Our Company » Testimonials & Case Studies

Total Automotive is a very innovative auto parts company that specializes in selling parts at substantial discounts for non-warranty repairs. They specialize in selling parts to dealers, mechanics, body shops, jobbers, warehouse distributors, and retail customers. When we first started working with Total Automotive in 2002, it was to help them market a hinge kit that the owner had invented to allow a faster and better repair on GM trucks and SUV’s. After hearing about their business more, we suggested they consider selling all their parts online and the owner mentioned they already had an e-store product for accomplishing that task. We asked how they liked that product and they told that this was a custom product that allowed them to manage their entire site as well as their e-commerce portion. However, this so called “custom” site had made two web sales in a span of two years.

The product that Total Auto was using to manage their web site was not actually a custom solution. It was a one-size-fits-all solution and did not allow Total Auto to sell their products the way they needed to be sold so that customers would actually consider the web site as a reasonable method of making a purchase. Frontier went on to help build an online e-commerce system that exactly matched the sophisticated internal processes and systems of Total Automotive.  Online sales regularly hit $5,000 or more a day.

The first challenge we had was convincing the owner and internal systems person that building an online system that matched all their business rules was possible. Total Automotive sells so many different types of parts to many different types of customers and each of those sales are handled and priced in a different way. For example, they wanted to sell one part that fits both a Lexus and a Toyota car. Their internal systems have that part as one part number, but they needed to be able to sell it to Toyota dealers as the Lexus dealers as a different part. Also, they needed the price to be different depending on who was making the request for purchase. They needed the system to calculate a price which was relative to a published database of dealer costs and relative to what the part cost Total Auto to buy. To make things more complicated, they want to be able to show all their inventory to potential new customers, but they did not want any of their competition to be able to steal their valuable data.

Total Automotive actually had a very powerful internal system that tracked all their product data and the developer of that system was just a bit behind in technology trends on the Internet and he didn’t believe that it was going to build a system that ran at high speeds and met all the requirements of the system.  He especially didn’t believe that it could be done at the price we told them it would cost. The forward thinking owner over-ruled his internal database designer and trusted our group to tackle the project.

We built a system which took all the relevant data from the internal system and added fields that were needed to make the web system a success. To allow customers to see a sample of the data that would entice them to work with Total Auto, we allowed parts to be searched, but always limited to the results to 10 products. That way, if the competition wanted to steal all the products, they would have to spend several thousand hours getting that done. To sell correctly to customers, we showed only retail pricing to those who were not logged in and encouraged site visitors who were dealers, body shops, or other types of large quantity buying customers to apply for an account that would allow them to see their discounted prices side by side with known prices within the industry.

Once customers signed up, Total Automotive was able to contact them and give them each a quick personal walk through of the web site pointing out all the advantages of buying online with them. The site priced each customer as needed since Total Auto was able to set preferences associated with that customers account before they approved them for logged in browsing. The system was able to show customers only the parts they were interested in seeing. Lexus dealers saw parts only for Lexus automobiles and Toyota dealers saw parts only for Toyota automobiles; of course, those parts may have been the same, but they were not priced the same.

Like with all successful web projects, the web site was just one part of a larger marketing approach that involved advertising the hinge that the owner had invented, encouraging buyers to come to the web site to learn more, and then taking that captive audience and converting them into long term customers. We have helped with Web marketing programs, upgraded the site to allow Canadian customers, and gone through some graphic upgrades and redesigns as well.

The bottom line dollars spent to dollars earned are most impressive on this project. The customer is extremely happy with our consulting and developing services and has sent many referrals to our group. Our favorite quote from the owner was “I can’t believe you guys can do all this complicated stuff and make it so simple for me to manage.” 

Features on this site include:

• Management of customer login history by username and ip address
•  Custom PDF flyer generation
•  Canadian pricing and conversion tools
•  Complete content management
•  HTML newsletter and advertising tools
•  Detailed site statistics and login history viewing tools
•  Online customer and product editing that synchronizes with offline editing software
•  Up to date inventory viewing
•  Ability to manage sales and product specials
•  & more

For more visit this project in our portfolio, or www.totalauto.com or search “hinge kits” on Google.