Parts Suppliers Look Beyond DIY With Buy Online, Find a Mechanic Feature

While there are some consumers who enjoy working on their cars, there are others who find car repair to be complex and stressful. Plus, even for those who normally like to do it themselves, there are jobs they don’t feel comfortable doing.

To meet the needs of these customers — and to expand its own total addressable market — CarParts.com has launched a do-it-for-me feature that gives them the option to buy the part online and, at the same time, book an appointment with a local repair shop to install it.

“In the spirit of simplifying and removing the stress from vehicle care, we have been working on expanding our offering to include the ability for our customers to find a trusted local mechanic to assist with their repair,” CarParts.com CEO David Meniane said Tuesday (Aug. 2) during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Growing the Addressable Market 

The do-it-for-me experience was launched during the past quarter and is now live on the company’s website in certain test markets. Meniane reported during the call that it has completed several hundred successful bookings.

After gaining experience with this new feature in the test markets, the company intends to scale the offering.

Facilitating automotive service is a new offering from CarParts.com, which since 1995 has focused on eCommerce sales of automotive parts and accessories to consumers who install the products themselves.

“As we think about the future, we are committed to growing our addressable market and turning more of our customers into repeat customers,” Meniane said. “The opportunity is the do-it-for-me customer who relies on outside help to complete the repair or maintenance job.”

Providing Full Transparency 

In practice, the customer submits a form that includes information about their vehicle and the service they’d like, CarParts.com responds with quotes from different shops in the customer’s area, the customer selects a shop, works with CarParts.com to book and appointment and then shows up at the shop with the part they’ve purchased online.

To give customers confidence that they can trust the repair shop, CarParts.com has partnered with RepairPal to provide access to shops and mechanics certified by that organization.

In addition, with this newly built functionality on the website, customers will have full transparency of the installation price as they are choosing the repair shop with which they want to book an appointment.

Targeting Current Customers Before Scaling 

The No. 1 source of customers using the new feature is the company’s existing customer base. The company has over 100 million visitors on its website and millions on its email list.

“There’s plenty of opportunities for us to offer this service to our current customers,” Meniane said, “so, I think right now, at least for Phase 1, we’re okay with targeting the current customer.”

In this and other ways, CarParts.com sees an opportunity to increase its focus and efforts on customer-centric initiatives, Meniane said. More than one-third of the company’s eCommerce revenues come from repeat customers.

“Our entire team is fully committed to simplifying and removing the stress from vehicle care by redefining ourselves from a parts company to a customer-oriented company with an unparalleled digital-first experience.”