The automotive aftermarket industry has seen a huge shift in how retailers sell products to their customers. Gone are the days of brick-and-mortar stores with cars on display out front. These days, most people buy their car parts online, whether from an OEM or an aftermarket retailer. With the rise of eCommerce, your business needs to provide fitment data for your customers if you want them to buy from your Amazon store.
As most already know, Amazon is the largest eCommerce marketplace around. It’s also the most competitive. If you want to sell automotive parts on Amazon successfully, you must ensure that your products are accurately listed with fitment data. This is where a good fitment tool comes into play.
There are a few different types of fitment tools on the market, and it can be hard to determine which one is the best fit for your business. You need to make sure that you choose a tool with all of the features you are looking for because it will impact how well products sell within Amazon’s catalog.
How Does Fitment Data Works On Amazon?
Fitment data is the type of information used to determine whether or not a particular auto part or accessory will fit on a certain vehicle. Amazon has an extensive catalog of products available for purchase. Retailers need to make sure that the products they sell will actually fit the vehicles their customers are using. This is where fitment data comes in handy- it can help retailers identify which products work with which vehicles.
Also known as compatibility, application, or ACES data, fitment information lists the brand/part numbers that may be used to install certain car models. For example, according to fitment information, ACES data shows that the ACDelco 41-993 spark plug fits a 2000 Cadillac Escalade (and other vehicles). The Aftermarket Catalog Enhanced Standard, or ACES, is the industry standard used for describing and communicating fitment information.
When operating on Amazon’s Seller Central, retailers will encounter some of the following situations:
- If an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) has no fitment information, the Part Finder stripe will prevent customers from determining whether a product fits their vehicle.
- If a part does not have fitment information, the Part Finder stripe on an ASIN’s detail page will read “Shop by vehicle” (if there is no car entered) or “Find parts for your:” (if there is a car entered).
- If a product has fitment data, it will display either “Select your vehicle” (if there is no vehicle entered) or “This does not fit your” (if there is a vehicle entered).
What Is Amazon’s Part Finder
The Amazon Automotive Part Finder is a website tool that allows consumers to see if specific goods (items that only work with certain automobiles) will fit their cars. It also aids customers in locating items that will fit their vehicles. This tool focuses on displaying relevant information in the form of a ‘check-fit’ stripe that appears on product (ASIN) detail pages.
Customers can use the Part Finder stripe to see if a product fits their vehicle’s Year, Make, and Model by inputting that information into it. Additional vehicle information such as Trim or Engine type may be required to determine what part will work. If the component fits the specified automobile, the stripe will turn green. Customers who know they can access their purchase history, in which parts are identified, from anywhere on the internet can buy parts for their cars with confidence. This lowers returned and canceled orders.
Amazon’s Part Finder provides some of the following functions:
- Customers can use the Shop Parts by Vehicle page to look for parts for a certain car. This area may be accessed from a detail page by clicking the ‘See all products that fit this vehicle’ link in the Part Finder stripe, or it can be reached from the main Automotive page via the ‘Go’ button after you enter your car.
- Customers using the Part Finder Search Stripe may filter search results to only those that are suitable for their car.
- The Compatibility Chart is a table accessible through a link on detail pages that shows all of the fitment records for an ASIN.
- A customer’s saved cars are shown on the Your Garage page.
Part Finder works with automobiles, light trucks, SUVs, vans, motorbikes, scooters, and ATVs. It does not support medium/heavy-duty vehicles. In Part Finder, you can only include part-specific products. You cannot use universal goods such as universal floor mats and seat covers, air compressors, or OBD2 scan tools.
That said, automotive aftermarket retailers with an online store on Amazon still need to add fitment data about the parts and components they sell, which may not exist in Amazon’s fitment database. For this reason, retailers need to use a fitment tool capable of incorporating their information into their Amazon store.
There are a few different fitment data tools on the market, and it can be difficult to determine which one is the best for your store. Let’s take a look at some of them and compare their features:
Automated Fitment Validation
The ACES automotive standard compares a vehicle’s fitment to target databases that include point-in-time data on vehicle configuration. Groups of individuals who study cars and keep track of the information in car tables like the ACES Vehicle Configuration Database (VCDB) generate and maintain these vehicle datasets.
These vehicle tables are written by aftermarket researchers rather than the OEM producers, and they represent a “best guess” based on information that can be found online and in other publications. Even though expert specialists carefully investigated this data, it is never completely correct because of its nature.
This implies that regardless of how much effort you put into it, your fitment data will have a “shelf life’’ similar to milk in your refrigerator. And the longer you go without updating it, the worse it gets.
After a few weeks, enough automobiles that your parts and accessories were linked to were removed from the vehicle tables. Many are replaced with new vehicle configurations. From this, two possibilities emerge:
- Any parts and accessories associated with these records become unreliable. As a result, your components can no longer be searched by those records on the marketplaces listed above.
- You are not linked to the new vehicle records frequently submitted to fix the old ones. These are “Holes” in your data, as they represent missing information.
Every time these criteria are updated, myFitment automatically revalidates your data so you can act quickly to maintain your vital business asset as up-to-date and operational as feasible while also increasing sales and lowering returns.
Export Fitment Reports
Excel lets you view and change fitment data in bulk when necessary. Rather than forcing users to complete repetitive tasks in a user interface, myFitment is dedicated to making running your fitment business asset as easy as possible. In order to get your fitment in Excel format for bulk editing and other uses, use myFitment’s numerous report options.
A Comprehensive Knowledge Base
Vehicle installation consists of many topics, including validation, holes, formatting, component types, inheritance, variations, and hundreds more. It is a problem domain that may need many years to master.
There’s still A LOT of ground to cover while myFItment strives to make the administration of this essential business asset as quick, simple, and efficient as possible. The myFitment Knowledge Base distributes both basic and complicated fitment information in manageable portions for easy consumption by the general public.
Over the years, we’ve worked with a wide range of service people from many different backgrounds and walks of life. Our team’s combined experience in vehicle fitting covers the following topics:
- myFitment services
- An analysis of how the various marketplaces work in terms of fitment
- General knowledge and information about aftermarket data standards
- Important news about the fitment sector
Fitment Inheritance for Amazon
If you have multiple Amazon parts with the same fitment, you may use our inheritance tool to share them quickly. We refer to such a relationship as “parent and child.” You can add the fitting to one part number (the parent part number) and then set the other part numbers (the children part numbers) to inherit its fittings. This will greatly streamline processes and save tons of time and resources in the process.
ACES XML generation necessitates a high enough level of expertise to justify higher subscription fees at other vendors, in some cases exceeding $500 per month. myFitment is committed to offering this cutting-edge feature at an affordable price point for our eCommerce customers.
Customer Support
myFitment prides itself on providing excellent customer support to all of its users. You can contact myFitment through the live chat feature and email support.
Without the right technology in place, you’re going to have a hard time getting your business off the ground by importing fitments from Amazon into Google shopping or other marketplaces that offer this valuable service for automotive retailers with products available on Amazon. Suppose you are looking for a comprehensive tool that will enable you to import product data from any source to make it visible in these listings without spending hours doing so manually every day. In that case, myFItment is here at your disposal!
