Historically, Parts and Accessory business development for an OEM has centered around end-of-quarter deals for the retail network. This often leads to a ‘boom and bust’ mentality across the quarter, with dealers having to cope with excess stock. In the meantime, the current OEM focus on Accessories per new car sold (APNCS), or Accessories per used car sold (APUCS) is creating new ways to grow parts and accessory sales.). These measures are becoming increasingly important in a dealer’s balanced scorecard but are often at the mercy of the types of vehicles sold within the manufacturer’s portfolio.
OEM’s struggle with the dichotomy between aftersales, where the accessory bonus resides, and the sales team who are tasked with selling the accessories. It’s hard to get engagement with the sales team as the commission on accessories sold is not sufficient to motivate them to sell. Instead, they tend to focus on higher-margin products like finance.
How to see more accessories online
At Autofinity we have developed a process that automatically uploads accessories onto a web platform such as Magento or Shopify. This removes the need to dedicate a person or time to managing accessory stock. We can take dealer inventory and populate to a dealer group’s web shop or take an entire network’s inventory and populate an OEM webshop.
We can also enhance accessory data through our patented taxonomy process. It ensures that the correct images are displayed, that the spelling and format of the description is correct and that the accessory is attributed to the correct model.
By utilising OEM pricing data on accessories, we can enhance dealer and OEM webshop inventory. We can also use OEM warehouse or Dealer Parts Department to fulfill an order and link it back to the selling dealer. This drives online sales.
Integrating supplier accessory data, reducing the Accessory or Parts Manager’s workload
As the manufacturer’s accessory portfolio grows over time, more suppliers are vying to link up with OEMs as a viable route to market. And, as new models are introduced, this increases the complexity of producing accessory catalogues and managing online portals and webshops. Our product can automate that process.
It takes supplier inventory or parts lists, and makes them consistent in format. You can then upload them to the platform of your choice. It simultaneously enhances and updates PDF catalogues for use by dealerships. This can be done dynamically and frequently with minimal manual intervention. In this way, OEMs can manage their own webshop or ensure that each dealer or dealer group has their own up to date accessory webshop.
Enhancing the new/used sales process
We’ve automated the management of accessory data, adding in prices, providing the function to alter labour rates to account for differences in dealer fitting costs. We can integrate with online selling portals for new and used vehicles, as well as within a dealership environment ensuring that accessories are always presented to the customer and therefore improve your APNCS/APUCS. Having the part number, description, image and fitted costs significantly improve the sales team’s chances of successfully up-selling accessories, so they can hit accessory bonuses.
Our technology is so much more than just managing, enhancing and improving the taxonomy of accessory data. Used correctly, it will increase sales of accessories and overcome the front of house inertia of presenting accessories for sale to the customer.