Selling Heavy-Duty Parts Online: eCommerce, AI, and More
This episode explores how evolving customer expectations, digital transformation, and AI are reshaping heavy-duty parts sales and service.
Episode 355: In this episode of The Heavy Duty Parts Report, host Jamie Irvine speaks with Kris Harrington, CEO of GenAlpha, about how buying habits in the heavy-duty parts industry have evolved over the past five years. They discuss the acceleration of digital sales channels driven by customer expectations for convenience, speed, and accuracy, emphasizing the need for businesses to provide self-service, remote, and in-person options.
Harrington highlights common misconceptions about e-commerce—such as viewing it only as a shopping cart—arguing instead that a digital platform should serve as a comprehensive business transformation tool offering product information, service history, and efficiency gains.
The conversation also explores challenges with ROI measurement, internal adoption, and competitive pressures, while differentiating GenAlpha’s Equip360 solution as industry-specific, consultative, and continuously evolving. Finally, they address the role of AI in discoverability, customer support, and productivity, stressing that companies must adapt to remain competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
Links
Sponsors of this Episode
The Hub Corp: Introducing the new standard in wheel-end protection: The Hub Corp’s revolutionary XTRACTOR™. The only line of heavy-duty hub caps with a built-in 3-Stage Magnetic Oil Filter that safeguards critical axle components under extreme loads for longer. And with the patent-pending HexThread™ cartridge, the XTRACTOR makes hub oil servicing and inspections faster, easier, and cleaner. The Hub Corp: Challenge The Standard. Visit TheHubCorp.com to learn more and join the waitlist.
Fullbay: Fullbay is built for the heavy-duty world, giving your operation the tools to keep your fleet or independent repair shop running. Features like streamlined scheduling, real-time inventory tracking, technician efficiency insights, and detailed reports are how Fullbay helps shops reduce downtime and keep your vehicles on the road where they belong. Check out Fullbay.com/power to maximize your shop’s productivity.
GenAlpha: Equip360 by GenAlpha helps manufacturers and distributors grow their parts sales and make life easier for their customers. With real-time insights into inventory, pricing, and order tracking, it keeps customers coming back. Plus, it saves time by automating routine tasks and making repeat purchases simple. Explore Equip360 at GenAlpha.com.
Disclaimer: This content and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, The Heavy Duty Parts Report may receive a commission.
Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine
Welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. And in this episode, we are going to talk about how buying habits are continuing to change in the heavy-duty parts industry. And we’re also going to look at how people are adapting their digital sales channel where they try to sell parts online when there’s so much unprecedented change happening all around us. And we’re kind of going to end the conversation on a high note where we’re going to talk about some of the key things that each distributor needs to do or each supplier needs to do to truly be successful with their digital sales channel in 2026. Now, that’s a pretty tall order, so I needed some help to accomplish that. And I am so happy to have one of our returning guests, someone who’s been on the podcast three times, this is her fourth appearance, Kris Harrington, who is CEO of GenAlpha. Now, as I mentioned, Kris has been on the show several times. If you want to go back and listen to the previous episodes, they are episode 61, 140, and 202. I’ve put the links in the show notes so you can easily find those episodes. Every time I talk to Chris, I find that I learn quite a bit. So it’s probably worth your while to go back and listen to what she had to say in those other episodes. But today’s conversation, like those previous episodes, is going to be jam-packed, so you’re in for a real treat. Kris, welcome back to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. So glad to have you here.
Kris Harrington
Oh, Jamie, thank you so much for having me. This is fantastic. I always enjoy my time with you. So thanks.
Jamie Irvine
And as they say, fourth time’s the charm? Yeah.
Kris Harrington
I’m not sure that’s quite it, but we’ll take it. Every time is a charm. Let’s go.
Jamie Irvine
There we go. Sounds good. So Kris, I wanted to start off our conversation by kind of looking back over the last five years. What a five years it’s been, COVID, supply chain collapses, our lingering freight recession, trade wars. I mean, this has been… just the most dynamic five years that most of us have probably ever experienced in our career. So my question is, how have buying habits changed when we’ve had so much change in the industry?
