A Guide to "Making it" in the Automotive eCommerce Market

or eCommerce automotive parts and accessory companies, the past few months have probably hit your bottom line... hard. If you rely on Amazon FBA, your shipping times are 10x’d, 3PLs are limiting their offerings, and sales are on a decline during what has always been "peak" season for the industry.

We were all ready to go for 2020, and excited by reports that predicted the automotive eCommerce market, especially the aftermarket industry, was expected to skyrocket in the next 5-10 years. Driven by a general reliance on online shopping and an increasing number of websites enticing consumers toward eCommerce, the automotive industry was poised to reap the rewards of online shopping. Good bye junkyards, hello eBay.

The story is the same for almost everyone - it doesn’t matter if you’re selling your own branded accessories or managing millions of dollars in aftermarket parts every day, your sales are almost certainly down as COVID-19 continues to disrupt the world and our economies.

But hang on! This too shall pass.

eCommerce has seen a spike across every category this year. When the economy picks up and non-essential spending starts to unfreeze, consumers will continue to look to online shopping for the answers to their casual, professional or hobbyist automotive needs. But not every seller will win. Those who do will up their game by offering customers high-quality listings, accurate fitment data, and speedy delivery.

Is your business ready? After working with automotive sellers across the globe, here are a few things we learned about how to “make it” in the industry.

Rich, high-quality listings

• SEO-optimized listings are critical for eCommerce sellers, regardless of platform or industry. But it’s not only critical that listings are RICH, but also that they are consistent, up-to-date, and easily digestible. Much of this relies on accurate, diverse keyword searches that allow you to appear higher in search results for multiple queries. Keyword data can be found in Amazon Market Services and Google AdWords, but there are also great tools to give you an extra boost.

Stay Compliant 

• While Amazon is by far the most notorious for their rapidly changing policies, selling on any 3rd party marketplace requires that you stay up-to-date on policy changes that impact your listings. These not only include changes on the exact text you can use within the listing, but that you are also compliant with copyrights and MAP pricing. For example, while you can sell a tow hitch for a Ford Truck, it can no longer be listed as a Ford Truck tow hitch unless you are a private label seller.

Fitment data

• After spending the last 7 years working with automotive sellers of all shapes and sizes we have learned one very important lesson: fitment data is by and large terrible. Most companies are relying on distributor fitment data, which was copied or translated from multiple manufacturer sources, which was based on the original OEM data. It can feel like a poorly executed game of telephone. By the time most sellers get fitment data, it can be riddled with errors and inaccuracies and sometimes, flat-out wrong. Bad fitment on marketplace listings leads to loss of sales and increased returns. We can't emphasize it enough: getting quality fitment data requires careful planning, mapping, and conversions.
  

Accurate ASIN Matching (for Amazon)

• Speaking of bad data, those of you who have been selling multiple brands for more than 5 minutes have probably discovered the challenges of bad UPC/EAN/ASIN matches. One common result of "garbage data" is what we call a bad egg listing (just ask us about the bounce house that was listed as a tow hitch). In the best case scenario, you’ll probably have to spend a few hours a week of manual work to ensure your inventory data is mapped to the correct Amazon ASIN. In the worst case scenario, you end up selling the wrong product and become the subject of a future FeedStation blog.
  

Order & Inventory Management

• Many automotive sellers built their companies on their ability to leverage a large volume of distributors. Companies like Turn14, Keystone, Meyer, and others provide sellers access to millions of products and drop-shipping services. The challenge, however, comes with managing dozens or hundreds of different data sets to ensure inventory is accurate, pricing is right, and orders get placed, fulfilled, and reviewed. As your workflows expand and you begin selling across channels, you need to be more diligent than ever to ensure you are constantly pulling and updating inventory from every distributor at least 3x a day, and constantly monitoring when orders are placed and shipped. At the end of the day, if an order is delayed this is YOUR responsibility as the seller to resolve this issue and its YOUR seller account that is on the line.

Repricing and “Winning the Buy Box”

• The more your listings straddle the commodity market, the more you need to understand your repricing and buybox strategy. While “winning the buy box” is an entire conversation within itself, you need to understand how this impacts your listing. Repricing, however, is critical for every company in the automotive industry. This can be done manually by adjusting your price within seller central, or automated with popular repricing tools. 
  

You’ve got this. The challenges of the day will present opportunities tomorrow, but you need to start preparing now.

Need some help? FeedStation's advanced technology helps growing sellers automate existing processes and centrally manage your entire eCommerce business - without requiring you to change a thing.