Thanks again WorldPac, I know you want to make sure your existing customers continue to sell their products from your catalog and that is all fine and dandy, however how about making it possible for new customers to also succeed.
Today I’ve spoken with the Technical Director and the person in charge of data feeds for worldpac.com and been told that their off the shelf catalog system that actually does provide you with the information necessary to sell a part is the only thing that they make available to their “new clients”.
The down side is it doesn’t allow for any optimization at all nor does it allow for any site score as everything to do with the parts themselves are served through an antiquated pop-up from your site.
What we need is a simple data feed that would allow us to add the parts they sell to our CMS system. Much like we get with all the distributors we work with including industries that are far larger than the aftermarket parts world. This would allow us to optimize the content and advertise the parts themselves. Being that we are a company that specialize in SEO and SEM it’s very important that we are able to control the data that is on our site. If they would simply allow us their data feed which is available to their existing customers and not to a new customer we could easily outsell most of their existing customers.
My advice to you if you are looking in to selling performance auto parts is find another distributor, or find something else to sell.
As it stands right now, the client is going to have to pay us to launch a site that is garbage but sells their parts for the next year or so then he will have to come back and pay us again to rebuild a site that actually works once we can establish a relationship that gets us the data feed.
Way to go worldpac!!!