Ecommerce for Industrial parts distributors

Your store ships orders.
It should be building
accounts.

We build the parts store so buyers want to buy. We run the ad and marketing campaigns that bring them in. Then we route the ones worth a call to your sales team.

Let's Chat

Heavy duty · automotive · industrial

PIES-HD, ACES & VMRS

Fitment & cross-reference

Order routing to sales

Problems we solve

A buyer from a major national airline ordered through a store we built. Nobody in sales knew it happened.

That order could have become a managed account. Instead it was a packing slip.

We connected that store to the sales team — value thresholds, territory routing, company enrichment, alerts that land where reps already work — and the same buyer became an account conversation.

How many of those have you already
shipped? That's the one nobody sees.

Here's what distributors told us about the rest.

“We have no online visibility.”

Buyers were searching for these parts and finding somebody else. We built the store around how they actually search — fitment, cross-reference, the part number in their hand.

“Daily orders are slow. The floor needs to be busier.”

The store took orders but nobody owned growing it. Paid, search and CRO now run against it every month, and day-to-day revenue grows quickly.

“Seventy percent of our revenue sits with a handful of customers.”

Losing one big client would have been detrimental. New accounts sourced online are how that concentration comes down without buying anyone.

“My reps are working a cold list they built themselves.”

The website already knew which companies were buying. Now those names become warm leads for the rep to own, with the context to make the call.

Nobody's job description says “watch the website for contacts worth calling.” And nobody does.

Results

We drove orders until fulfillment became the constraint. Now this mid-market distributor's website is one of their top five revenue sources.

Heavy Duty Specialists sold the traditional way. Phone, counter, fax. They doubted any of this applied to them. We built the store, handled the catalog data, grew it vendor by vendor, and ran the demand engine on top.

$1M+

In store revenue in 16 months.

20:1 ROI

For every $1 spent with us, the client generated $20. A typical target ROI is 3:1.

+30%

Average monthly profit margin from the online store after shipping fees.

Read the full case study

“Luma Visibility's work has opened the door to different markets...international customers and high-profile clients. The team meets deadlines, stays on budget, and communicates constantly. We're impressed with the team's personal care and investment.”

David, Vice President @ Heavy Duty Specialists

Read the full verified review on Clutch.

How it works

Our Web Order-to-Pipeline System™. You start where you are.

This runs as an ongoing engagement, not a website project. Nobody signs up for all three on day one, and plenty of distributors never need the first one.

Build

Stand the store up or fix the one you have.

Shopify B2B build or rebuild

PIES-HD and ACES setup

Fitment and cross-reference

Matrixify catalog load

Launch with 1-2 vendor lines

Generate

Launch advertising campaigns to drive orders at scale.

One vendor line per quarter

Dropship, so no inventory risk

Google Ads and retargeting

SEO, AEO and email

CRO across the buying paths

Acquire

Connect the store to the people who can close.

Enrichment on every order

Account-fit scoring, not cart size

Territory and rep routing

Alerts into how reps work

Feedback loop on what converted

Where you're starting

Which one sounds like you?

There's no wrong place to be. Each of these starts at a different one of the three stages above — pick the one that sounds like you. Whichever you start at, every engagement includes basic order alerts from month one. You should never have to wait three years to find out who's buying.

Starts at Foundation

You have little or no online presence, and few online orders if any.

Buyers are searching for these parts now. Without a store built for how they shop, they find someone else. We start with one vendor line, on dropship, so the risk stays small.
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Parts data is the hard part here — fitment, cross-reference, PIES-HD.

First move: build the store and get one vendor line selling.

Starts at Foundation or Expansion

You have a store, but it isn't close to its potential.

It usually failed for a nameable reason. Someone built it like a product catalog. Buyers can't confirm a part fits, and can't find it by the number in their hand. We diagnose first, then fix.
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Most stores at this point need weeks of work, not a rebuild.

First move: diagnose what's actually broken, then fix that.

Starts at Foundation

The store drives revenue, fulfillment is handled, and you want bigger national accounts.

You don't have a store problem. You have buyers arriving who should be accounts, and nobody watching for them. We profile your best accounts, then score every order against that profile
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This is the highest-value work we do.

First move: profile your best accounts, then score your order data against it.

Why Luma

Taylor & Matt · 90 seconds

Neither of us found this industry on a spreadsheet.

Taylor grew up going to parts stores. The counter, the catalogs, waiting while somebody looked up a number in a book. That's not a market she researched — it's where she's from.

Matt spent seven years in industrial sales before this, sitting across from the same people you'd send us to.

So when you describe your buyers, your vendors, or why the counter still beats the website — we won't need it explained.

Why doesn't anyone else do this?

Because it sits between three industries, and each one solves a third of it.

Luma

Does the data, runs the demand, and routes the buyers to your sales team. One system, one accountable party.

Data vendors

Clean your PIES and ACES files, then hand them over. They don't sell anything.

Dev shops

Build a good store and leave. They're gone before anyone finds out whether it sells.

Ad agencies

Spend your budget on traffic. They've never opened a fitment table.

What you get with Luma

You talk to the person doing the work

Founder-led out of Omaha. No account manager relaying messages to a team you never meet.

