On October 1, International Motors switched on Fleetrite.com, a storefront where fleets, independent shops and owner-operators can search, price and buy across the company’s full parts portfolio — roughly 400,000 OEM, Fleetrite and all-makes part numbers — in a single transaction.
Jordan Birch, International’s vice president of parts, put the pitch in one line: “Find the part, see where it is, know when you’ll have it – all without picking up the phone. That’s what keeps trucks earning.” That last clause is the story. An OEM with more than 600 dealer locations has decided the parts phone call is a defect to be engineered out, not a service to be staffed.
What they actually built
Search by VIN, vehicle, SKU or category. Live inventory read from three places at once — the local dealer’s shelf, the ten parts distribution centres across the US, Canada and Mexico, and digital stock. Order tracking, reorder history, and API access for fleets that want it wired into their own systems. Behind it sits a network shipping 6.6 million parts a year against a 95% fill-rate target inside 24 hours.
None of that is especially clever technology. It is plumbing: a catalogue, live stock, checkout. But it resets what a buyer with a truck down expects from every seller, including the independent two exits away who has no intention of building a 400,000-SKU storefront.
The expectation moves before the technology does
The gap was already measured. BCG, working with MEMA Aftermarket Suppliers, surveyed the commercial-vehicle aftermarket this spring: 44% of distributors, dealers and service providers said customers now expect faster delivery or response times, and 38% reported skill gaps on the parts counter, in sales, or in the bays. In the same survey 70% had some AI in place but only 14% were getting value from it — the difference being whether it touched the actual bottleneck.
For most independents the bottleneck is not the catalogue. It is the hour. A driver finds a cracked air dryer at 9pm Thursday. The OEM store answers at 9pm. The independent’s phone does not, and the order goes wherever it is answered. Cross-referencing, fitment by VIN and “is it on the shelf” are exactly the questions a parts seller fields all day and all night — repetitive, answerable from data the business already holds, and currently gated behind one person at a counter.
Where parts sellers should start
Pull last month’s call log and count the misses — calls that rang out or hit voicemail between 5pm and 7am, plus anything on Saturday. Multiply by your average order value. That number, not the OEM’s press release, is what the gap costs you.
Write down the five questions the counter answers most. In practice: does this fit my VIN, is it in stock, what does it cost, when can I have it, what’s the cross-reference. All five are answerable from your own catalogue and inventory, in English or Spanish, without waking anyone up.
Then make something answer them on every channel. A web chat that handles fitment while the phone still rings out has moved the problem, not solved it. The useful version takes the call, the text and the web enquiry, then sends the caller a price, availability and a checkout link — the same answers wherever the buyer starts, with the awkward jobs handed to a person who already has the context.
Track three numbers: share of inbound actually answered, minutes from question to a price-and-availability answer, and quotes that convert. If the first is not near 100% within a month, the rest does not matter yet.
International just told the market that a parts buyer should never wait for a human to be free. Agreeing is the easy part. Being open at 9pm on a Thursday is what gets the order.
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