Should a Repair Shop Have an eCommerce Store?
Learn how Dieselmatic can help repair shops grow their business.
Episode 130: We’ve talked a lot about parts companies setting up eCommerce stores on this show. But what about repair shops? Should they have an eCommerce store for their customers?
To help answer that question, we talked to Nick Adams who is the Managing Director at Dieselmatic.
Nick Adams leads Dieselmatic as they continue their 2nd year of rapid growth throughout North America by providing a comprehensive marketing solution for heavy-duty repair shops. From premium websites to the Dieselmatic Dashboard, monthly reporting, and DieselDoc articles, Dieselmatic’s solutions aim to help the diesel repair industry catch up with the digital world.
If you’d like to grow your diesel repair shop, with the heavy-duty aftermarket industry’s new secret weapon, Dieselmatic, now is a perfect time.
Dieselmatic is offering special discounts for listeners of the Heavy-Duty Parts Report podcast.
To get your discount visit Dieselmatic.com, and schedule a call now.
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Complete Transcript of Episode:
Jamie Irvine:
You’re listening to The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. And this is the show where you get expert advice about heavy-duty parts that keep trucks and trailers on the road longer while lowering cost-per-month. We’ve talked a lot about parts companies setting up eCommerce stores on this show before, but what about repair shops? Should they have an e-commerce store for their customers?
My guest today is Nick Adams, the Managing Director of Dieselmatic. Now Nick Adams, he leads Dieselmatic as they are continuing their impressive second year of rapid growth throughout North America, by providing a comprehensive marketing solution for heavy-duty repair shops, they specialize in working just with heavy-duty repair shops. They help them from everything from premium websites to the Dieselmatic dashboard, monthly reporting, diesel doc articles, and Dieselmatics solutions are really all aimed at helping the diesel repair industry catch up with the digital marketing world. And one of the things I know about Dieselmatic is they help repair shops find new customers and fill up their bays with lots and lots of work. So I’m very excited to talk to Nick about this subject. Nick, welcome to The Heavy-Duty Parts Report.
Nick Adams:
Hey, thanks so much for having me Jamie, very excited.
Jamie Irvine:
So when we think of a repair shop in the heavy-duty truck repair industry, and they’re doing trucks and trailers, they’re offering a service, but oftentimes they’re buying parts and installing them. And sometimes they’re buying parts and selling them. So what should a repair shop consider before they go out and launch an eCommerce store?
Nick Adams:
Man, I think we’re gonna have a good back and forth on this. Maybe we’ll do a little bit of like the devil’s advocate of whether you should or you shouldn’t because there are definitely different situations in which somebody should consider eCommerce or not. You know, I mean, I would say one of the main factors for consideration is where you’re at in your business, right? Are you a new shop who is looking to generate another source of revenue through drop shipping in an eComm, maybe not the best way to go, right? It’s a lot of work unless you have a good understanding of e-commerce systems, inventory and management shipping, managing your website. It’s a lot to go into on top of running your repair shop.
Jamie Irvine:
That’s kind of the point though, right? Is that if you’re running a repair shop, your core competency is repairing trucks and trailers. Not necessarily everything that goes into selling parts. So you’re just about to go into the other side of that. So I’d like to hear what you have to say.
Nick Adams:
So the other side of it, is the side where, you have established your shop and you have a solid system in place, you’re well known within your community, you’re not having big ebbs and flows of good months and bad months. You have consistency within your business. And you’ve started to either specialize into one certain area, maybe your area is or your shop, your cat specialists, right? And your stocking specialty, parts, maybe your inventory has just grown to facilitate the repairs that you’re doing and your inventory is large enough to start considering eCommerce and scaling that side of it. Obviously everybody’s gonna line up on one side or the other somewhere in between those two and figuring out, you know, where you’re at and whether the time and investment is worth it it’s whether you’re gonna be on one side of the spectrum or the other.
Jamie Irvine:
Right. And there’s lots of challenges running a repair shop from the diesel technician shortage all the way through to new technologies coming faster than most repair shops can even keep up with. One of the considerations I think that I would think about is, is this going to enhance our business or is this going to actually take away from our core competency and make it harder for us to do the job that we initially set out to do because we’re diverting resources away from that repair shop and getting those trucks and trailers in and out of our shop efficiently. So that’s a big concern.
