Digital agency for car parts retailers

The demand is there. 45.7% of cars on UK roads are over ten years old and the average car is 9.7 years old, which is the parc that keeps the aftermarket worth around £17bn a year to the economy. Online, the category is led by Euro Car Parts and a long tail of OE specialists, marque specialists, aftermarket generalists and marketplace-first sellers. Margins are thin, returns are driven by mis-fitment, and acquisition is dominated by Google Shopping and the eBay compatibility filter.

Everything hangs off the catalogue. Supplier data arrives as TecDoc packages, MAM Autocat exports, spreadsheets and PDFs, with the same article under three supplier codes, OE numbers formatted four ways and no fitting-position criteria. We cleanse it: deduplicate SKUs, normalise part numbers, build OE-to-aftermarket-to-supersession tables, pull attributes from TecDoc or PIES for filters, and attach K-Types to every SKU. That one dataset then drives the web store, the eBay compatibility CSV, the Amazon fitment submission and the Google Merchant Center feed.

Reg lookup is where the buyer meets that data. A VRM goes to a licensed provider such as Vehicle Data Global (UKVD), cap hpi or One Auto API and comes back with make, model, derivative, engine code, build dates and a TecDoc K-Type. Often it comes back with several candidate K-Types, because DVLA holds no engine code and a 2.0 TDI can be a CBAB or a CBBB with different discs. We disambiguate with the engine code, VIN prefix or a single question to the customer, then show 'fits your car' with the criteria they need to confirm.

We have built this for Kitspares, a kit car parts retailer, and for Milner Off Road, whose Land Rover catalogue is split by chassis number and model year in ways no generic catalogue handles. Both are multichannel businesses where the store, eBay and the supplier feeds have to agree on stock every hour of the day. Linnworks, ChannelAdvisor and M2E Pro all sit comfortably in the stacks we run.