One of the biggest challenges that dealerships are facing is growing their wholesale business. With the effects of the economic downturn of 2020 still being felt, dealerships have lost quite a bit of their previous wholesale business. It’s essential to refocus your efforts on regrowing and retaining wholesale customers. A strong wholesale customer base will help your dealership supplement its parts revenue without relying too heavily on individual parts buyers.
Your parts delivery process is a critical component of your wholesale parts business. The amount of time a car spends on the repair lift waiting for a part is just as costly for your local ISP or collision center customer as it is for your dealership.
Your dealership has to offer fast and reliable delivery to be considered a premium parts supplier. It’s important to give yourself the tools and resources to help you streamline and optimize this aspect of your business.
Having the best parts delivery can help you:
- Combine and optimize your delivery routes to help speed supply lines
- Add more stops to your route for maximum efficiency
- Lower your overall delivery costs
- Help decrease hours worked
Growing your wholesale business relies on providing your customers the best experience from purchase to fulfillment. Your delivery process can be the clincher for keeping wholesale customers.
6 Best Practices for Amazing Parts Delivery to Your Wholesale Customers
Communication
Establish a delivery schedule and promote it to your customers. Keep in contact with customers when parts deliveries are delayed or when parts deliveries arrive early. Having a real-time notification system in place can help put you and them at ease. It helps build trust between you and your wholesale customers efficiently.
Reliability
Do whatever it takes to honor your delivery schedule. If you can’t get a part delivered to them at the time they need it with your existing delivery process, create new ones to ensure that deliveries aren’t delayed, or worse, canceled. Set reasonable delivery time rates so that they know, from the get-go, that you deliver what you promise. Reliability creates trust, and trust creates loyalty.
Flexibility
A customer emergency is a great opportunity to increase your customer satisfaction. Having a flexible delivery system gives you the opportunity to acquire new business. Put processes in place to prioritize deliveries based on immediacy. Your extra effort will be appreciated and remembered.
Fast Delivery Routes
Establish the most efficient and effective routes for your drivers. Keep an eye out for busy roads, construction, traffic jams, and so on. Be aware of the locations of current and potential customers as well as route differences that could affect drive times. Once you’ve got your delivery routes mapped out, be sure to review them to see if any changes need to be made to meet customer demand.
Combine Deliveries
Time is money, so find ways to cut down on delivery times. Consider working with one of your sister stores to combine deliveries and split the costs. This allows you to share the costs, increase efficiency, and expand your overall delivery radius. It’s a win-win-win situation!
Hotshot Delivery Service
When a shop has a vehicle waiting on a part that they urgently need, a hotshot delivery is the best option to keep the customer’s workflow on schedule. Having an on-demand delivery service option for your local customers increases your chances of being chosen when you can deliver in as little as an hour.
Meet Best Practices With RP’s Local Delivery
Looking for a hotshot delivery service? RevolutionParts offers Local Delivery—an affordable and reliable addition to our parts eCommerce platform. With a streamlined process, your customers will be able to order the part, you will then order that part a ride, and a delivery driver will pick up and deliver the part for you.
Learn how you can save money and win more sales with our Roadmap to Winning More Local Parts Sales. It’ll show you exactly how the process works in less than a minute!
