How Piazza Auto Group Turned Online Parts Sales Into a $250K-a-Month Operation
Estimated read time: 10 minutes
Piazza Auto Group runs parts departments of every size. There’s a two-person counter out in Reading, Pennsylvania, right through to a Porsche store pulling in a quarter-million dollars a month online.
Same playbook, wildly different scale.
Dave Rogers oversees parts across the whole group, including Porsche, VW in Langhorne, three Mercedes-Benz stores, Nissan, Infiniti, and that Mazda store in Reading everyone keeps bringing up.
Armund Dezii runs parts at one of Piazza's Mercedes-Benz stores, and he's the one who ran the experiment that ended up changing how the whole group thinks about getting people on board with selling online.
Nobody mandated online sales from the top. A couple of managers tried it, watched the money show up, and let the results do the convincing.
Why Sell Parts Online? Piazza Group’s Fixed Ops Director Explains
The Turning Point: The Email Experiment
It started with one guy who wasn't sold on online parts. Armund had a staffer handling the store's online orders, and the guy wasn't exactly thrilled about it…“Nervous,” Armund says, “and not sure it was worth the hassle.”
So Armund made him a deal.
"Put your work email on your phone just for a month," he told him. "When you're sitting on your couch on Sunday afternoon and you're getting orders, boom, boom, boom, while you're playing with your kids, watching TV, whatever, tell me if that doesn't make you feel a certain way. You're making money and you're not even at work, dude."
A month later, the guy was convinced. Now he checks the online orders every single morning without needing to be reminded. Armund still credits him with most of the store's success. The idea was Armund's. Making it stick was the guy on the floor.
Proof At The Small End: Mazda in Reading
If you want proof this works at any size store, look at the Mazda store out in Reading. There are just two people working on the online parts operation. That webstore is now pulling in $80,000 to $90,000 a month.
When they started less than two years ago, the guy running it was a skeptic, same as Armund's employee. That's a thing of the past now.
Dave says the store has doubled its quarterly performance bonus since going online, which isn’t a life-changing number on its own, but
The store's getting close to needing a third person to keep up with the growth.
For two guys who weren't sure this was worth doing, that's a pretty good problem to have.
Want More Parts Revenue? Listen to This Fixed Ops Director
When Volume Becomes A Staffing Problem
That Mazda store is now getting close to needing a third person just to keep up, which is a good problem to have for two guys who weren't sure this was worth doing in the first place. And it points to something Armund has learned from watching stores scale: there's a rough tipping point, somewhere around $125,000 to $150,000 a month, where a store needs someone dedicated to online orders full-time, not squeezed in between other tasks.
Proof At The Big End
Porsche was the first store in the group to go online, five or six years before anyone else had considered it, and back when Dave's Volkswagen store in Langhorne was still testing the waters on eBay. That head start shows.
The Porsche store is doing $200,000 to $250,000 a month now, well past the point where one person answering emails between customers was going to cut it. So they hired, same math as the Mazda counter, just further down the road.
Profit Over Percentage
Dave’s got a line he keeps coming back to, and it’s the whole philosophy in one breath:
That's it. That's the whole thing.
A lot of parts departments are trained to chase the margin percentage, hit the number and never sell below it. In other words, protect their margin like it’s the only thing that matters. Dave thinks this is backwards.
A 13 percent margin on a part you'd have never sold anyway isn't a bad deal, it's free money, especially when the customer's paying the shipping.
Armund says it even simpler:
Not a smaller chance or a discounted one. That sale flat-out doesn’t happen if you’re not online, and the proof backs it up if you go back over the years. And it stacks up in ways you don't see on any one ticket, as manufacturers reward volume with backend bonuses, so every extra part that ships out, even at a thin margin, is quietly building toward a number most departments aren't even tracking.
Keeping Growth From Turning Into Chaos
None of this works if the parts don't move fast enough to matter. Piazza keeps turnaround time under three days, because that's the line for staying a Google preferred business. Miss it, and every dollar spent getting found online is money down the drain.
It's the unglamorous part of the story, but it's the thing quietly holding up everything else: the buy-in, the volume, the bonuses, all of it.
Advice For Other Dealers
There’s no secret sauce here, which is kind of the point. What worked for Piazza is stuff that any parts department could do tomorrow.
See What RevolutionParts Could Do For Your Parts Department
If your parts department is still sitting on the sidelines, or you've got one dealer doing it right and the rest of the group hasn't caught on yet, book a chat with a RevolutionParts ecommerce specialist to see what setting up online could look like for you.