Nick Adams:
Yeah. And I’m curious too with the shops that you’ve worked with more on the heavy-duty repair side of things, when somebody’s gone from just holding inventory to switching towards eCommerce, we talked about this, I threw some questions into a live you did a couple days ago, but another big consideration is inventory syncing. If you have your inventory listed in two places, whatever system you’re using for inventory management and then a separate system of listing all of your products online, you’re gonna have a nightmare on your hands of like, if you sell something in your shop, you have to update it online. If you sell something online, you have to update it in your shop inventory. So you have to make sure that you have a sync going in between them. And I’m curious, like some of the shops that you’ve worked with, have you run into that at all before, and what your experience been like with setting that kind of stuff up?
Jamie Irvine:
Hey, listen, Nick, I’m the one who asks the questions on this show, not you. So most repair shops that I dealt with because I was working in as a sales account manager and we were essentially their warehouse. So they didn’t stock a lot of product because first of all, they didn’t necessarily know what parts they were gonna need day to day. You know, there things like brakes and batteries and drums and things like that that were almost considered consumables that they just knew they were gonna go through. So they stock some of that. But for the most part, depending on what was diagnosed that day, those are the parts they ordered. And so they would use our parts center as almost like a proxy warehouse for their operation. There were some repair shops that were at larger scale, and oftentimes these were the repair shops that had multiple locations.
And to your point, selling parts became a way to add a revenue stream. And because they had multiple locations, they were managing a lot more inventory and therefore they had an ERP system that would allow them to have that multi-location inventory management system in place. Now integration with the ERP to the repair shop system that they’re using was always an issue. So like on that live stream, I mentioned Fullbay. They have really emerged over the last couple years as a dominant player in that space and providing a really next level solution. So I think historically the IT side of it has been one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. And certainly I think a lot of the repair shops are selling parts almost by way of the business that they’re in. They have fleets and customers that are coming to them for maybe repairs that the fleets can’t do themselves. And sometimes an owner operator or a fleet might call them up and say, Hey, we’re looking for this part, can you supply it? And they would take that sales order on the phone, not really through eCommerce. So that’s why I wanted us to have this kind of discussion, this round table discussion about it, because that question of should repair shops even get into eCommerce. Is it, I mean, this is an absolute must if you’re in the business of just selling parts, but if you’re primarily in the business of repairing equipment, where does it fit, and when should you do it?
We’re gonna take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Don’t have a heavy-duty part number and need to look up a part? Diesel Parts is a cross reference and parts look up tool that makes it easier to identify heavy-duty parts than ever before. Go to parts.diesellaptops.com or download the app on Apple or Android to create your free account. We’re back from our break. And before the break, we were really analyzing whether or not repair shops should get into the eCommerce side of the business. And Nick had some good suggestions and he threw some questions at me, which is kind of funny, because I’m the host, I’m supposed to ask those questions, but I love the fact that we can have this two-way conversation. So Nick, what I’m really curious about is what’s at stake for the repair shop when evaluating this decision and deciding whether or not to go into the eCommerce side of the business and start selling parts. I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.
Nick Adams:
Yeah. To kind of tie it all together, there’s a kind of a middle ground of, you know, not doing eCommerce or doing full eCommerce and that’s doing like a pseudo eCommerce. So talking to customers on the phone, placing an order over the phone, it works right. But tying in more systems of communication with your customers is always better. So a pseudo eCommerce is something that you can set up where your parts are listed on the website, but they’re listed just with a contact form. So a good example, I’ll share here, Adrenaline Diesel. So they are heavy-duty shop in Alberta, Canada. So what we’ve done for them is set up a part section where you can search by engine manufacturer. So let’s say someone knows that they need some Cummins part.
Jamie Irvine:
So Nick, I’m just gonna describe for those that are listening. Maybe you’re listening on TNC radio and you’re driving down the highway. So what he’s shown is he’s shown the website in the top menu. There’s a parts section. When you click on that, it creates a dropdown menu. There, you can see the different engine manufacturers from there. Let’s say you pick Cummins. And now you’re seeing on the screen the different Cummins models.
