Supplying Car Lift Outlet

We are opening a US store dedicated to automotive lifts and would rather understand your dealer terms directly than infer them from your website.

The six questions we will ask

1. Do you ship direct to our customer, and whose branding is on the delivery paperwork?
2. What is the dealer discount off MSRP, and are volume tiers judged per order or per year? In this category a customer order is almost always a single unit, so per-order banding would hold a dealer in the entry tier permanently regardless of annual volume. That distinction usually matters more to us than the headline rate.
3. Are we free to set our own retail price, or do you operate MAP?
4. How is freight quoted, is it curbside or liftgate, and does the customer pay it?
5. Who carries returns and transit damage?
6. How many SKUs are in the dealer feed, and does it include images, dimensions, weights and capacity ratings?

On margin, so we do not spend three emails getting there

Advertising runs at roughly 15% of revenue in this category and card processing takes about 3%. On a $2,700 lift a 15% dealer margin is $405 against $459 of advertising and fees, so the order loses money before carriage or labour. No reseller could trade on that.

If your opening tier sits near there, what we need to understand is the realistic path to 25% and above, whether that comes through volume commitment, a stocking order, or a different tier structure. We are happy to commit to a stocking order if that is what opens a workable tier.

Built to integrate

We build ecommerce sites for a living. This storefront runs on the Serpply ecommerce site builder, which is our own platform, and it runs on it because we chose that rather than because it is all we have. Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce are all things we work on for clients.

Integration is therefore not a project we would have to learn. Our product data model is platform-independent and we can ingest a dealer catalogue as:

Each supplier gets its own adapter. Your SKU structure, your field names and your quirks stay in the adapter and never reach the storefront. We support your SKU and ours side by side, MPN and GTIN where you provide them, cost and MSRP, stock and lead time, dimensions, weights, capacity ratings, freight class and images.

Where a dealer workflow requires Shopify, our catalogue exports to Shopify's product, variant and collection format on a single command and the storefront migrates as part of onboarding.

Product photography

We would like a written licence to use your product photography on our storefront and in our feeds for the models we buy from you. We attribute brand and model correctly on the page and in structured data, we link to you from your brand page, and we remove anything within five working days of a written request.

What we will not do: publish your photography without that licence, reproduce or regenerate your images, remove a watermark, or describe ourselves as an authorised dealer before that is agreed in writing.

Certification and specification data

We publish ALI certification per model with the directory entry behind it, and we publish required ceiling height and concrete specification where we hold your documentation. Where we do not hold it, we publish nothing rather than a plausible number. If you send us the installation manuals, those fields get filled in properly.

Getting in touch

A dealer price list, your MAP policy and your freight terms through the contact page or by email to the address in the footer. If you already have a dealer feed, a sample file and the field definitions are the fastest way to start.