Vertical Development’s ShowMeTheParts database can show your customers which parts will fit their vehicle, what those parts look like and what their design characteristics are. That just leaves one thing they can’t find: inventory. With the near real time inventory system, your customers can see how many of an item you have in stock alongside all the other information that helps them find what they need for their vehicle. We recently added this feature to AP Exhaust’s catalog to take some of the work out creating a parts order.

This system is automated, so when a part is ordered, it’s subtracted from the inventory automatically. These inventory changes are pushed to the website every hour, which is far faster than the days it can take to get information into a system by manually filing and checking orders against the inventory. Automating this process also eliminates errors made when transferring stock information to the system, so the inventory is always accurate.

For buyers ordering from a distributor or wholesaler, that means they don’t have to call ahead to make sure the parts they want are still available. AP Exhaust added real time reporting to their site at the request of their customers. Their distributors already use SMTP to find the parts they want to order, so it seemed logical to display the inventory alongside the parts information. This doesn’t just shorten the time it takes to make an order, it makes it easy for these customers to choose alternative products if the part they want isn’t currently available.