Nick Adams:
Perfect. And then you click in, you choose your model and then you’re seeing, all right, I’m searching. Like I know I’m on the right page. I’m searching for ISX series engines and then a general list of cylinder heads, EGR coolers, fuel systems, manifolds, turbos. What we’ve done with Adrenaline Diesel is just kind of left it here. You can go another step and, you know, specify specific parts within those categories. But what we’ve done is, you know, just make it very clear. You can put a little tag here where you have, you know, Brayden is there outside sales, all his contact. And then if you go onto any of them, that’ll call directly to him or you go to a get pricing screen and then you send an inquiry based on what you’re looking for. So that’s kind of the middle ground pseudo eCommerce that allows you to list your parts on your website and have customers contact you based on them without having to go through the whole process of setting up a true eComm system, syncing it with your inventory and worrying about incoming shipping, managing inventory levels and all that kind of stuff.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah. I think that’s a great step, right? You can start off where maybe you don’t even touch parts and then you can say, okay, we’re established, we’re to the part where we are selling some more parts, now we listed in the way that you just showed as an interim step. And then as the business expands further, then you can look at implementing a true e-commerce platform where people can just, you know, one click and order, and then you handle fulfillment. Nick, let me talk about the situation that I think a lot of repair shops would find themselves in, which is that perhaps there’s some fundamentals around their website and their marketing that they haven’t put in place yet and eCommerce is two or three or maybe four steps down the road. So let’s talk about those fundamentals. What fundamentals should they be focused on before they ever even consider listing parts or adding eCommerce to their site?
Nick Adams:
A little bit of background into Dieselmatic and why we do what we do, how we kind of got into the heavy-duty industry. One of the first shops that we worked with, where they were started out around $500,000 a year AR and after about two years, I think we got them to two and a half million. When it really clicked for me the owner moved from a a 750 square foot house to a 3,500 square foot, two acre property, and I realize that these small things that we do for marketing in the heavy-duty space, it makes a really drastic difference. The industry as a whole lags because you are forced a lot of the time to work with a local marketing company that probably doesn’t know the industry very well. It wastes a lot of your time trying to explain things to them, teach how to do what you do, explain to them what an EGR is.
So some of those things, if you are that person and who’s working with a local company, some of the things that you can ask them to make sure that they know what they’re doing is ask them about your services and how they want to articulate them. One of the things that we do that makes the biggest difference is breaking down services into individual service pages. So having a service page, you know, not just your services listed in a bullet point form, but having your services listed on an individual page with information about that service timeline recommendations of how often brakes should be repaired. If your Canadian CVIP sections, if you’re American DOT inspections, how the process goes, the general pricing is, all of those kinds of things make a drastic impact on your local search rankings. So where you show up in organic Google search results and Google maps result depending on people’s proximity to you. So that would be the number one thing that you know, we recommend.
Jamie Irvine:
I got a question about that. So if you have one main service that you offer, but you offer it in a lot of different locations, should you build location pages for that one service? So for example, I only offer one service, but I do it in six different cities. So should you build individual landing pages for each of those cities in that situation? And then conversely, if you do a lot of different services, should you have each in on its own page and also location pages? How do you handle that?
Nick Adams:
Yeah. So the way that we recommend doing it is you have service pages, right? So if you have, you know, whatever, 10 to 20 different service types that you offer everything from, just really splitting them up, brake service, transmission engine rebuilds, making sure that everything is articulated. So listing all those out as service pages, and then on those service pages, listing your service areas, right? So if you have locations then linking those locations to and pages, each of those location pages are separate. And then on each of those location pages, vice versa, you list the services that you offer at that location. If you want I can show another example. I know where people are probably listening. So this would be a good example, Specialized Truck Repair in Tennessee and Mississippi. So lots of locations, so listing all their services, right. Nice and simple. Let’s say we have engine diagnostics and individual service page. So heavy truck engine diagnostics, and a little bit of information about it, a form to book and contact the shop customer reviews and social proof. And then conversely, we have locations. So listing out each and every location. And then within that location, we have a list of these services that they offer at that location.
