Jay Hodge Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram

Estimated read time: 5 minutes

$51K/month in online parts. 3 person team. Small town store.

“What better way to reach more customers than to start selling parts nationwide?” – Marcus Jacobs, Parts Manager

Running a parts department in a small local town usually means accepting one hard truth: You can only sell to people who step foot through the front door. This CDJR in Hugo, Oklahoma, decided not to accept that limitation.

Led by Marcus Jacobs, this dealership built a RevolutionParts web store that blitzed its old ceiling. What used to top out around $37,000 per month is now tracking at $51,000 per month online alone. January ran 3.5x higher than the year before, and traffic is up 58%, too. 

Here’s the story of how a small-town dealership built a national parts counter on track to hit $100K a month by the end of Q4.

The ceiling is sky high  

For most small-town dealerships, geography sets the ceiling. If a customer can’t get to you, they’re not buying from you. Some months are good, some not so much. You learn to live with it.

Not Marcus and his team. Thanks to their web store, they’re now reaching buyers who’ll never set foot in Hugo, Oklahoma. With eBay fully integrated and international shipping available, this CDJR has orders coming in from across the country, and sometimes the globe. 

“I can tell you the place we’ve sold the most parts,” Marcus said, “as odd as it is, is New York and Los Angeles.”

Read that again. A three-person parts department in small-town Oklahoma is regularly shipping parts to New York and Los Angeles, and 3.5x-ing growth in the process. That’s what happens when your parts counter stops relying on the use of the front door.

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“We have three people, that is our total parts department”

You might think growing an eCom store like this needs a ten-strong team. You’d be wrong. This dealership is doing it with just three people. And to reiterate, they’re now pulling in $51,000 in online sales in a single month, with online revenue making up a quarter to a third of total parts sales.

When Marcus stepped into eCommerce, the parts department was stretched thin. The manager was essentially running the entire operation alone, juggling service counter demands while trying to grow online sales.

Today, there are three people. Marcus still runs the majority of the online operation, while James (new parts manager) manages inventory and department flow, and a parts advisor steps in on shipping and invoicing during peak volume.

It took a couple of months to lock in the daily workflow and iron out early headaches around listings, warehouse tracking and fulfillment, but “once I dialed in the process,” Marcus said, the whole thing started to click. 

Now they’ve got a repeatable process in place, they’re moving more parts, cleaning up aging inventory, and building revenue that doesn’t depend on the door or the phone ringing. 

3.5x YoY growth? Don’t mind if they do  

Before the eCom store, the parts department was pulling in $30,000 to $40,000 per month. Solid numbers for a small-town dealership, but capped due to the town’s small population. That was, until the launch of the online store. 

Now the same dealership is sitting at $51,000 in online sales alone, which will be their first month earning north of $50k. Their previous best was $37k, so this is not a tiny bump. 

Online sales make up about 25-33% of total parts revenue and more than half of the store’s wholesale business. Total parts department revenue is hovering just under $100,000 for the month. So whichever way you look at it, that’s real weight on the balance sheet.

In terms of what’s next, Marcus has set some clear, practical targets: $60,000 per month by the end of Q2, $80,000 by Q3 and $100,000 per month by the end of the year. The plan is to lean further into repeat wholesale buyers, targeting mobile mechanics and independent shops rather than relying on one-off transactions.

Add in a 58% increase in traffic after tightening up the process and adding marketing support, and it becomes clear this isn’t a lucky run.

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A win for the service department

The more inventory you have, the more customers you can serve. Marcus and his team have seen that play out in real time. Not just online, but also inside the dealership. More parts on the shelf means the service department can handle more jobs on the ground.

“Added inventory helps with the service drive as well. They capture more jobs on the drive now”, said Marcus.

When parts are already on the shelf, vehicles spend less time sitting in the service bay waiting on orders, which means faster repairs and fewer customers leaving to find quicker service elsewhere. “Now,” Marcus said, “the odds of us having that part on hand are higher. That matters in a small-town market where speed and reliability matter as much as price. 

More inventory supports both the service drive and the growing online business, helping parts move faster instead of sitting on the shelf.

Shipping and profit go hand-in-hand  

When you start shipping nationwide, shipping stops being about getting a box from A to B and starts being about margin control. Marcus is pretty direct about how they manage it.

“One thing I learned down the road,” Marcus said, “is that when RevolutionParts quotes shipping, customers don’t see UPS, USPS, or FedEx. They only see standard, expedited, or overnight.” From there, the decision power shifts back to the dealership.

“Once they choose the service level, I’ve got the freedom to pick the carrier,” he explained. “And I don’t pick at random. I take a few things into consideration every time.”

Profit is one of them. But so is product protection.

“You can choose based on margin,” Marcus said. “But it’s also about how fragile the part is, and which carrier you trust to get it there without damaging it.” That’s why he keeps the customer experience simple on the front end. 

That level of control adds up quickly when orders start stacking up. A damaged part doesn’t just mean a refund. It means paperwork, handling fees and waiting for the part to return before recovering any money.

When you’re moving hundreds of orders, decisions like that quietly protect profitability without slowing down fulfillment or customer service.

Stubborn stock causing a headache? 

Some parts are harder to move than others. Any dealership will tell you that. When Marcus and his team started selling online, moving obsolete or slower-moving parts wasn’t the main goal. But it quickly became a helpful side effect.

“The online store has helped a lot,” Marcus said.

Selling parts online changed how they thought about inventory. Instead of parts sitting on shelves waiting for the right local customer to need them, those parts now reach buyers far beyond Hugo, Oklahoma.

With the web store and eBay listings fully active, inventory is moving faster. More importantly, they’re recovering value from parts that might have otherwise sat on the shelf tying up cash.

“We’ve started selling more obsolescent parts and parts that are in our own inventory rather than coming from the warehouse,” Marcus explained.

The lesson is simple here: When you can put parts in front of more buyers, even slower-moving inventory gets a second life.

It’s all about the process

Launching a webstore with RevolutionParts is straightforward, even for a team of three. But like most new systems, there is a learning curve.

Marcus keeps the advice simple: “Be patient. It took me two or three months to really nail down our systems and processes.” Those first few months are about refinement. “Every day is a new day to do something a little bit better and learn something new,” he said.

This isn’t something you turn on and walk away from. It’s something you build over time. Once Marcus dialed in the process, things started to click. Orders moved more consistently and operations became more predictable.

Now Marcus is focused on the next layer of growth. “I’ve gone back and looked at some of our previous sales,” he said. “We’re starting to sell to more businesses. I’m putting together a marketing campaign to target shops like that.” 

For Marcus, repeat business is where real stability comes from. “I believe targeting businesses like that is key to gaining repeat customers. That’s where we’re going to keep those sales growing.”