Connecting the Dots - Collision Repair Magazine

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Volume 6

Connecting the Dots

Written by David Ros

Saturday, 17 March 2007

Car-part.com allows parts buyers and sellers to connect instantly.
The year was 1996. The Internet was increasing in popularity and auto recyclers had begun to share their inventories with one another through the linking of their inventory management software. However the linking technology was still young and there were some severe roadblocks that needed to be overcome.
One of the main challenges at that time was that the inventory link-ups worked fine so long as both parties were using the same inventory management software. Making things worse, the inventory list was not available to recyclers’ biggest customers, predominantly adjusters and collision repairers.

The GOAL
Recyclers themselves, Roger, Jeff and Urban Schroder devised a solution to this frustrating problem whereby they would create an online portal where anyone, anywhere could search through the inventories of any recycler to find the part they needed. Two years later, car-part.com was officially launched.
“The original goal was to try and make things easier for the customer to locate the part they required,” Roger says. “Instead of them having to call 10 different people looking for the part, we put that information right at their fingertips.”
This idea seemed to resonate not only among customers, but among recyclers as well who saw car-part.com’s free listing service as a great opportunity for them to sell more parts. Over the next few years car-part.com grew by leaps and bounds and unlike many of the other “dotcoms” of that era, car-part.com’s bubble never burst.
Today car-part.com is flourishing with upwards of 90 million unique parts from more than 3,000 different recycling facilities uploaded to their web site every night.
“We’d always hoped it would eventually grow into the numbers we’re pulling in today,” Roger says. “But when we started off, we never really knew how big it would become.”

real time solution
One of the hallmarks of car-part.com is how easy it is to use. Searches can be made as wide or as narrow as necessary through four quick drop-down menus. Searches can even be sorted by price or damage grade so customers can try to figure out the best possible deal.
Car-part.com has also made it easy for customers to interact with those selling the parts. Recently the site implemented a live chat feature where customers can speak to auto recyclers in real time in order to inquire about specific parts. This feature can help the customer to quickly make a better informed purchase.
“Before if you wanted to know something about a part, you had to send an e-mail and then wait for them to return it before you could get your answer,” Roger says.

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