Parts Unlimited · Western Power Sports · Tucker · Turn 14
Your distributor lets you sell a hundred thousand parts. Your website lists forty.
You can already dropship the whole catalog. No stocking, no float, no risk. The reason it isn't on your site has nothing to do with you and everything to do with how brutal the data work is — which is the part I do.
2.0
Why the catalog never gets built
Every dealer who has tried it knows the shape of the failure. You run the bulk import, ten thousand rows land in the store, and now you own ten thousand pages with no photograph, a description reading PLT,BRK,FRT,ORG, no category, and nothing that tells a customer whether the thing fits their bike. The site gets slower. Google indexes none of it. The parts still don't sell.
So it gets shelved, and that is the correct decision — a bad catalog is worse than no catalog. The import was never the hard part. The work is mapping supplier commodity codes onto categories a human would browse, finding a real photograph for every part, attaching fitment so the bike filter functions, and writing page copy for each product and each category. That is weeks of specialised work, and it is why your competition hasn't done it either.
3.0
What the money is actually for
Parts and accessories carry 35 to 37 percent gross margin — the highest of any department in the building. The benchmark dealer books about 19 percent of total sales there; strong ones run 25. The trade calls the target 100 percent absorption: P&A and service covering the whole dealership's overhead, which is as close to recession-proof as this business gets.
Online powersports is a $2.8 billion market growing 8.6 percent a year, and roughly four out of five of those shoppers are on a phone. Your customer is searching for that chain and sprocket kit tonight either way. When you aren't listed, RevZilla is, and the margin leaves your town.
4.0
Line items
Catalog import
Pulled straight from your distributor's API. No reseller sitting in the middle taking a monthly cut.
Category mapping
Onto categories a customer would actually browse — brakes, tires, chains, filters — not the supplier's internal commodity codes.
Product photography
Sourced from the suppliers' own image servers. No grey placeholders, and no paid image feed stacked on what you already pay your distributor.
Fitment and bike filter
Customer picks year, make and model and sees only what fits. Fewer wrong-part returns, and a path in for someone who doesn't know a part number.
Search copy
A written title and description on every product and every category. This is the step that everyone skips and the one that decides whether any of it is findable.
Price and stock sync
Scheduled, so the catalog doesn't quietly rot back to where it started. Optional, and billed monthly.
5.0
The reference build
Dream Street Powersports, an independent in Tampa running WooCommerce. Every figure below was measured on the live store by an audit script, not estimated.
One detail that will mean something if you've ever had a developer attempt this: writing to sixteen hundred products through the standard WooCommerce interface costs twelve to a hundred seconds per product on ordinary managed hosting. That is an eight-hour job that mostly times out, and running more at once makes it worse because the host serialises them anyway. Done correctly it takes minutes. Knowing that difference is the reason a catalog this size is finishable at all.
6.0
What it costs
| Package | Covers | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog Launch | up to 2,000 products | $2,750 |
| Full Catalog | up to 6,000 products | $4,950 |
| Keep It Current | sync, new products, copy — optional | $349/mo |
| Option | Year one | Year two | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| DX1, estimated $1,200/mo | $14,400 | $14,400 | $28,800 |
| Dealer platform, low end $495/mo | $5,940 | $5,940 | $11,880 |
| Catalog Launch plus the monthly | $6,938 | $4,188 | $11,126 |
Read that honestly: in year one the cheapest rented platform beats me by about a thousand dollars. From year two it stops, because the build is already bought. And they aren't the same purchase — a platform is a rental, so the day you stop paying, the site goes with it. This sits on hosting you already own and stays there whatever happens to me. For a narrower comparison, Spark Shipping charges $249 a month to sync a catalog and nothing else: no categories, no copy, no fitment, no photographs.
7.0
The questions you're already asking
I already have someone who does my website.
Keep them. This isn't web design, it's catalog data, and most web people have never touched a distributor API. It hands off cleanly — when I'm finished your person maintains the site exactly as before, with a few thousand more products in it.
Doesn't my DMS do this?
Some push a parts catalog to a website they also host. If yours does it well and you're happy, you don't need me and I'll say so. What they generally don't do is write search copy for every page — and you don't keep the catalog if you ever leave them.
How long, and what do you need from me?
Two to three weeks, nearly all of it my time. From you: distributor API credentials and admin access to the site. Call it twenty minutes up front, then nothing until there's something to review.
What happens if I stop the monthly?
Nothing disappears. The catalog is in your store on your hosting. The monthly only buys keeping prices, stock and new releases current — cancel it and you keep everything already built.
Will it work on a phone?
It has to — around four out of five powersports shoppers are on one. The bike filter, the categories and every product page are built mobile-first, because that's where the customer actually is when they're standing next to the bike.
Who this isn't for: if you're a franchise store locked to an OEM-mandated website platform, you probably can't do this at all, and no amount of wanting to changes that. Worth finding out in a five-minute email rather than a sales call.