Automotive E-Commerce Challenges

When starting to build the perfect e-commerce site for your automotive aftermarket business there a number of important points to consider. As you already know, selling auto parts provides unique challenges that companies selling other goods don’t always face. Providing a big quality customer experience is always a priority, but online sales have another unique challenge – fitment. The most important piece of functionality for automotive industry sellers is ensuring the customer buys the part that fits their vehicle.

In today’s post about the challenges of building an automotive e-commerce website, we’ll dive deeper into fitment, and how to solve it, but we’ll also talk about other important considerations when building an automotive e-commerce website.

Fitment – ACES & PIES Data

Automotive parts present a unique challenge not seen by other retailers selling more standardized merchandise. When car buyers need to buy new parts or accessories for their vehicle, they are faced with a number of choices and challenges. The first decision point is rather to purchase an OEM part or a replacement part in the automotive aftermarket segment. From there, does a customer want to buy from a dealership or another distributor like an online retailer?

Once a customer decides to buy an aftermarket part using an online shopping experience, they are faced with the next challenge – ensuring the part fits their vehicle. Making sure your customer base is able to guarantee the part they are buying in your online store is a make or break experience for the customer. If your fitment data is incorrect and the customer gets the wrong part, everyone loses. Return rates will increase, customers will leave negative reviews, and issues will continue to spiral.

This problem is easily avoided by ensuring your are keeping up to date ACES and PIES data from distributors. Not sure what ACES and PIES are? Check out Strabo’s page decided to breaking down everything you need to know about ACES and PIES data. Once you have this data from your distributors, it is important to have a way to take all of this data in and feed it to you e-commerce platform. Looking for a solution to ingest this ACES and PIES data? Our industry leading automotive e-commerce Product Information Management (PIM) tool, Product Desk publishes all your PIES data and fitment to your e-commerce platform as well as other sales channels like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Product Desk comes with a specialized Year, Make, Model (and more) widget publishable to your e-commerce store making it easier for customers to find the car parts they are looking to buy.

Now that we’ve broken down some of the complexity around fitment, we are ready to discuss some of the other challenges a modern automotive aftermarket company faces when beginning their e-commerce sales journey.

Price Competition

While not unique to the automotive e-commerce industry, today’s aftermarket parts sellers face challenging competition when it comes to price. The automotive industry, like other industries, is seeing consolidation all throughout the market. This consolidation makes it harder for smaller brands with parts sales exclusively online to compete. Automotive businesses are going to have to sell on many marketplaces to ensure customers are able to find them.

While price competition may seem daunting, there are numerous ways to still be competitive in an era of pricing wars. One of the biggest things to remember is most manufacturers enforce at least some level of base pricing. Manufacturers will require distributors to have a minimum advertised price (MAP) on their site to ensure their brand isn’t being devalued. Enforcement of MAP pricing is taken seriously by manufacturers and search engines alike. If an e-commerce store is found out of compliance with MAP pricing and reported to Google, there is a strong chance the store will be penalized by Google and de-ranked.

Another important consideration when building out your e-commerce solution is how to handle customer service. If you can’t win on price, there are certainly other ways to win over customers and gain market share. Our next topic covers customer trust and marketplace visibility.

Building customer trust and visibility

In today’s online world, customer experience is everything. While it is possible to gain market share on price, if the user experience is poor, price will only take you so far. We’ve already talked about one of the most important parts of user experience earlier when we discussed fitment. There are still many other considerations and important factors when considering user experience. Customers want to know they have someone they can contact if they have issues with the car parts they’ve purchased or want to better understand a product before buying.

Existing brands have a head start when it comes to established customer service and trust levels with customers. It’s important, especially when starting out, to ensure you are keeping a professional level of customer service. Be it having an online presence through social media or just quick responses with customer inquiries, it is key when starting out to work on building trust with your user base. Be sure to have metrics and goals in mind from the start around response times, engagement rates, and more to build a strong presence!

Automotive Industry Supply Chain

Another headwind the automotive industry continues to deal with is supply chain troubles. During the pandemic, the automotive industry was hit especially hard when it comes to aftermarket parts manufacturing. New car prices skyrocketed, but consumer demand didn’t slow down. This is true for aftermarket parts as well. Throughout the pandemic we saw numerous automotive e-commerce companies we work with struggle to keep parts availability. Because of this, keeping a real-time inventory feed was and still is critical. Customers want to know when they land on your site they are able to receive their orders. Keeping a 100% accurate fulfillment rate should be a vital component of your business model and something you are always striving for.

Building a strong brand

If there is one common theme throughout many of the topics discussed above, it is branding. Building a strong brand is one of the biggest keys to success as you start to scale your business. The automotive e-commerce market is large; customers have a number of choices when looking to purchase car parts online. Your marketing strategy is going to be critical to your success. So you may be wondering what all goes into making a strong brand, let’s discuss.

As you bring your brand online, digital marketing is key. It isn’t just about getting to the top from an SEO perspective. That is definitely important, but market research indicates being omnichannel and having a strong social media presence is nearly as important. Maybe it’s making TikTok videos with your parts or a strong presence on Instagram. Current e-commerce trends show it is necessary to have a secondary source beyond search engine traffic to get buyers onto your store.

The Future of Automotive E-commerce

Here we’ve discussed some of the unique challenges around implementing an automotive e-commerce website. With all that being said, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about selling car parts online. Connectivity with customers only continues to grow and there is a general excitement in the automotive aftermarket around e-commerce right now. The industry is moving from an offline model to online rapidly. Strabo’s preferred e-commerce platform, BigCommerce, recently published a detailed report on how the automotive e-commerce industry is poised for growth. To learn more about how take your automotive aftermarket business online with us, get in touch. We’d love to be part of your digital transformation!