A delivery error was exactly the stroke of good fortune Craig Shield needed to start selling online. Around a year ago, a stock parts order was delivered to Craig\u2019s Gateway Buick GMC dealership by mistake, having been ordered by the competitor across the street.<\/p>\n
Craig was immediately struck by the size of this order: 3 to 4 times bigger than the typical stock order at Gateway. After some digging into how this was possible, Craig discovered that the dealer across the street was selling on Amazon. He took pictures of the order and presented his research to his owner with a question that was more of a command \u2013 \u201cwhen can we start doing this?\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.revolutionparts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Gateway-Buick-GMC.jpg\")
Getting into the online parts selling game was a long time coming for Craig and Gateway. He had talked to RevolutionParts a couple years before this package arrived at the wrong door, but could never get full buy-in from management. He would send links to articles about the benefits of selling online to his owner, but it took actual physical evidence of what online selling success looks like for the tides to turn. Craig finally got online with RevolutionParts in May of 2019.<\/p>\n
Craig is no stranger to selling parts, serving as parts manager at his Dallas-based dealership for seven years. He heads up a modest but hard-working five-man department and was looking for a new profit base and a way to increase monthly sales. \u201cAs a medium-sized dealership, you can only run so many cars through the shop,\u201d says Craig. \u201cIf you\u2019re not one of the mega-dealers with a multimillion-dollar inventory, doing wholesale is hard. Selling online gives little guys like us an opportunity to compete.\u201d<\/p>\n
In just a few short months, Craig has seen his department grow their online sales to over $20k a month \u2013 much of that on parts they wouldn\u2019t have sold otherwise. He credits the freight calculations feature in RevolutionParts as a huge reason for his early success. \u201cIt takes so much of the guesswork out of it,\u201d Craig says. \u201cInstead of wasting time jumping on multiple websites to figure out where I can make money and ship quickly, RevolutionParts lays it all out in one place.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is still a learning curve to selling online, mostly in the mindset shift the parts department has to make when it comes to margins. Once the manufacturer kickbacks started rolling in for hitting volume incentives, however, the smaller margins didn\u2019t seem like as big of a deal. With a typical inventory size of 300,000 parts, Craig has relied on RevolutionParts to help him be more creative with sourcing and marketing, leading to more sales.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo many Revolution partners are just killing it, and we\u2019re starting to get there,\u201d says Craig about his department\u2019s future. \u201cMy goal is to get the Parts Department to stand alone and not rely on service or sales to make our dealership profitable.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Gateway\u2019s owner? Well, he\u2019s the one doing the convincing these days. When a dealer group partner from Amarillo returned home after a week in Dallas, the first thing he did was sign up for RevolutionParts after seeing Gateway\u2019s success.<\/p>\n
Craig Shield, Parts Manager of Gateway Buick GMC started selling online after an unlikely stock order mistake. A delivery error was exactly the stroke of good fortune Craig Shield needed to start selling online. Around a year ago, a stock parts order was delivered to Craig\u2019s Gateway Buick GMC dealership by mistake, having been ordered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[40,39],"class_list":["post-50255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-case-studies","tag-growth-strategies","tag-selling-online"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n