Raised in it, and sold in it

Taylor grew up going to parts stores. Matt sold industrial for seven years. Neither of us needs your world explained.

We say no

If fulfillment isn't solid, or there's nobody to hand an account to, we'll tell you and walk away.

Who we work with

Parts distributors with sales teams & large catalogs.

The work transfers anywhere fitment, cross-reference and vendor lines exist.

Heavy duty truck & trailer

Brakes, suspension, drivetrain, electrical. VMRS on one side, PIES-HD on the other.

Automotive aftermarket

Light duty, performance and specialty. Year, make, model fitment at scale.

Construction & agriculture

Off-highway and equipment parts, where the VCdb coverage is thinnest.

Bearings & power transmission

Interchange tables, dimensional search, and cross-reference against a dozen brands.

Industrial MRO supply

Deep catalogs, contract pricing, and buyers who order the same twelve things forever.

Aviation parts

Where our first enterprise buyer came from. Different data rules — ask us before assuming.

We're not the right call for everyone.

Being specific about this saves us both a meeting.

A good fit

→ $20M–$200M in revenue, one to fifteen branches

→ Fulfillment already works, because we intend to stress it

→ Your customers include fleets, municipalities, utilities or leasing companies

→ Someone can work a sourced account, even if it's one person

→ Your catalog is complicated

Not a good fit

Fulfillment isn't solid yet. We've driven demand until it became a client's constraint. Good problem, but only if you're built for it

Nobody to hand a sourced account to

You want a website built and handed over. That's a different kind of firm, and there are good ones

You're shopping for the cheapest ad management

Pricing

What does this cost?

Start small. One stage, one vendor line, one month at a time — nothing here asks you to commit to the whole thing on day one. Two calls and a holepunch analysis come first, and we only scope the work once we both know what is actually broken.

Ongoing engagement

From $2,000_/month

A starting point, not a package. We scope to what you
actually need, and it only grows if the work does.

What moves the number

Whether we're building the store or improving one you have

How many product lines come online, and how fast

Your ad spend — managed at 10–15% of budget

Whether account routing and enrichment are in scope

How we start

Two calls. You'll know if this is worth doing by the end of the second.

No proposal on call one. No pitch deck. We look at what you've actually got and tell you what we find — including when the answer is that you don't need us yet.

Discovery call

30 minutes

What you sell, who buys it, what you've already tried, and what happens today when an order comes through the site. You'll get a straight answer on whether any of this applies to you.

Ecommerce Teardown

We go do the work

We search for your parts the way a buyer would and show you who comes up instead. We try to buy from you — fitment, cross-reference, the part number in someone's hand. And we look at what your order data would tell a sales team.

We walk you through our findings

45 minutes

Every hole we punched, what each one is costing, and the one thing we'd fix first. You keep the findings whether or not you ever work with us.

Let's Talk

Questions we get

Fair objections.

What is PIES-HD, and why does parts data matter so much?

PIES-HD is the heavy duty extension of the PIES product data standard. It arrived in 2020 and covers 20 product categories, so the tooling around it is still thin. ACES handles fitment — which parts fit which vehicles. Both come from the Auto Care Association.

Heavy duty is harder than light duty for one reason: trucks are spec'd to order. Two same-model tractors can take different brakes, axles and suspensions. So fitment can't resolve cleanly to year, make and model the way it does for cars.

There's also a second language. Your suppliers send PIES. Your customers' shops run VMRS, a coding system from the American Trucking Associations that's been in use since 1970. Nothing reconciles the two automatically.

This is why cross-reference and fitment came out as the top two unmet digital needs at the Heavy Duty Aftermarket Dialogue this year, and why it held whether a company had spent $250,000 on their platform or a billion. A store that can't confirm a part fits, or find it by a competitor's number, doesn't have a conversion problem. It has a data problem wearing a website costume.

Isn't this our marketing person's job?

They're one person running a store, a catalog and everything else. Routing high-value buyers to sales isn't a marketing task. It's a revenue system, and it belongs to whoever owns revenue. In practice the marketing lead becomes our closest partner, because it finally makes the store something leadership takes seriously.

Our store already works. What would you change?

It works at selling transactions. The question is whether it's sourcing accounts for your sales team. At most distributors nobody has ever checked. That's a routing and enrichment problem, not a redesign — it's the Acquisition stage, and it doesn't touch your store.

Do our customers really buy parts online?

Some don't, and heavy duty moves slower than the people selling ecommerce like to admit. The industry forecast 15% of parts purchasing would be online by 2021 and it came in at 11%. But it isn't going backwards, and your buyers research online before they call. The question isn't whether they buy on the site. It's whether they find you at all.

Do our customers really buy parts online?

We tried an agency before and it didn't work.

Usually for the same reason. They treated a parts catalog like a product catalog. Load the SKUs, take the orders, hand it over. Parts don't work that way. Tell us what happened and we'll tell you whether it's fixable.

How long before this produces anything?

Paid demand moves in weeks. Catalog and fitment work takes a quarter to do properly. The routing only matters once there's traffic worth routing. That's why the stages run in this order instead of all at once.

What if the order review finds nothing?

Then we tell you, and we tell you what to fix instead. It means you don't have a routing problem yet. You have a demand problem, and that's a different engagement.

Your store ships orders. It should be building accounts.