The automotive market has changed over the past 20 years as an outcome of a rise in online auto sales, due to the impact of automotive marketplaces.
The market for online car parts in North America reached $26 billion in 2021, an increase of more than 30% from 2020. Furthermore, the percentage of US consumers who purchase cars online nearly increased from 32% to 61%. The COVID-19 pandemic's consequences and ongoing investments in eCommerce make this an excellent moment for business owners to start an online auto parts store.
Automotive businesses embrace a more omnichannel approach, allowing customers to research and buy products through both physical and digital channels. Similar to many other digital commerce sectors, companies create or redesign their online auto parts stores using eCommerce platforms.
Therefore, auto parts eCommerce store owners are recommended to choose the best auto parts eCommerce platform that enables them to cover all business requirements and to seamlessly scale a business.
To understand what eCommerce platform is the one that fits your automotive online store, we have put together an overview of the 5 most commonly-used auto parts eCommerce platforms. Before we dive deep into discussing their pros and cons of them, we will look at features that are essential for an eCommerce platform to provide.
Required functionality for auto parts eCommerce
Your auto parts online store may offer a wide range of functionality, depending on the company strategy and customer requirements. However, there are a few key features you should consider when choosing an eCommerce platform:
Advanced parts search
When looking for auto parts, various types of customers rely on different criteria. The most usable parameter:
- YMM search (Year-Make-Model) enables customers to find required parts based on their vehicle model;
- VIN search (vehicle identification number) may help your auto parts website visitors look for spare parts that match specific batch produced at a particular plant;
- Manufacturer filter allows you to link many items under one brand and look for related items by brand. It may also help for cross- and up-sells since merchants can create manufacturer profiles and product suggestions.
Finally, you may provide other specifications for advanced searching by including custom fields from pre-filled product characteristics.
Product information features
With a chosen eCommerce platform, you should be able to work with product data without losses. Therefore, checking if preferred PIM, CRM, or other systems can be seamlessly integrated is recommended.
As most auto parts are complex, an eCommerce platform has to allow adding guidance and instructions to a product page. In addition, custom product attributes should be allowed to be created since they provide customers the ability to filter products by various parameters.
There are buyers who require sets of auto parts for certain vehicle systems. So creating product combinations or kits has to be enabled on an eCommerce platform.
Integrations with other selling platforms
With a chosen eCommerce software automotive businesses should be able to support dropshipping, as it can help distributors and retailers. Moreover, it can be valuable for a business if merchants can integrate their auto parts online store with popular marketplaces, like eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping, and other selling platforms.
Evaluate the top auto parts eCommerce platforms
Many numerous options for auto parts eCommerce software are presented now and most of them provide similar functionalities. However, there are 5 automotive eCommerce platforms that have advanced features and are leaders in the automotive sector.
nopCommerce
The scalable eCommerce platform, nopCommerce, is free and open-source software for automotive online stores. This solution helps auto parts sellers to market their products effectively. nopCommerce is the most recognizable ASP.NET eCommerce platform having a large community of over 250’000 members.
The automotive business, especially Enterprise-level one, usually deals and manages with an enormous number of SKUs. It is not a challenge for eCommerce stores that are powered by nopCommerce, this platform can be easily integrated with inventory and information management systems. Moreover, the nopCommerce software provides a high-level customer experience thanks to YMM, VIN, and other types of searches.
Here is the list of other features that enable auto parts store owners to sell online more effortlessly:
- popular payment and shipping methods and providers are available out-of-the-box and on the Marketplace;
- automation of routine processes (tax management, operational and marketing notifications, etc.);
- multi-store and multi-vendor functionalities;
- innovative SEO features.
The nopCommerce platform is powerful and scalable, however, it requires technical skills to install and deploy an eCommerce store. Moreover, choosing a hosting option for an online store can be challenging but there are hosting partners that are cost- and data-effective. nopCommerce has a collaboration with Everleap that helps improve website performance by deploying an eCommerce store on a custom fully managed private cloud hosting solution.
Magento (Adobe Commerce)
Acquired by Adobe, Magento is a free open-source auto parts eCommerce platform with broad functionality. There is also a self-hosted version, Adobe Commerce, that has two packages: “Commerce Pro” and more advanced “Managed Services”.