Kris Harrington
Yeah, it certainly is a resilient group, isn’t it, that we’re all a part of here. I would say for myself and my career, this past five years has been a lot of change as well. And that’s why, you know, we have to think about as organizations, how do we ensure our ability to be flexible and respond? And I really think that’s what we’re seeing over these past five years, right? If we take e-commerce, which is really the space that, you know, we’re in, is, you know, COVID was really a transition period, right? It changed the way we do things individually. So, you know, you and I and many others started in our personal lives purchasing things online, and we got comfortable doing that. I think some of us might have stepped into that a little uncomfortable, but certainly the ease, the convenience that took place just, and the ability to get products when we wanted them, as we expected them, you know, just kind of translated into us doing it more. And as a population that has grown, you know, locally, regionally, and throughout the world. So, you know, as we look at 2025, what I think has really happened is that that’s just accelerated, right? So that same convenience that we all understood and became accustomed to in our personal lives, we started expecting in our professional lives as well. So when you look at a B2B space like the heavy duty industry, when we’re talking about parts and service for trucking, for trailers, people want information with speed, they want accurate information, and it’s kind of the perfect space for parts and service to gain efficiencies and really help out the end customer. So I think that it’s only accelerated and customer expectations have certainly changed. You know, I’ve read McKinsey articles that really have said that customers today want a third, a third, a third. So I think this is something great for your audience to listen to is that they want a third of that self-service experience. So the ability to go online and get answers to their own questions and get the information that they’re looking for. The other third, they want to be able to send an e-mail. They want to be able to make a phone call. So it’s part remote, but it’s also that ability to have a touch base with people. And it’s really through those traditional channels that we’re used to. And then that other third is the in-person piece. Now, sometimes that comes down to that complex sale that is taking place, or it can be that they want to show up at a dealership and actually ask questions, go through product information. So if we think about it, you know, we’re selling. whether it be equipment or parts, and we need to service that over its lifetime. And people want to do business with you in these three areas. And we have to enable all of them today in order to be successful. And I think in 2025, the companies that have done that, they’re the ones that are really prospering today because they’re able to meet the needs of people in all these different areas.
Jamie Irvine
I think you’re absolutely correct. That expectation to be available in those various ways is now becoming the status quo. Whereas five years ago, there was still a fair amount of resistance to the digital or online sales channel. And I don’t see that resistance anymore. I mean, it’s just now part of what you have to do to take care of your customers. Now, with that being said, are there any lingering misconceptions that both suppliers who are maybe in that B2B environment selling to their distribution channels or the distributors who are selling to the fleets and repair shops and owner operators, are there any of those lingering misconceptions around what it takes to launch or even if you already have tried and now you need to upgrade your e-commerce platform, like what are those lingering things that people are still getting hung up on?
Kris Harrington
There are people that are out there that think this is just a shopping cart. It’s just a place to transact. That’s the only thing that people are going to do there. And I would argue that your digital presence is really a business transformation. It becomes the way that you stay connected to your customers when you’re not on the phone with them or you’re not having that in-person opportunity. So I always like to say that a website is so much more than a place to do transactions, right? If it’s a good site, people are coming there to look for product information that helps them do their job. They might be downloading invoices, they may be paying invoices with you online. So they’re all coming to the same place to do those things. They’re looking for documentation. It might be on, you know, if there’s a person who’s repairing their own fleet of trucks and they need access to the expertise of what to do because they’re facing a problem, they want to be able to go to your website and get information. And you as either the supplier or the local dealer, you should be the one providing them with that information, particularly if they bought that unit from you and you’re the one that regularly helps them service it. So any warranty information related to the unit, any past service reports, any purchasing history from the past. You know, we get people who are hung up on data a lot as the big challenge of not getting started. But if you had five years of purchase history out there, a lot of what gets purchased over the lifetime of a vehicle or any fleet of product, whether it be, you know, an engine or brakes or it’s common parts that are often getting reordered. So if they can go back and see what they bought for a specific truck or trailer, you know, three years ago, and then two years ago, one, that all builds confidence that this is the thing that they need for that particular unit. So they might not even going through the traditional search mechanism to find something, they’re going into past orders to find things. So if we think about your solution as all of that, and that’s often what a great solution, particularly our solution, Equip360, can enable for companies, right, is to give all of that information. So it’s not just a shopping cart. It’s really a place to do business with you and get answers to the questions that they need quickly.
