Case Study: Cars LLC, Drive Productivity With the Ascent eBay Connector on Salesforce

About Cars LLC (OldBuickParts.com)

Cars LLC (OldBuickParts.com) is a niche Buick automobile parts vendor. A family run business for nearly 50 years, the company began when the founder purchased a 1951 Buick automobile from his grandfather. While searching for parts to maintain the car, he quickly realized it was a cumbersome process to locate and purchase specialized automobile parts. This led to the creation of Cars LLC, as the founder collected hard to find Buick spare parts and resold them out of his family’s garage. Cars LLC is now the world’s largest Buick parts supplier with 1M+ pieces of inventory and 15,000+ SKUs for 1935 – 1987 Buicks.

Opportunity

Like many family run businesses, as the company grew it became increasingly difficult to manage the volume of sales orders and inventory parts in Excel spreadsheets and paper-based systems. This became even more challenging as Cars LLC extended its sales channel to eBay, with orders exceeding tens of thousands annually. There simply wasn’t enough time to manually enter nearly 10,000 eBay orders; especially with eBay’s policy of shipping to customers within one business day.

This led to long weekends for employees, process bottlenecks, inefficient sales and customer service, and mismatched data records due to the manual entry of unique pricing and shipping costs for eBay customers. Adding another layer of complexity, Cars LLC creates many bills of materials (BOMs) to build custom kits, which requires another level of sophistication to manage.

Solution

When the founder retired from the business, his son Logan, took over leadership and began a search for technology to help Cars LLC scale with its customer growth. While QuickBooks was used for basic accounting, the company needed a way to better manage sales orders and have real time inventory control capability, including returns and PO management. This led Cars LLC to select Salesforce and Ascent ERP to provide a complete end to end cloud solution on the platform.

Ascent Solutions certified partner Aethon Consulting built an eBay connector for Ascent in Salesforce. Cars LLC uses the Ascent eBay Connector capability with Ascent Master Planner to create purchase orders and add inventory items to better manage eBay orders and maintain parts in stock. The new system provides a connected front and back office for a better sales process and improved customer experience. Information is also saved more accurately now and the company has freed up 8 hours per employee per week to work on other critical activities for the business.

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