- PiHUB set to boost ecommerce accessories business for retailers
- Cambria Automobiles, Chorley Group and Ancaster first official partnerships now live with the platform
- PiHUB facilitates ecommerce accessories for Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin, Nissan and Kia brands with other brands in development.
Cambria Automobiles and Ancaster are now live with Autofinity’s revolutionary automated parts and accessories ecommerce platform PiHUB.
Launching with Jaguar and Land Rover accessories through its Grange dealer brand, Cambria initially piloted PiHUB. The platform now powers its ecommerce accessories strategy for its JLR businesses and wider roll-out is underway across the group including Aston Martin and a leading motorcycle brand.
Cambria’s roll-out follows a five-fold increase in JLR accessories sold in the first month of the system’s operation with an average transaction value of £560.
Ancaster, which represents six brands at 12 locations in south and west London, Surrey, Kent and Berkshire, have launched PiHUB for its Nissan brand. Already, the average transaction for Nissan stands at an impressive £367.
Autofinity’s PiHUB solution automates online accessories retailing with only picking, packing and posting requiring manual intervention from dealership staff. The platform collates and uploads OEM accessories and parts data and integrates with marketplaces including Amazon, eBay and Shopify as well as the group’s own website.
It means a brand’s full range of accessories, obsolete lines and fast-moving service parts can be marketed online whereas previously just a small selection could be marketed due to time consuming manual input requirements. Where PiHUB is in operation, on average 5% of obsolete parts listed have sold each month.
A dynamic dataset ensures details including prices and parts numbers are automatically updated dramatically reducing the time to market for accessories and making the online customer purchase journey simple. Correct postage costs are calculated with integrations with other systems ensuring accurate pricing.
For Cambria, previously, only around a quarter of Jaguar Land Rover accessories were sold online due to manual uploading of items, descriptions, pricing and images whilst inconsistencies were caused by data inaccuracies which meant wrong prices eroded margins.
Now the complete range of JLR accessories, around 1,200 items, are available online for sale with a completely automated process. The project has since been rolled out to Kia and Aston Martin with other brands to follow suit.
Parts commercial lead and business analyst William Hornsey, who has led the development of PiHUB, said: “Our platform provides an ecommerce solution for the successful and widespread online retailing of accessories, the likes of which most dealer groups have been unable to attain due to the manual requirements of doing so and data inaccuracies.
“Time spent on parts administration is reduced to zero, therefore allowing marketing teams to focus on building impactful campaign initiatives to drive customers to its website. It has transformed the accessories businesses of the groups we have partnered and we are currently working with several other groups as the platform gains traction and the impact on profits is realised.”
The accessories ecommerce solution can integrate with any current ecommerce store such as the Shopify platform.