Jamie Irvine
So you and I both have led companies in our career and when you are leading a company, your big responsibility is to bring a return on investment for the shareholders, right? And so sales and revenue is really important. And what I see happen sometimes is you have a leadership group that gets kind of hyper-focused on, okay, I spent X to put this platform in place. Now what’s my direct sales from that platform? And you know, is there a return on investment on the money we spent on this platform. And it’s hard to quantify the value to the customer in those things that support the sales, but don’t necessarily add directly to top line and bottom-line revenue.
Kris Harrington
Particularly if you weren’t tracking your e-mail volumes or your call volumes or your sales activity, especially that admin activity that your sales team was spending so much time on in the past and now, some of that stuff has gone away, but you just don’t have any way of measuring that because now they’re going to that website and they’re getting all those answers that may have consumed a lot of people’s time, right? So usually there’s a lot of efficiency gains that help support that ROI, but they’re difficult to measure because we haven’t been in the habit of measuring those things in the past. So you can’t clearly see, you know, and that’s why people rely on conversion. You know, I guess that would be my biggest answer. Some companies don’t always get the ROI as well because they just haven’t had adoption across the board, both internal, I think, you know, when you launch a website, you have to ensure internally your people know what a resource it is, both for them and for the customers that you serve. And they should be the advocates. If your people don’t want to use it or they’re not proud of it, then they’re not telling your customers about it. And therefore, your customers may not even have an awareness of the things that they can do with you. So, you know, there’s that piece of how do we measure ROI? But there’s also, we just don’t feel like we’ve had the right adoption. I would say you have to look internally and see, you know, have we rolled it out properly? And if you’ve done all of that, then you need to go and you got to look at your website and say, you know, is this website bringing value to the end user? Is it easy to use? Can they find the information that they’re looking for? This is rarely a technology issue. Very rarely, you know, you can use a lot of vendor solutions to put your products online and it’s not going to come down to always the vendor solution. It’s how you rolled it out, how you execute your product information and how you’re taking care of making it easy for your customers to do business with you.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, it’s always, always, always left up to the execution of whether or not these things are successful. And to your point, not only internally may you have a failure to promote, you may actually have people as detractors internally. And I have seen that in several companies, and that’s kind of a worst-case scenario. In addition to that, one of the things that I often see companies not tracking is the opportunities that are lost if they don’t move in this direction or they don’t keep up with their competitors. So it’s one thing to just look straight at conversion, like you said, but what about those efficiency gains? But also, what about what you’re going to lose to your competitors when they do this and you don’t? And I don’t find a lot of companies today are kind of starting at zero. A lot of them have already maybe taken their first step into this world. And there’s a lot of options out there. There’s general platforms, I think of like, you know, Shopify, BigCommerce, SBS Commerce. There is other options that are tailored more for our industry. And how does someone like GenAlpha really differentiate themselves from those other general platforms that are out there?
Kris Harrington
The first thing I would just say is that we are manufacturers who created a solution for manufacturers and distributors. So our whole goal at the outset when we formed the company in 2011 was that we were going to create something for the parts, equipment, and machinery industry. We’ve lived in our customer’s shoes. I personally, you know, up in Canada, I was a national parts manager for a mining manufacturer, so I had to sell parts and grow parts. It was expected every year. I spent four years in Latin America working on parts and equipment sales. So we created a product that really was specific to helping customers find the right product for the machine that that they’re running, whether that be a truck and trailer, whether it be a machine that runs on the manufacturing floor or a specialty vehicle that’s out there in the construction or agriculture space. All of those companies do business with us, and they are companies that are driving some of the enhancements and things that we continue to bring to our solution. Those play a critical role is that we’re listening to customers in this space all the time. We’re very proud that we don’t have agency partners in the middle when you’re doing business with GenAlpha. We take a very consultative approach. Teams get to work with us, so we’re engaging with them to truly advise them on how to best utilize the data that they do have to launch an e-commerce site, and then iteratively improve it over time, because that’s really what this takes. And we’re there with them for that entire journey. That’s our whole goal. So we’re proud to be in this space. The other thing that I would say is that we are proud members of several associations. We’re not just members, but we participate. We’re there. We’re present at conferences. We take speaking engagements. We take a very educational approach to being in this industry and being a part of this industry because we know through education, people are going to gain a greater awareness. They’re going to be able to help their customers, but in the end, it’s going to help us build a better product as well.