Jamie Irvine:
That makes a lot of sense to me. And for those listening, who may not understand this, Google is always updating their algorithms. So, you know, that being the main search engine that we’re always targeting for search traffic, and one of the big changes in 2021 was Google stopped looking at entire websites and started looking at individual pages. So now each individual page is being ranked. And so that’s why this strategy is so important because it enables, you know, one person told me that Google’s kind of like, the AI is kind of like a child. If you have all the pieces of the puzzle in a box, but they’re all mixed up, you’ve gotta show Google the picture of what your business is all about. And then Google will take all those pieces and put it together and then put you on like the top of a search query for your service in your location. And so that you get that organic traffic. So I see that this strategy is important. A lot of people often say to me, and I don’t work with repair shops as often on the consulting side. For me, it’s mostly heavy-duty parts manufacturers, but principally it’s the same situation where they say that’s a lot of content and it’s like, yes, and that’s what your website needs to perform well.
Nick Adams:
It needs a lot of content, it needs people. Search engines have evolved to be better for people not for search engines, right? So the old systems of gaming search engines by just stuffing them full of keywords, it doesn’t work, right? The things that work is creating content that is actually valuable to people, you know, content that people want to read, making your site logical, to be able to navigate, to get to whatever the customer wants to do. Do they wanna make a call? Do they wanna send an email? Do they just wanna get information? All of those things, you know, those are the things that make a difference. Like you’re saying Google’s updates are much more based on the amount of time that people spend on your website. So if they spend more time reading interesting content, it’s probably a more valuable website than your local competitors.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah. So I think that the reason that I wanted to go into this part of the conversation was just to demonstrate to any repair shop owners who are listening. The fundamentals here on your website are so important. And if you haven’t even begun, if a lot of this is sounding kind of like overwhelming and maybe a bit confusing, it probably is a good indication that you’re not ready for eCommerce. For more advanced organizations, who’ve done all these fundamentals. They’ve got a great lead generation system. They’re busting at the seams for work, and there’s all this opportunity to sell parts. That’s when overlaying another system and adding to it can create this second revenue stream. So we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the customer and the buying experience when we come back from our break, we’ll be right back.
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Nick Adams:
Yes. Yes. I always have thoughts on it, my best recommendation and something that is not technical. When you are in the early stages of designing the framework of your website and the layout, bring your website on your phone to your parents, give your parents your phone and watch them try to do something that you tell them to do, tell them to book an appointment or tell them to try to call the shop. Can they do it? Do they stumble? It is our job is to make sure that those kind of user interactions happen smoothly. And it is one of the most frustrating things when you watch somebody who is in their sixties or seventies, try to navigate the website and they can’t get where they need to be. So that’s always a really easy one to make sure that what you’ve laid out actually does what you want it to do.
Jamie Irvine:
This really resonates with me because about 45% of our listeners have subscribed to our email. They get the email and then it’s a one click for them and they listen or watch the podcast directly on heavydutypartsreport.com. Why do they do that? Why is it because they really don’t want to figure out how to use a podcast player, or they might be on YouTube, but that’s not where they’re going to listen. So quite a large portion of our audience does that. So if you haven’t done that, go to heavydutypartsreport.com, right on the homepage, it’s very easy. Just put in your email address and you’ll get that weekly email where you’ll get notified of the next episode. So I certainly, as a podcast host had to figure that out and make it as simple as possible.
Nick Adams:
That’s how I’ve listened to them. It’s way nicer than having to go through to Spotify or Apple and pull ’em up. I mean, once you, I think once you get to the point of a listener being a regular listener and they’re subscribed to it in their platform. Yeah. That works. But it’s nice that you have it straight one click through email, right. To the website where you can listen.
Jamie Irvine:
And so principally why I brought that up is because that’s in line with what you’re talking about is that we have to consider the customer. Who is your customer? Are they trending towards younger people who want to be on one platform or another? Are they still, you know, people who are traditionally been in the industry for many decades, and they’re gonna want to get access to information about your repair shop in a different way. You’ve gotta understand what your customer wants. And as those customers change their requirements and their expectations are gonna change and then you can adapt. But it always starts with that asking yourself that question, like what’s good for my customer.
