Store Announcements
It’s been a little bit quiet on the Clickable blog recently, but that’s because we’ve been completely focused on developing our latest major website upgrade. You might not notice any visual differences at a quick glance, but there are two significant changes that will make finding the right parts for your vehicle much, much easier.
Our redeveloped ‘Quick Finder’ system now allows you to enter in the exact model of your BMW, filtering out irrelevant parts that don’t fit, as well as displaying customised messages that are tailored to your specific car (so if you’re buying for more than one car, just be sure to re-enter the details of the second model into the ‘Quick Finder’ box to confirm suitability!). These messages contain targeted fitment information such as compatible date ranges, transmissions, and body styles, all in a succinct and easy-to-understand format.
This update is something that we’ve wanted to do for some time, and we were in a good position a few months ago to begin the project and dedicate proper resources to it. It’s taken hundreds of man hours to get this point, with over 700 parts on the website being individually researched and cross-referenced to ensure the most accurate information is being provided to our customers. Some people don’t realise, but BMW almost always change and redesign parts throughout the life of a model, and often on completely random dates. Parts can also change according to country -- particularly with Australia, as we’re a ‘hot climate’ country with right-hand-drive vehicles -- so figuring out the correct fitting information meant independently verifying the data for every single part that we stock. As many parts are unique to Australia, you may notice that we recommend different parts to those that are offered by other online stores based overseas.
We’re really proud of the new update, and we believe we have now developed the most accurate parts fitment guide in Australia, second only to BMW themselves. But despite our best efforts, there will of course be things we’ve missed and mistakes we’ve made, so we really appreciate the help and understanding from our customers in this early stage of implementation. As we always say though, if you own a personally imported BMW or you’re ever unsure about the build date of your model, feel free to email us your VIN and we’ll be more than happy to confirm everything on your behalf.
As well as the upgrade to the ‘Quick Finder’ system, we’ve also introduced a mobile-friendly, responsive update to the website. This now makes navigating the Clickable store on a smartphone or tablet much better than it’s ever been. These are just two steps that we’ve delivered as we actively try to improve the experience that our customers have with Clickable Automotive at every level.
One of the more noticeable things with the new ‘Quick Finder’ system in place is how it highlights some of the limits within our catalogue. There are three main reasons for this: firstly, our focus is on mechanical maintenance parts, so we don’t offer things like interior or exterior trims, or performance parts. The second is that the store no longer displays irrelevant parts that simply don’t fit the model that’s been selected. Finally, and most importantly, we almost never offer more than one option for a part. We see it as our job to seek out the highest quality aftermarket parts for the best prices we can offer, so we don’t really understand the point of offering poor quality products or overly expensive products as alternatives that nobody wants. Our entire range is curated so that every part is as good as or better than what was fitted by BMW at the factory, and the guess work is taken out of it for our customers when it comes time to buy.
In the past we’ve written in-depth about our stock shortages, explaining the reality behind these gaps and how we’ve been working hard to resolve them. We feel we’re doing a better job at reducing these shortfalls in terms of both number of products that are out of stock, as well as the length of time that they’re unavailable. But there’s still a lot of room for improvement, and we acknowledge that. We don’t want to appear to be making excuses, however we do like to give our customers some behind-the-scenes insight into Clickable. And one of the reasons we haven’t been able to resolve the stock shortage issue completely is because sales continue to exceed our own expectations, even with projected growth accounted for. As far as problems go, this is one of the better ones to have, and we’re humbled and excited that more and more people are trusting us to look after their BMWs.
Accurately forecasting sales is made more difficult due to the fact that a significant proportion of our stock arrives to us via sea, so any purchasing decisions must be made around six months in advance. Air freighting in smaller shipments to cover the shortfall is an option that is available to us, but it’s an expensive option, and the truth is that the margins just aren’t enough for us to be able to consider it in most cases. We really want to avoid raising our prices whenever possible, so that means working to find the right rhythm to meet the demand from our customers. It’s worth noting that since we first launched in 2011, we’ve avoided making across-the-board price increases on our product range, even with the Australian dollar working against us. The reality is that these stock shortages will unfortunately continue in the short-term, but the long-term advantage is that we’ll have a larger and better product range and it will allow us to uphold our current pricing structure for the foreseeable future.
However, even as we attempt to increase our stock levels, another significant factor continues to be that our suppliers simply cannot keep up with demand. None of these are issues that can be fixed overnight, but things are constantly improving, and we’re grateful for the patience and understanding from our community as we sort through them. Our goal has always been to create the type of online parts store that we would want to buy from, stocked only with parts that we would be comfortable fitting to our own BMWs, and that continues to be our motivation.
If you have any comments about the new ‘Quick Finder’ system or the changes to the mobile-friendly functionality, please drop us an email to hello@clickableautomotive.com.au.