Jamie Irvine
It’s time to hear from our sponsors. We’ll be right back.
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We’re back from our break. Make sure you go and check out the links in our show notes to all of our sponsors. Okay, let’s get back to this episode. Before the break, we were talking about what differentiates GenAlpha. I have another question for you. And some of these questions, just so the audience understands, some of these questions are coming from people who have looked at GenAlpha and they’ve raised objection. AI has now emerged over the last couple of years, and it is fully in play now in our business environment in a way that just didn’t exist a couple of years ago. And so one of the concerns someone might have is they might say, well, I might want to go with one of these big platforms because I believe that those platforms will give me more AI integration and easier integration to various tools than if I went with someone like GenAlpha, who’s more industry specific. Tell me whether or not that is something that is like, first of all, I guess, is that a concern that someone should have? And then kind of the B part of that question is, and how does GenAlpha address that concern if it is?
Kris Harrington
Yeah, well, I’m glad you’re asking about AI because you can’t go anywhere without people talking about AI today. So it’s something all of us need to be looking at with our businesses. I think the first way I would just address your question is that the most important thing we can do right now as organizations is make sure that we’re found, that we’re discoverable for AI. What we’re seeing is an increase in people going to generative AI solutions to ask questions. They’re making queries, right? They’re prompting. And through those prompts, they’re getting answers. And Digital Commerce 360 just put something out in September about this, that there are roughly 2.5 billion daily prompts to ChatGPT, so OpenAI. And when What do they say? 2.1% of those are roughly like 53 million of those prompts are related to shopping. And we’re just at the beginning of this, right? So the key for all of us is that we have to be discoverable by these different generative AI platforms to ensure that customers are even getting our business, our products, as answers to these queries. And that, to me, is the most important thing we can do as companies right now. So if you are a product company, you’re selling parts, you’re servicing equipment, are you coming up in these generative AI? And that’s what we at GenAlpha and with Equip360 are enabling companies is to first even ensure that they are discoverable. That is a key, key, key component.
Jamie Irvine
I understand that need to be discoverable. That’s basically like, if you think of Web 2.0 back in the day when it was all about search engine optimization, getting your website found by search engines. Now we’re moving to Web 3.0 technology, and it’s gonna be all about being discoverable through these AI chatbots. I think about also, and I think where the motivation of this question came from is you have a younger, business owner who has now got the full responsibility of the organization for maybe the first time in their career. They are lacking some of the people who once worked for the organization with 30, 40 years of knowledge, and therefore they’re having to do a lot more with a lot less resources. And so I think the AI tools also is about productivity and about making sure that you don’t kind of paint yourself into a corner or that you some, you know, the next great tool that hasn’t been created yet, that’s going to be created in the next 12 months. I know, I, you know, because I made this one choice, I’m not going to have access to that. And then that’s going to put me behind. I think that was kind of like the essence of the objection and the fear. So I’m just kind of curious from your perspective, when you think of, okay, being discoverable, where in that is productivity and what other considerations am I missing that are also very important to think about?