Because of Magento’s open-source nature, most of the components of an eCommerce store powered by this platform may be customized, provided you have the necessary expertise. Magento has many features that enable merchants to effectively sell auto parts:
- ability to integrate with many auto parts databases;
- “fit my car” searching tools;
- mobile-friendly interface and payment systems.
You can also install new features and extensions from the Magento Marketplace.
Although Magento may seem an appropriate platform with many features, it has a complicated setup process. Without the assistance of a developer, merchants are unlikely to set up their Magento-powered websites. Moreover, another issue of this eCommerce platform is website performance, which heavily relies on a chosen hosting solution.
BigCommerce
Small auto parts eCommerce firms can benefit from using BigCommerce, a SaaS solution. The BigCommerce platform is available to merchants through subscription plans, the least expensive of which is priced at $29.95/month.
First of all, there are a lot of simple drag-and-drop tools and themes available in BigCommerce. An auto parts website may be launched essentially without effort. The aid of web professionals or technical support is unwanted, you can easily construct a website with the help of this SaaS platform. BigCommerce comes with useful features out of the box, like faceted search, multi-store, and bulk pricing.
On the contrary, it is challenging to switch from BigCommerce to another platform because it is a closed, proprietary platform. Merchants are forced to use it unless they want to spend money on expensive data migration. The fact that some features of BigCommerce are only available with higher-tier plans is another drawback. Entry-level plans, for instance, are unable to use the functionality for preserving abandoned carts. Additionally, each plan tier has a sales cap, so a merchant needs to switch to a more advanced subscription plan. Finally, there are very few customization options accessible on the front end and none at all on the back end.
WooCommerce
Compared to other eCommerce website builders, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that is free and open-source. Especially for startups and small businesses, WooCommerce is a flexible eCommerce solution that can help create auto parts stores.
If you have the resources, WooCommerce may be altered and personalized greatly. It is based on WordPress, therefore it has some sophisticated blogging and SEO tools. WooCommerce offers a wide variety of premium and free plugins and themes. This eCommerce plugin offers multi-store functionality. Additionally, a WooCommerce single-vendor store might incorporate the multi-vendor feature using external plugins.
Despite the fact that WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin, merchants still need to pay for their own web hosting. Furthermore, businesses must set up their own shipping and payment systems. To fully utilize its capabilities, you'll need a lot more technical know-how or money to hire developers. This is especially true if you require a lot of extra features and customization. At last, on WooCommerce, performance issues can be more frequent and more challenging to fix.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a website-building company with “drag-and-drop” tools that enables you to create a website without touching a single piece of code. The platform provides eCommerce functionality with the Basic Commerce plan that starts at $26/month.
Choosing Squarespace for your auto parts eCommerce store can be beneficial for merchants who require an easy website setup, customization, and launch using a drag-and-drop editor. Squarespace also handles hosting, domain names, and other technical things with support for new customers who are setting up their stores. Squarespace provides over 100 templates with the support of mobile devices that you can use.
There are a few useful features included in the Basic Commerce plan:
- CSS/JavaScript customizability;
- promotional pop-ups and banners;
- a variety of eCommerce analytics tools.
In terms of drawbacks, with Squarespace, it can be challenging to accelerate loading times past 3–5 seconds. Poor overall performance could lead to lost sales. Moreover, this software only supports Stripe, PayPal, Afterpay, and ApplePay, which can be constricting if you wish to use another payment processor, especially if you want to sell your products worldwide. You could struggle to place your website content exactly where you want it because of the "content block" architecture used to develop websites, especially if you're an advanced user.
What’s the best auto parts eCommerce platform?
The answer to this question is not certain and universal for every auto parts retailer. Automotive eCommerce businesses need to pick software that covers their requirements and enables future growth.
Features, like advanced parts search, product information management, and integrations with marketplaces and selling platforms are pretty much installed or can be integrated into the platforms we have presented in this ranking.
At the same time, nopCommerce powers solutions for auto parts online sellers more effectively, due to out-of-the-box features and great performance. Moreover, it is not only free to use, but your data remains your own and free of proprietary platforms. Finally, it is scalable and enables auto parts merchants to sell an infinite number of products without additional fees.