Brands and manufacturers new to auto parts marketplaces
Many OEs and OEMs distributing auto parts are rightly concerned about controlling their brand on online channels. Perhaps they already see their brands being sold by other sellers and don’t like what they see. After all, other sellers may offer a host of different competing brands and individual brand values might be a good way down their list, behind revenue. Brands also worry about the erosion of their existing channels’ revenues and relationships if they start selling on marketplaces.
More consumers and business buyers went online in 2020 than ever before. At the same time, brands want to have a closer connection with the end user, but their level of understanding of how marketplaces work and how consumers interact with their brands is lacking compared to their experience of the traditional business-to-business routes to market. They generally don’t have the infrastructure and expertise to cope with ‘B2C’ or ‘D2C’ – direct to consumer – since their business model is ‘B2B’.
Online marketplaces are proven to drive incremental revenue for brands, from end customers who are happy to pay even a slight premium to transact directly from the brands their know and trust. Marketplaces are the gateway to these new groups of qualified customers, and marketplaces do the work driving very large numbers of qualified buyers to your brand.
We understand how each major marketplace works and how they are laser-focused on delivering an ideal consumer experience so that buyers keep coming back. We can manage your brand and reputation for the entire buying and after-sale cycle. We can get your auto parts and accessory listings correctly configured and promoted for the way marketplace buyers will search for and invest in your products. We’ll provide the infrastructure to manage a virtually limitless number of SKUs, listings, orders and shipments.
Distributors and resellers new to auto parts marketplaces
Distributor and resellers often stock a range of auto parts brands. They have established business-to-business relationships and access to large amount of inventory. This gives them the ability to buy in bulk and at the best price with their superior buying power. Because of their expertise in the market and experience selling multiple brands, distributors and resellers know what sells and often offer their own white label versions in addition to the more recognised brands.
Multiple online channels like marketplaces have become established in the last few years, and with the 2020 pandemic the move online has accelerated markedly. These ‘new’ channels present many distributors with conflict around their existing routes to market, but that needn’t be the case. At the same time, there is an understanding gap when it comes to the array of potential marketplaces, how they work and more importantly how the end customers behave.
Established marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, as well as up and coming marketplaces like OnBuy are idea places for distributors and resellers to sell. The come with a ready-made and vast customer base, with eBay for example serving over 14m unique buyers per month in automotive alone. Your access to a large pool of inventory means that you can easily and profitably serve the ‘long tail’ of consumers and hobbyists searching for the auto parts you stock. It’s been proven that these online channels drive incremental revenues that don’t tread on your existing routes to market because you’re accessing a different group of buyers.
We’re used to working with the aftermarket industry to advise on the right marketplaces to be on and how to optimise your products for the way marketplace buyers buy. We’ll do the work too, getting you connected to the marketplaces and setting up your listings to best win new customers. We’re the back office for 5 industry automotive data cataloguing systems and we’re comfortable with thousands of part numbers and millions of SKUs. What’s more, our systems have been road tested for handling these SKU volumes and processing heavy order numbers with sellers who have gone before. If need be, our system will also play nice with your existing systems.
Brands, distributors and resellers already on marketplaces
Many companies in the aftermarket space have already made the move to ecommerce. They’ve typically started with a web store or tried a single marketplace and grown slowly and steadily, their organic progress limited by the resources at their disposal and how fast they can gain the experience to be successful. The seismic events of 2020 have meant that they had a degree of protection against the sudden loss of the established routes to market.
The growing pains that come from starting out with heavily manual processes can be considerable, and existing sellers often find that when they sell more online they also layer on additional costs. This prompts the desire to move to more automated ways of doing business and reducing the operational overheads. These companies frequently have much more inventory to list but don’t have the resource or capabilities to do this efficiently and with an attention to quality and detail that is required to be successful. Expanding into other auto parts marketplaces, channels and countries is also desirable, but the same resource and expertise barriers present themselves. Perhaps also they’ve outgrown their current ecommerce software system and need to upgrade.
Marketplace sellers of auto parts live or die by their seller ratings and the high consumer-driven standards that marketplaces set. Being on a number of marketplaces gives you more resilience, since an over-reliance on one marketplace or web store leaves you exposed if you get into difficulties there, or are suspended. The trick is to be on the right marketplaces and understanding not only how each of them operate but also what performance criteria determine seller ratings.
At ecommotors, we specialise in providing a full technology-and-services solution for profitably growing your business across multiple marketplaces. We’re experts in taking all of your auto parts product lines online, optimising the data for maximum sales success and automatically pushing out listing and stock level updates across all your channels simultaneously. You’ll get instant order updates and you can take care of the pick-pack-ship yourselves or one of our logistics partners can do that for you. Our systems can handle millions of SKUs per customer and very high order throughput. We’ll manage the integration to your other systems and design the automation of various data flows to dramatically reduce the amount manual effort on your part.