Kris Harrington
I would say in being discoverable, I’m more thinking about the sales, sales enablement piece, right? If we’re applying AI to our business, I think that’s where we’re going to find efficiencies, right? So in our Equip360 solution, as an example, we’ve had to look at where do we need to enable AI? Where is it available today? So we’ve embedded AI in documentation search. We’ve embedded AI, it’s what we’re working on in our analytics. We’re creating AI assistant chats so that customer service and parts of lookup tasks can be completed through assistance. So all of us, in our platform, and in any e-commerce solution, we’re going to be looking for those AI-enhanced capabilities to increase the efficiency of how people find what they’re looking for when they come. And people are going to do all kinds of different things now, right? So for a long time, it was that parts search bar or search bar on a website. That’s kind of in a storefront, that’s where people start. Is it where they’re going to continue to start? Let’s say they do a query in AI and they want some information on a product. Well, you’re going to want your product to show up there in that query. They’re not even coming to your site for the search. They’re starting that way over there. That’s that discoverable piece that I was talking about. If you don’t have an open site, you don’t have products for sale online, you’re not even going to come up over there as a resource for them to get to your site or buy within the platform because that’s what a lot of the platforms are talking about, these AI generative tools are doing shopping right in there. But what if they do come to your site, but now they want to use voice search, or they just want to go into a chat and chat through, or they want to be on their mobile phone and look for something and again, just talk into it. I have a Mack truck, you know, 2023, this thing is happening to me, how can you help me? You know, how are you responding to that? I think these are real scenarios in the future, and we have to be able to respond to those. So, you know, to your question about efficiency in the business, I think AI can be applied to a lot of areas in the business, for sure. But if we’re just talking digital commerce, I think these are the things that are becoming really critical.
Jamie Irvine
You know, it’s interesting. I’m building a 1966 Triumph chopper and I was having a problem. I had ordered a bunch of, of the rear brake assembly components and it just, the anchor plate just, it wasn’t working. Like the parts were not compatible and it really stumped me for a little while. I’m like, what is going on? And I was checking the actual Triumph part number listings that I found online. I was talking to a vintage specialist and he was confirming that I had ordered the correct parts. And it’s like, it’s just not working. And all of a sudden, I thought to myself, why don’t I just take a picture of it and put it into AI and see what happens? So I took a picture of the anchor plate on the rear wheel of the bike. And I said, what is this and what are the brake components that I need? And it turns out, because it’s a chopper, somebody somewhere along the line used a BSA, not a Triumph backing assembly. Within, I would say less than three seconds, it identified the part, gave me the part number, it gave me a full listing of everything that I need. And that day, I was able to actually complete the job because I was able to return the Triumph parts, get the BSA parts, make one modification, and I had the rear brake down, something that had plagued me for quite a while, and in just a few minutes, I found the solution, and within a couple hours, it was solved. Now, obviously, a vintage motorcycle is something purely recreational, but imagine that exact scenario happening every day now in commercial equipment where that equipment needs to run to make money, right? It’s a completely different need. And I think that that scenario is playing out a lot more than people realize.
Kris Harrington
And that’s why I go to your product or your website being so much more than a place for a transaction, right? You want to help people solve the challenge that they’re having with the products that they’re running. And you want them to see you as a resource. And ultimately, you’re going to grow your business as a result from it. So we need to think beyond just the selling of parts in trucks and trailers, we have to think about all the questions that come up in the ownership and operation of these and how do we support them throughout that lifetime and build scenarios for that. And that’s where we’re going to create a really unique offering and differentiate amongst the other, you know, vendors and distributors and dealerships in the territory.
Jamie Irvine
As you integrate an e-commerce solution into your business, I want to kind of paint a couple scenarios here and then we can talk about it. So first, let’s say we have a situation where the company has invested in maybe a platform and they just don’t find that it’s working for them. It’s not integrated into their other business systems like their ERP or their shop management software well. Maybe the user experience front facing to the customer isn’t what they had hoped for. They’re just not seeing the overall adoption and use of the site the way that they had hoped. Walk me through kind of the way that somebody should be thinking about making a change. And then I’ve got another scenario I want to run by you.
