid plan that:
- Sets you apart from the pack
- Drives traffic to your site
- Ensures you maintain an acceptable margin
If you have all three set, you can now decide which features you need in a parts eCommerce vendor. Knowing the foundation of your parts store will make your process of selection significantly easier. And now, you won’t be distracted by a ton of features you’ll never use–instead, you can find a solution that meets your particular needs, and walk away happy.
