In the internet age, e-commerce is the key to success for more and more businesses. Customers are more likely to go online to gather information before making purchase decisions, as well as eventually purchasing the product. Car parts stores can take advantage of this by catering to the emerging demographic of online customers to increase their sales volume.
However, it is also true that managing an online car parts store is not an easy task. This can be particularly challenging for businesses that manage both online ecommerce as well as brick and mortar. Fortunately, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. There are several automotive parts software services that can greatly help improve not just the performance of your online store, but overall customer experience as well.
Challenges faced by car part store owners
For some car part store owners, managing an online store can be a technical or logistical nightmare fraught with challenges. Though each store owner might face a unique challenge, there are many shared challenges that they usually face, such as the following.
Car part organisation issues
Some car parts are really small and fragile, so it can be a really challenging endeavor to organise and store these parts. Furthermore, shipping car parts from your storage to the customers’ address might be a challenging issue, especially if the parts require special storage or maintenance.
Car part store owners have to pay special attention to the storage and shipping requirements of these car parts. Improper storage will lead to further degradation of the parts, which will negatively affect your sales and profitability.
Documentation
Car parts come with a vast amount of product information as well as fitment data. When you add a product into the system, you will have to add the relevant information as well. This can be a very difficult and time-consuming task, especially if you have a lot of unique part numbers to sell.
Furthermore, as human error is often inevitable, your team members might make mistakes that will lead to customers buying the wrong products. This can lead to even worse consequences in the future.
Fulfillment errors
When a car part store has to fulfill thousands of orders per day, mistakes are more likely to happen. These mistakes can occur during any step of the process, and they can potentially ruin your business reputation. The chance of errors occurring are increased even further if the store is not integrated with modern auto parts inventory software.
Excessive reliance on human input
Some store owners might be tempted to hire more employees to handle these issues for them, However, hiring more people means larger capital expenditure, as well as the overhead of having to manage a larger staff.
Furthermore, relying on more humans does not exactly solve the problem of human errors in management, in fact, it can increase them. The chance of errors is still high, especially if a team member is not an expert in the field.
Solutions provided by automotive parts software
Fortunately, you do not have to rely on human input all the time while managing your car parts store. The advent of technology has made available many new tools that help you to easily automate many processes, which greatly helps your business. Automotive parts software can significantly boost the efficiency and accessibility of your website.
Automotive parts software like PartsPal offers a central hub of management that allows car parts sellers to control various aspects of their websites. It allows them to seamlessly manage ecommerce platform sales channels from A to Z from a centralised and user-friendly control center.
The dashboard also includes online support that is within your reach, helping you to navigate through the system more effectively. Here is how managerial steps are streamlined with auto parts inventory software.
Better parts management
Automotive parts software can help you with the challenges you face in warehouse management. For example, the software allows you to manage multiple warehouses as well as sales channels in just one spot, a feature very important to owners of online stores with numerous different locations. Furthermore, this software allows you to easily make bulk changes to product information, speeding up many steps considerably.
When it comes to fitment data, the software helps you to navigate through this vast sea of information. It will link up your website to a trustworthy fitment database, and it will automatically update the data whenever there are changes in the database. This means that you and your team members will not have to manually update any data, saving you time and effort that you can use to improve other parts of your business.
Tools such as PartsPal also help you to integrate your storefront directly to platforms such as Shopify or eBay more easily, allowing you to jump into some of the best e-commerce platforms around the world. This software can even be integrated into a custom platform with ease.
Higher customer satisfaction
Website accessibility is a very important key to customer satisfaction. Customers will not feel satisfied if they have to navigate through a cluttered website with little useful information. By using automotive parts software, you can vastly improve the customer experience. This kind of software allows customers to search for the parts that fit their vehicle easily without having to call the shop assistant to find out about the fitment data.
The fact that fitment data for each product is automatically updated means that there will be far less room for human errors on your end, ensuring that the parts that customers buy will fit their vehicle. Therefore, there will be fewer disputes, and customers will end up being much happier with their buying experience.
Increased profits
Automotive parts software will not only help you streamline the management of your online store, but it can also increase your profits in other ways. As your team does not have to manually update fitment data or handle as much product information, they will have a lot of time for other aspects of the website and business, helping you to utilise their skills more effectively. Over time, having more features will steadily increase your profits.
With automotive parts software, you can also reduce the chance of customers demanding to return their bought products because of misfits. This will greatly reduce the losses you might have to face in case of too many returns.
Automotive parts software also manages important data that can be utilised for other purposes. For example, if you know which parts that fit your customers’ vehicle, the marketing team could utilise this data to send targeted ads or marketing emails, which greatly increase the chance of them making another purchase.
It may be daunting to start using auto parts software without help, but you are not alone. With PartsPal, it will be comparatively easier to manage any online car parts store. If you need a good tool for managing all aspects of your inventory, then PartsPal is a great choice for you.
