The B2B Platform Built for the Way Auto Parts Actually Sell

Selldi is an all-in-one sales system for automotive parts wholesalers: a B2B store where garages search by OE/OEM number and cross-reference, check vehicle fitment, and reorder in seconds; a B2C store for DIY buyers; a field-rep CRM; and an AI Email Reader that turns emailed orders into ERP-ready documents. One shared catalogue of warehouse, products, customers and per-workshop pricing, integrated with any ERP via API, running multi-currency and multi-language for cross-border EU trade.

It is 7:40 in the morning and the phone at a parts distributor near the ring road has already rung four times. A mechanic wants a water pump for a 2014 saloon but only has the number stamped on the old one, caked in oil and half unreadable. Someone emailed a list of eleven items overnight, pasted from a workshop program, no part numbers, just descriptions like "front brake discs, vented". A third caller is at the trade counter holding a box, insisting the alternator he got last week is the wrong one. And the van needs to leave on its first run in twenty minutes.

None of this is unusual. It is Tuesday. Anyone who has run an automotive parts business knows the product itself, the pump or the disc or the filter, is almost the easy part. The hard part is everything wrapped around it: matching a vague request to the exact reference, knowing whether it fits that engine and year, quoting the right price for that garage, and getting it out the door before the customer calls the competitor down the road. This is the work a B2B platform for auto parts has to make faster, or it is not worth having.

Search that speaks the language of part numbers

Automotive is unlike almost any other wholesale category because the identifier matters more than the name. A customer rarely searches for "brake caliper". He searches for a number: an OE reference from the vehicle manufacturer, an aftermarket manufacturer code, an EAN off the box, or the number of a competing brand he has always used. And critically, the same physical part carries several of these numbers at once.

Selldi's B2B store is built so a single search box accepts any of them. Type the OE number and it resolves to the item; type a supplier's aftermarket code and it lands on the same product; scan the EAN and you are there instantly. Cross-references sit on the product record itself, so when a garage searches by the original manufacturer number, your equivalent from a quality aftermarket brand comes up as the match, not a dead end. That is the difference between capturing the sale and hearing "never mind, I'll try elsewhere". The buyer does not need to know which brand you stock; he knows the number he is replacing, and the platform does the translation.

Fitment: the question behind every order

The number gets you close. Fitment closes the deal. A mechanic ordering a timing belt kit does not want the part that is probably right; he wants confirmation it fits a 1.6 diesel built in that year with that gearbox, because a wrong kit means a car up on the ramp going nowhere and a very unhappy phone call. Selldi lets you attach vehicle compatibility data to products, so a buyer filtering by make, model, engine and year sees only what actually fits. Fewer wrong parts shipped means fewer returns and credit notes, and returns in this trade are expensive beyond the freight, because a returned part often cannot go straight back on the shelf as A-grade stock.

Hundreds of thousands of SKUs without the platform falling over

A serious parts distributor does not carry a few hundred products. Filters, pads, sensors, bearings, bulbs, wipers, fluids, across dozens of vehicle platforms, easily runs into six figures of active SKUs, and the long tail is where the margin often hides. Selldi is designed to hold a catalogue at that scale and still return a search in the time it takes a counter assistant to finish a sentence. Structured categories, manufacturer and vehicle filters, and per-product attributes keep an enormous range navigable rather than a haystack. The value is a customer finding the one part he needs without asking a human.

The warehouse runs on the scanner, not the keyboard

Behind the counter and in the racking, nobody is typing part numbers. They are scanning them. Selldi supports barcode scanning through a phone or a handheld, so picking an order, checking stock on a shelf, or confirming the alternator in the box matches the line on the order becomes a scan, not a squint-and-retype. It sounds small. On a day with two hundred order lines it is the difference between the van leaving on time and leaving late, and it removes one of the most common causes of the wrong-part return: a human transposing two digits under pressure.

Every garage sees its own price

No two workshops buy on the same terms. The high-volume fleet garage across town has earned a sharper price than the one-man operation that orders twice a month. In automotive that pricing logic is not a nicety, it is the relationship. Selldi handles per-customer and per-group pricing, so when a garage logs in it sees its price and only its price, with its agreed discounts applied. Credit terms work the same way: account customers see their limit and terms, so nobody renegotiates on every order. Quick order lists and saved baskets let a regular reorder his usual thirty items in seconds, and recurring orders cover the predictable monthly stock-ups without a phone call. For requests that need a human, a built-in RFQ flow keeps a bulk or unusual quote in one place instead of a lost email thread.

The orders that arrive as a mess of text

Here is the reality every distributor lives with: a large share of orders never touches your ordering portal. They come as an email with a list pasted in, a PDF from a workshop system, an Excel sheet, sometimes a photo of a handwritten note. Someone then retypes all of it into the ERP, line by line, which is slow and is exactly where wrong quantities and references creep in. Selldi's AI Email Reader takes those emails, PDFs and spreadsheets and turns them into structured, ERP-ready order documents, matching the text to your catalogue and flagging what it is unsure about rather than guessing silently. The order that took a clerk fifteen minutes of retyping becomes a review-and-confirm, time handed back to people who could be selling instead of transcribing.

Selling across the border, and to the DIY crowd

Parts do not respect borders, and neither does demand. A distributor in one EU country routinely sells to workshops in three others, which means invoicing in more than one currency and speaking to each buyer in his own language. Selldi is multi-currency and available in eight languages, so a garage in another market browses, prices and orders as if you were a local supplier. And because the same warehouse and catalogue can also face the public, you can run a B2C store for the DIY customer, the enthusiast rebuilding a project car, the person who just wants a wiper blade, without a second system or a second stock file. One catalogue, two audiences, priced correctly for each.

One system instead of five, wired to your ERP

The pull of an all-in-one system is not tidiness for its own sake. It is that the B2B store, the B2C store, the field-rep CRM where your reps track which garages they visit, and the CENTER module that pushes your range out to marketplace channels all share the same warehouse, products and customer records. A field rep sees the same stock the customer sees; marketplace listings draw on the same inventory as the trade counter. And the whole thing connects to your ERP through an API, whether that is SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite or another system, so stock, prices and orders stay in sync rather than living in four places that disagree by Thursday afternoon.

When this is not the right fit

Honesty helps here. If you sell a handful of part numbers to two or three long-standing customers who phone their orders in, a platform like this is more machinery than you need. If your catalogue is genuinely tiny and never changes, the fitment and cross-reference engine solves a problem you do not have. And if your business is really a physical trade counter with no ambition to take orders any other way, the digital side is overhead rather than leverage. Selldi earns its place when the range is large, the customers are many, the same part carries several numbers, and orders arrive faster than a person can retype them, which describes most growing parts distributors and very few tiny ones.

The morning at the trade counter never gets quiet. But the difference between a good parts business and a stressed one is usually how much of that morning goes on finding, matching and retyping versus actually selling. That is the work worth handing to the platform. The best way to judge whether it fits is to see it run against your own catalogue rather than tidy sample data, so ask for a walkthrough with real part numbers, real cross-references and a real messy order email.