Heritage Parts Centre

Challenges

Errors and inconsistencies littered Heritage Parts Centre product information, which caused its knowledgeable and passionate group of customers to lose trust in the brand.
Heritage Parts Centre’s extensive and varied product catalog made it impossible to enrich products in a timely fashion, making it challenging to update product information or correct errors.
Customers could not easily search for or find specific products due to issues with product information resulting in poor product experiences.

Benefits

Implementing a single source of truth allowed the company to offer accurate information, restoring faith in its brand and leading to increased conversion rates.
Akeneo PIM allowed Heritage Parts Centre to implement efficient product creation and enrichment processes, allowing the company to update products instantly.
Improved accuracy and consistency of product information led to a dramatically enhanced product experience.

The Challenge

Need a new bumper for your vintage Volkswagen Beetle or Bus? Maybe the clutch on your decades-old Porsche has gone faulty and needs to be replaced. But no modern repair shop has the parts you need to fix your beloved classic car, and they don’t know where to find them either. So how do you get your vehicle back on the road where it belongs?

If you’re a fan of classic Volkswagens or Porsches in the UK, you probably should start with the Heritage Parts Centre, a classic car parts supplier based on the South Coast of England. The company boasts a large and varied catalog of parts and accessories for these vehicles, totaling more than 30,000 individual parts covering more than 20 different vehicles.

Founded in 1986, the company built a reputation as a go-to brand for replacement parts. So, in an effort to expand its reach, the company looked to create a digital offering that could bring its parts to customers in a wide range of locales.

Heritage Parts Centre was eager to bring its large and diverse catalog of classic car parts to enthusiasts online but struggled to accurately and consistently recreate that catalog via its eCommerce store.

Rob Tickner, head of digital for Heritage Parts Centre, noted that previous to using a PIM solution, the company’s highly technical and varied catalog was difficult to enrich and maintain. Errors and inconsistencies plagued product data, causing customers to struggle to find the parts they need and lose confidence in the company’s products. Demand on their contact centre teams grew as the company could not update products and correct these errors and inconsistencies on a frequent basis, meaning that customers continued to find incorrect or outdated information when shopping on the Heritage Parts Centre eCommerce site. This also caused the company’s time-to-market to slow to a crawl as it was unable to add new products to its catalog in a timely fashion.

So, to navigate around the obstacles that blocked the company’s path to success, Tickner and Heritage Parts Centre turned to PIM for help with its product information problems.

Our customer base is very passionate and very knowledgeable, so we needed to be able to fix the errors in our product information if we wanted to succeed.

Rob Tickner, Head of Digital

The Solution

According to Tickner, implementing Akeneo PIM had a noted impact on the company’s product enrichment processes and the product information presented to customers.

The first task forthe PIM team was radically accelerating time-to-market by updating its product enrichment processes. This led to increased accuracy and consistency in its product information. To do so, the company turned to Akeneo PIM’s accelerated workflow capabilities, including automation and a business rules engine, bulk actions and editing, and more.

With the improved product information offered by Akeneo PIM in place, Heritage Parts Centre could also more easily update and correct errors and inconsistencies in product information, which helped win back customers who had lost faith in the brand. It also allowed the company to offer a more dynamic digital experience to its customers shopping online, allowing them to shop by vehicle, by type of part, by manufacturer, and by many other criteria.

Implementing Akeneo PIM has been like putting a supercharged engine into your car.

Rob Tickner, Head of Digital

The Result

Accurate, consistent product information

Before Akeneo PIM, errors in product information were causing Heritage Parts Centre customers to lose faith in the brand and abandon planned purchases. After beginning their PIM journey, however, the company was able to rectify these errors and inconsistencies in product data, helping them win back classic car enthusiasts’ trust.

Constant enrichment and updates

Implementing Akeneo PIM allowed the company to radically rethink how it adds new products and enriches product information for existing products. Rather than updating products once a year, Heritage Parts Centre can now do so “nearly instantly and constantly,” Tickner said, allowing the company to accelerate time-to-market and improve its product data accuracy.

Increased conversion rates and revenue

What do you get when you combine increased accuracy in product information with nearly constant product information updates? A dynamically improved product experience and increased digital revenue! Tickner noted that the company had seen an “organic uplift in conversion rates” since implementing Akeneo PIM, thanks in large part to the company’s improved ability to “present information to buyers that can confirm their buying decision.”

Case Study: Heritage Parts Centre

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