A new report says that combining the websites selling parts and accessories for each of its four core brands is starting to give GM greater success in generating e-commerce profits while cutting the number of digital shopping sites from eight to four.
Automotive News reports that GM’s plan of bringing together spare parts and accessories under a single website encourages visitors to shop for both, increasing efficiency and the likelihood that customers will find what they’re looking for rather than coming away empty-handed.
All four of the principal General Motors brands – Chevy, GMC, Buick, and Cadillac – have a unified website selling parts and accessories. The combined approach generates additional traffic, with 6.2 million visits to the family of websites between August 9th and December 31st, 2022, before the consolidation, and 7.9 million visits during the same period in 2023 following the consolidation.
Many shoppers on the sites choose to pick up their orders at a local dealership, with 280,000 dealership visits made in 2023 for exactly this purpose. According to GM, 92 percent of people who buy parts and 88 percent of those purchasing accessories pick up their purchases at a dealership, creating additional opportunities for sales.
The General Motors director of e-commerce, Kristie Bidlake, says the automaker views the results as successful. She says the strategy is based on “what is important for our customers” and that GM undertook it to reclaim sales that would otherwise have been funneled through Amazon or Walmart.
Bidlake asserts that “for our customers and our dealers, we were losing market share to those big players” and that the change is helping to bring sales back to The General’s e-commerce sites.
The strategy also frees dealerships from building their own websites to sell parts and accessories. GM is now able to “essentially provide them a gateway to connect to customers that they have potentially never connected with before,” according to Bidlake.
General Motors started consolidating some websites in 2022 when it merged GM Genuine Parts and ACDelco parts into one site. Combining more websites should also enable the automaker to maximize its profits from an increasing trend of purchasing automotive accessories online. Chevrolet generated record sales in 2023, approaching its $615 million accessories sales goal by November.
Some stores are already reporting massive jumps in sales following the website consolidation, with Carl Black Automotive Group seeing the number of orders jump by 36 percent and dollar amounts spent soar by 60 percent at some pilot locations immediately following the change.
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Comments
The GM Parts website is honestly pretty great. I used it last year to buy spark plugs and a serpentine belt and they were all cheaper than anywhere else, including Amazon. Some more expensive parts that I checked are much cheaper than any other source, in large part due to free pickup versus expensive shipping for large/heavy products.
My advice to anyone who uses it is to compare prices from different dealerships as their markup varies a lot. I’ve seen things that were maybe $800 from one dealer and $1300 from another 10 miles away.
It’s less likely the actual sites and more likely the price/quality ratio. Amazon isn’t as cheap as it has been, and eBay has become a junk peddler. I will say, unlike some OEM’s (looking at you Japanese and Germans in particular) GM products are fairly affordable, and quality is very high.
GM’s site is pretty good, no question.
BUT also consider that certain “big player” sites have gotten THAT BAD. From blatant knock-off items to orders regularly getting lost in transit.