SimplePart increases market share for Atlanta Imported from 8% to 27%
The consumer market for restoration parts for the more prevalent English makes (Austin Healey, MG, Triumph and Jaguar) is served by four primary suppliers – Moss Motors, Victoria British, Atlanta Imported and Little British Car Company. Other specialized players in this space supply niche products (suspension only, electrics only, interior/trim only, etc) but do not serve the wide market as a whole. Moss Motors, in addition to being a player in the B2C space is also the principle supplier of wholesale parts to the other B2C players. That is, Moss Motors is not only the main wholesale supplier but also the biggest direct competitor to Victoria British, Atlanta Imported and Little British. Each of the these B2C-only players sources better than 50% of their stock directly from Moss Motors.
Traditionally, Victoria British has been considered to be the largest Moss distributor West of the Mississippi, while Atlanta Imported was the largest to the East. Little British has always been a mixed player. In February of 2008, there were roughly 69,500 total website visits across all four websites. Some of these visits can be assumed to overlap – one customer may visit all four websites. Here are the total visits for each website:
| Website |
Visits |
Share |
| Moss Motors |
41,500 |
60% |
| Victoria British |
15,000 |
22% |
| Little British |
7,000 |
10% |
| Atlanta Imported |
6,000 |
8% |
It should be clear; Moss Motors had by far more website visits by potential customers than any other market player, by a factor of three. While this may not translate directly to sales, shopping is the first step to buying.
Atlanta Imported’s website, atlantaimported.com, is based on a generic web commerce template package, adapted through custom coding to handle auto parts. Though able to represent the catalog of parts, SEO visibility – and therefore, organic (“free”) traffic volume over time – was minimal. Conversion rates, too, were below expectations for the segment. In late 2007, Atlanta Imported began to experiment in detail with Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising to supplement the organic traffic (3,000 average monthly visits) they receive from word-of-mouth and traditional catalog/magazine/mail advertising. While successful in driving traffic, conversions were still below expectations. This success, however, motivated Atlanta Imported to jump to SimplePart.
Rather than change content on the legacy atlantaimported.com domain, Atlanta Imported opted to deploy a sister website – englishparts.com – to test the waters. Their SimplePart website started out with no “head start” of historical traffic, returning visitors or organic ranking.
The restoration parts market between February and October of 2008 has seen profound changes. The economy as a whole has contracted and discretionary spending is at the lowest levels observed for years; retailers are reporting year-on declines between 30% and 50%. This specific market is also heavily cyclic, seeing a majority of retail sales between March and August; sales volume during the winter months (as observed between 2001 and 2007) is typically down 25% from peak months, in absence of a recession. This drop typically happens from August to November.
In November 2008, across all five websites, there was a total of 59,000 visits with the following breakdown:
| Website |
Visits |
Share |
| Moss Motors |
23,500 |
40% |
| Victoria British |
14,500 |
24.5% |
| EnglishParts |
13,500 |
23% |
| Little British |
5,000 |
8.5% |
| Atlanta Imported |
2,500 |
4% |
As can be seen, in only eight months Atlanta Imported’s combined market share (of website visits) increased from 8% to 27%. Further, the EnglishParts website saw its September seasonal peak in traffic of 17,700 and a 24% drop in traffic from September to November – in line with pre recession figures from previous years. Not to mention, this very profitable growth occurred during a period of drastic economic contraction.
The figures cited thus far have been provided by Quantcast.com, a third party source for website traffic statistics. These statistics are gathered independently and reflect an estimate of traffic and visitors calculated by the same means for all five websites. That is, the figures are designed to show relative changes in traffic rather than hard actual numbers of visits. The changes in traffic during this period are best represented visually:
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Notice that traffic for EnglishParts begins the year at 0, reflecting the "from scratch" start. Traffic quickly builds as catalog data refines, organic sources of traffic build and online ad spend grows. |
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Moss Motors has experienced the largest relative decline during this period, from 60% of market share down to 40%. As can be seen, SEO and SEM for Englishparts have attracted those customers. |
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Victoria British, the largest B2C-only player in the market, has remained relatively flat during this period. |
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Little British has seen a drop from 10% to 8.5% market share |