Amazon is the elephant in the room when it comes to selling your auto parts online simply due to its market penetration and captive customer base. What makes Amazon uniquely successful for those of us in the parts and accessories space is Amazon’s auto parts finder which is especially potent when combined with the ability to add fitment data to your listings (think ACES and PIES if you’re not sure what we mean by this). When paired with listings that take advantage of color variants and customization fields, your customers have an unrivaled way to find the auto parts by vehicle they need in no time — leaving eBay Motors in the dust.
Discover the Top 3 Best-Selling Amazon Auto Categories
After you’ve determined that you want to list your auto parts on Amazon, your next step is to figure out the top selling auto parts & accessories on the Amazon Marketplace to drive maximum sales. Obviously, the best place to start is to look at the broad set of categories that are available to automotive parts and accessories sellers on Amazon. Pairing away specialized niches that tend to attract a small audience (like the RV Parts and Commercial Equipment categories) as well as vehicle specific categories like Replacement and Performance Parts, we’re left with three major categories:
- Exterior Accessories for Cars
- Interior Accessories for Cars
- Lighting and LED for Cars
Car Exterior Accessories
This category will include things like billet grille upgrades, chrome trim, nerf bars, tonneau covers, front lip/side skirt lip kits and wind deflectors. The best sellers in this category tend to be aftermarket accessories sold by companies like Lund, Putco, American Car Craft and MGP Caliper Covers.
Car Interior Accessories
Did you know that Amazon actually has a page that aggregates all of the best-selling interior automotive accessories? It’s true and it’s spectacular to boot! This category has even more to offer from items like floor mats, shifter knobs, dash kits, window tints, seat covers and universal interior molding trim. In addition to these familiar items, there are a ton of niche items like gel enhanced seat cushions, garbage cans, seat back organizers. Brands of note include WeatherTech, Rvinyl, Lexxen and Spec-D.
Car Lighting & LED Products
LED replacements are probably the largest single item type among all auto parts and accessories sold on Amazon. There are too many brands to count but other best sellers are replacement headlights for upgrades like halo lights, projectors and HIDs too. Spyder Auto and Oracle are brands to watch in this space. LED lights fit a lot of different applications, such as: running board lights, taillights, brake lights, turn signals lights, headlights, instrument cluster and gauge lights, license plate lights, trunk lights, side marker lights, and more.
Other Automotive Categories
The great thing about these categories is the ease of entry: you don’t need incredibly detailed fitment data. At most, YMM (year, make and model) is required for you to begin listing thousands of great selling items. This makes it easy for the general consumer to purchase—which is another reason why some of these are such popular auto parts and accessories. Outside of these three categories of automotive parts, there’s also a lot of demand for parts in these categories as well:
- Air Filters
- Battery Accessories (chargers, jump batteries)
- Decals, stickers, and Replacement Emblems
- Keys and Keyless entry fobs (mostly replacements)
- Manuals and Literature
- Car tires and rims
- Performance Chips and Programmers
- Shocks and Struts
- Car Covers
- Weatherstripping
Although none of the categories above are as popular as the automotive exterior, interior and lighting accessories categories, they still have a lot of demand and present a great opportunity to generate additional auto parts and accessory sales.
Best Practices for Selling Amazon Auto Parts & Accessories
If you do a quick search for the term “auto accessories” on Amazon the results that come up will tell you everything you need to know about how to market and sell automotive exterior, interior and LED accessories and products on Amazon. The following best practices will ensure that you come out ahead of the competition and get your piece of the Amazon auto accessories pie:
- Sponsored Listings: The first thing you’ll notice when you search for anything on Amazon are the sponsored listings. Not only should this tell you that you’ll want to consider using this feature, but it can also give you an idea of what types of products do the best on Amazon. These are cost-per-click so you only pay for what people click on.
- Pricing: This holds true whether or not you sponsor your products, although, if you’re priced competitively, you have a better chance of converting that click. Amazon shoppers aren’t as price sensitive as eBay shoppers but the A9 algorithm puts a high priority on prices.
- Inventory: If you don’t have adequate inventory in stock or you experience a part that is out of stock, your listing may disappear. Your metrics will also take a hit if you have to cancel any orders for this reason.
- Text Relevancy: Including everything from the product title, to the bulleted description and product copy. You’ll want to do some keyword research to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
- High-Quality Product Images: You’ll be rewarding in the search by including high-quality images of your product that are zoomable. Amazon recommends that images “be 1,000 pixels or larger in either height or width, as this will enable zoom function on the website (zoom has proven to enhance sales). The smallest your file should be is 500 pixels on the longest side.” Be careful about watermarks and text however as these are against policy.
- Using the Correct Categories: Categorize your Amazon auto parts correctly to reduce buyer confusion and increase sales.
- Use Enhanced Brand Content: If you have your own brand you can modify the description fields of your products so that instead of just a description, you get to tell your story. This allows you to enhance images and texts and add differentiating design aspects to your descriptions.
Other factors to consider are ensuring that you have a generous return policy and low-cost or free shipping. Yet, you should keep in mind that, unless you submit manual exemption requests (you can send a spreadsheet of 1000 SKUs at a time) all returns are automated and use Amazon prepaid labels billed to you.
Making the Most of Amazon Automotive
Now that you know what to do to ensure that your auto parts listed on Amazon will sell, you need to do a quick review of whether it makes sense for you, in particular, to be selling any of these parts or accessories on Amazon at all. As we covered in an earlier article which discussed the merits of selling auto parts on Amazon, the marketplace may not be the right fit for every brand, product mix and/or seller. In particular, you’ll want to consider the following before making the leap to listing your entire catalog on Amazon:
- Do you have the resource to ensure compliance with Amazon’s ever-changing policies regarding listings and products? If not, you may not want to rely on any income stream that you generate from Amazon because they have no compunction about suspending sellers to protect their brand and customer trust.
- Are you a pure drop-shipper? If so, Amazon is probably not the place for you because you likely can’t control fulfillment times and will likely end up with a suspension for policy violations and shipment times.
Some other things to consider are the difficulties of managing sponsored listing campaigns and roadblocks to other features. As case in point are Enhanced Brand Pages: even though they’ve been shown to increase conversion across all products by as much as 45%, they aren’t going to be available to those of us without your own private label brand.
In the final analysis, however, not using sponsored listings or enhanced product pages don’t have to be the death knell for your attempts to sell your auto parts on Amazon. In truth, if you cover the fundamentals in terms of pricing, inventory, copy and product photos you’ll find yourself making more money than you thought possible. Let us know what auto parts and accessories are top sellers for you below—we’d love to see if you move a lot of other products not shown on our list.
If you’d like to know of other eCommerce Auto Parts website solutions to sell parts online, other than Amazon, check out our List of Auto Parts eCommerce Websites.