Nick Adams:
Exactly. And understanding a customer journey. So one of the most common customer journeys is whether you’re on the part side of things or the service side, a customer is going to search what they’re looking for. A part or a service they’re going to click on one or three of the top three to five results, organic results or ads that come up. So you wanna make sure for organic results that your website is ranking well for SEO, for ads, you wanna make sure that you are running Google ads in effective campaigns. Once the user clicks on the, on the website, they’re gonna go to your website and a couple others. They’re gonna decide, you know, whether or not your business provides the product or service that they’re looking for. And then, and this is the important part they are either going to take an action or not, right? So they are either going to call your shop or send an email. If they do not do that, and this is where most shops stop and don’t think about it anymore, past that. If they don’t take an action, maybe they’re not ready to buy that part right now. Maybe, you know, they’re looking for service in a month from now.
What you want to do is continue to have your brand and your business be top of mind for them. So your business website should not just be a brochure that sits there. There should be a lot of data collection and analytics that are going on in the background that collect that user data and then re-serve them ads and target them based on them, visiting your website. So what we do is if a customer comes to the website and doesn’t take an action, we will re-serve them branded ads on, you know, social media platforms, through the Google display network that articulate your business the service offerings what they were looking at, social proof, customer reviews, to make sure that when they get to that point of service decision, that it’s an easy choice for them, right? Your brand credibility has already been built up. They trust you because they’ve seen you and they come back and take that action. So those are important steps to be thinking about and setting up in the customer, buying journey and process.
Jamie Irvine:
If someone is thinking to themselves, this is way over my head, this seems really complicated. Obviously one thing they can do is hire someone like you, but what’s the economic impact of doing nothing? Where is the trends going and how much it could that actually be costing a repair shop?
Nick Adams:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, we don’t have the data on the people who don’t take action. We just have, the data on the people who do take action, the best kind of stories. I mean, you can always go to, Dieselmatic.com and check out our case studies of customers and the results that they’ve seen. There are two conversations you can have with that either anecdotal or analytical. So on the analytical and data side of things, it’s significant, I would say on average, we see a 20 to 30% quarterly increase in the amount of traffic and inquiries going to Dieselmatic partners. Just really quickly breaking that down that means that if your average RO is, you know, $1200 to $1500, that means with a 35% profit margin, you’re somewhere between, $350- $500 profit per customer. Increasing those customers by 30% quarter over quarter is gonna mean at minimum, depending on where you are, five to 10 new customers a month on top of that, which means, you know, you’re in the five to $10,000 profit increase.
Jamie Irvine:
And that’s profit.
Nick Adams:
Profit’s the thing that matters, right? And that’s the big thing that we care about. We do a lot of our Dieselmatic dashboard and monthly reporting gives profit based return on investment numbers, because if you’re not making more money, and you are paying the marketing agency to market your shop, then neither of you are gonna grow, right. We’re not gonna continue to grow because you’re gonna fire us and that’s the way it should be. And so the other side of things is the anecdotal side of things, thinking about yourself, how you interact with other businesses, how people interact with other business, it’s digital, right? For the most part, you know, let’s say you want to grow the emergency road service side of your business. That’s happening on the phone not necessarily phone calls. People are looking on their phone, broken down on the side of the road and searching Google for emergency road service near them. So having marketing strategies, having a digital presence that is geared towards understanding those customers like we’ve been talking about and how they experience their service or parts buying experience happens is, you know, economically very, very important.
Jamie Irvine:
You’ve been listening to The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. And we’ve been speaking with Nick Adams, the Managing Director at Dieselmatic. To learn more about Dieselmatic, visit dieselmatic.com, links will be in the show notes on the site. If you’d like to grow your diesel repair shop with the industry’s newest secret weapon Dieselmatic, now is the perfect time. Dieselmatic is offering special discounts for The Heavy-Duty Parts Report listeners. To get your discount, visit dieselmatic.com and schedule a call now ,links are in the show notes so that when you click that link, they’ll know you’re coming from The Heavy-Duty Parts Report, but it does help if you mention that you came from the show as well. So visit dieselmatic.com today to get your special discount. Nick, thank you so much for taking some time to talk about this subject and being on The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. I was glad to have you here.
Nick Adams:
Thanks so much, Jamie, and thanks for answering my questions too.