Kris Harrington
If that were happening to me, the first thing I would go is to my internal teams and ask them for their feedback, what’s missing from the site? Do you use the site? Why don’t you use the site? Have you had challenges using the site? Walk me through those challenges. Really try to learn from your own internal people related to the site that you have. I would do the same with customers that I trust, customers that go back. You’re going to know which customers are buying online from you, and some that either tried or didn’t or did and stopped. Go talk to them. Understand. We forget so much that we have feedback that we can get from customers to learn. These could be very small things that we need to improve. Most websites today are tied to Google Analytics 4 solution that can help you understand which pages your customers drop off of. Go figure out, have you had a drop in traffic? At what point did you have a drop in traffic? Did something change related to your website at that time? Check your site speed. Check your product pages. Understand where you’re losing customers. Often, if it’s a technology-related issue, it’s typically because maybe you didn’t fully integrate, right? If you’ve been putting information online, but it’s static information and it hasn’t changed, and it’s not clear transparency with a full integration to your backend system, whether that be a DMS or ERP system, right? If you’re not pulling real-time parts availability, you’re not giving updated pricing information, you’re not showing the tracking information because you’re not integrated to anything. then that can be a real miss. And, you know, and there was a time when non-integrated solutions were what people were doing to get online. But in the next step, you should really increase the connectivity between all of your systems so that you get the efficiency of the order going all the way into your system. And when customers are looking for information, they know the exact product availability at that time, and they can come back and get, you know, whether that shipped and then go get that tracking information. So I think where it becomes technical is when some of these features that are there in other websites aren’t there in your site, and that’s what people miss. So they keep phoning you and doing the traditional methods. So you’ve really got to talk to your people. If you’re missing the technology piece, then I would meet with certain vendors, understand which vendors are capable of integrating with the solutions that you have and you’re running your business with, and they will be best ready to help you move forward. And I don’t think it’s going to be a wide swath of companies that you’re going to talk to. It will be few. Hopefully, GenAlpha would be one of them. But you’re going to learn from these different vendors what you might be missing in your solution as well, because they’re equipped to ask good questions, and you’ll learn a lot in that process.
Jamie Irvine
Okay, another scenario. I’ve got a bit of an outdated system, but it’s been working great for years. And my customers, a lot of them are kind of old school, and they’re kind of happy with it. And I just don’t feel like there’s a need to change right now. While that may be true in the moment, what’s the risk of having that mentality moving forward?
Kris Harrington
The risk is that the next generation that comes in to do business with you will see it as outdated. So it depends on what that outdated means, right? If your customers have just gotten, it’s okay to wait. So it’s a loading time and loading and loading and loading. And I do business with them regularly and I’m just used to this. The next generation workers that comes in, they are all about speed. And if they see things spinning for a long time, right, they’re not going to trust it’s the right website for them and they’re going to move along. So, you know, when we think about outdated, we need to make sure that we have a solution that meets the needs of all the people that we want to do business with. So we need to think about all the different generations that are in the workforce. I’d go back to being discoverable for AI. If you’re on a traditional site that maybe an older generation is okay with, is it going to meet the needs of being found by these new tools that are coming and coming fast? That’s something you want to stay ahead of because it doesn’t take long for people to switch. And then once they switch, getting them back is very difficult, right? It’s much harder to get a customer back than keep a customer. So we want to make sure that we build on the customers that we have, but that we have a solution that meets the needs of all the buyers out there. So that’s what I would encourage people to think about.
Jamie Irvine
Can you share a success story of someone who is either a manufacturer or a distributor who maybe overcame internal resistance and some of the challenges that just goes along with implementing one of these digital sales channels in the business? How did it go? How did GenAlpha help them to be successful? I’d like to hear that story.
Kris Harrington
Yeah, I can tell you about a manufacturer who was really reluctant, it’s a private company. The father runs the business, and a younger son was coming into the business in a sales role. And the younger son was pushing that they needed to do something different to continue to be relevant in the market that they were serving. So one came from that traditional selling approach, and the younger son had that younger mindset. And there was some reluctance that, you know, is their data ready? Are their systems ready? And we see this come up all the time. One thing we do know is that they upgraded their ERP to be ready for an integration because the older version of the ERP they were on could have changed the course of how we would have had to do the integration. So by upgrading the ERP system, it prepared them for the steps that they would be taking in all types of technology transformation. And then we looked at the data that they do have. And we said, OK, let’s look at this data, and let’s put this data into categories that would be helpful to your customers. How do they shop? When they phone you today and they’re looking for parts information, what are the questions you ask them in order to help identify the product that they need? And we started taking the data that they have categorizing it in that fashion. They also had serialized products. So we made serialized search enabled. We enabled a diagram so that they could easily, you know, hotspot a part and find the part information that they were looking for. And, you know, within six months of launching, this company had 40% of their parts business online and had over 2000 orders on the site. Now, this was several years ago. Today, they’re selling attachments online by using a product configurator. They’ve fully opened the site up to the public. It’s not just private to their customers. They’ve well gone over that 40% of their business online today. So now, through the proven way in which their customers change the way that they’re doing business with them, everybody has bought in and they decided to do more with their solution. And we find this to be true all of the time. So many people are reluctant to move online in this space because they don’t think their data is ready. But what I found is that people do not work on the data to be ready until there is a project that requires them to get their data ready. So we have to start where we are. You got to get going with an e-commerce solution or some change in your digital presence to start working on the data that needs to be improved. Because there’s no magic bullet here. There really isn’t. Even with AI, I think AI is going to help us gain some efficiency in how we shape our product data. But we still have to do the work. You still have to identify the brands that you represent. You still have to get that product data from those manufacturers. You’ve got to change your abbreviations. You have to have a project that requires you to do some of this work. That’s when the real data will start. And again, I truly believe with analytics and the information, once you’re driving people to use these tools and they’re using them, it will drive where you should focus. So you don’t have to solve for everything in the beginning. You just have to really get started.
