Autofinity’s PiHUB parts platform drives online accessories business
Autofinity has recently launched a pilot with an AM100 Top 50 dealer group to radically improve their existing accessories ecommerce platform.
The pilot initially launched with Jaguar and Land Rover accessories and we are now working on adding other brands.
The group wanted to boost dealer profits by upselling accessories with minimal intervention from staff. Previously, only around a quarter of Jaguar Land Rover accessories were sold online due to manual uploading of items, descriptions, pricing and images as well as inconsistencies caused by data inaccuracies which meant wrong prices eroded margins.
Now the complete range of JLR accessories, around 3,000 items, are available online for sale with a completely automated process.
Autofinity’s Parts commercial lead, William Hornsey, who has managed the pilot project, said: “The dealer group’s ambitions to drive more accessories sales were hampered by issues with data, which resulted in wrong pricing advertised online, manual product updates, which often led to errors, incorrect images and descriptions which were not detailed enough to generate sales. There were also problems around inaccurate postage and delivery costs for items.
“PiHUB has taken away the manual tasks and automated the process and now drives the group’s eCommerce accessories website for the JLR brand. The plan is to roll out the system to all its brands to create a group-wide ecommerce strategy for accessories on a scale which was never before possible due to the level of manual parts data intervention and aggregation required.”
A dynamic dataset ensures details including prices and parts numbers are automatically updated dramatically reducing the time to market for accessories, making the online customer purchase journey simple and fulfilment for the dealership team straightforward. Problems surrounding correct postage costs have been overcome with integrations with other systems providing accurate prices.
Hornsey added: “Time spent on parts administration is reduced to zero, therefore allowing the marketing team to focus all its energies on building impactful accessory marketing initiatives. It has transformed their accessories business and we are very excited to see their results as their ecommerce strategy gathers pace.
“PiHUB has created new routes to market and the volume of accessories which can now be sold online is equal to the number of accessories made available by the OEM including those which would not normally be promoted due to historic low sales volumes.”
Despite only just going live, Autofinity is already evolving the system and has incorporated updates such as larger images and utilising the extensive data set to add the part number to the description to assist with SEO rankings.
The dealer group is now gradually incorporating the online accessories channel into its wider marketing communications such as contacting customers who have recently taken delivery of a new Jaguar or Land Rover and highlighting the range of accessories to those who have recently placed a new vehicle order.
The PiHUB solution integrates directly with the group’s existing accessories ecommerce solution run via the Shopify platform.