Jamie Irvine
So if we’re looking ahead at 2026, give me three things that we have to be looking at to continue to be successful with our digital sales channel.
Kris Harrington
Yeah, the first is I think we have to work on our digital presence. So in all aspects, this is your website, your e-commerce site, ensure that people can find you. I don’t know about you. You just actually shared a really good example of how you used AI. I used a tree trimming service recently that I found using AI, looking locally for who could help me with the service, and it came up. More and more of us are going to these tools to get answers. So we have to work on our digital presence, period. I do think data is still something that has to be cleaned by everyone. Everybody can improve their data, but most of the companies that I’ve talked to who have either been doing e-commerce for a while or are just getting into it, they haven’t spent enough time in this area. And this isn’t a set it and forget it type thing. This is a sales channel, right? When it comes to selling online, you want to make sure your product data is really clean. The other thing I would say is we need to optimize for mobile. Mobile is not going away. That’s one thing that, again, continues to accelerate. We’re using our mobile devices more than anything else when it comes to doing business. Our customers are out, they’re not in offices now, yes, a lot of times, you know, a fleet buyer will be sitting in an office, but that’s not the only customer that’s out there. How are people finding your information from a mobile device? I think these are three key areas that we’re going to be focused on in 2026. And honestly, if you don’t step up with these, I think you are going to fall behind.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, I agree. If you’re not in those three areas working diligently and making progress, I think you’re out of the game. It’s that simple. Okay, we’ve talked about a lot of things. I always like to end my interviews with this question. What’s one thing, if out of everything we talked about today, what’s the one thing you want people to remember from this conversation with you and GenAlpha?
Kris Harrington
I would go back to the Digital Commerce 360 information I shared. In September, they reported that there are 2.5 billion queries a day on ChatGPT. That’s just one of the many generative AI platforms. And 2.1% of it is shopping today.
Jamie Irvine
Not to interrupt, but those are numbers that remind me of like 1999 with the early internet.
Kris Harrington
Yeah.
Jamie Irvine
Like it’s like if you missed all of that the last 20 years, you have a chance to like reboot and jump on the next wave.
Kris Harrington
Right. But you know, I feel like back then, there was more time to respond to that demand. I really do think, you know, what’s happening right now is happening faster than we’ve ever seen. So this adoption of, you know, of AI and using these tools and how fast they’re changing the way things are happening, if you don’t have a foundation in which everything that AI is doing can be built on, then you are going to be missed. You have to build the foundation, period. If digital can’t find you, if an agent can’t find you, and this is true for The Heavy Duty Parts Report, it’s true for GenAlpha, it’s true for a parts seller or a supplier, right? We have to be discoverable today by these tools. And I think it is going to be our work in the next 12 months.
Jamie Irvine
You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and we’ve been speaking with Kris Harrington, CEO of GenAlpha. To learn more about GenAlpha, visit genalpha.com. Links are in the show notes. Kris, thanks for being on the show for a fourth time. As always, it didn’t disappoint.
Kris Harrington
Thank you, Jamie. I appreciate the opportunity.
Jamie Irvine
And thank you to all of you who are either listening or watching to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I really appreciate the ongoing support. And as always, I want to encourage you to be heavy duty.
