Manage Business Operations Across Multi Parts Selling Channels

If you are an online auto parts or accessories seller looking to streamline your business operations and scale faster, SureDone’s e-commerce operations platform might be a great option. Designed with an automation engine and open API, SureDone connects with existing systems, whether internal systems, marketplaces, or websites. This makes it a great solution for managing products and orders along with frequent inventory and price updates and eliminating repetitive tasks.

The Spork team spoke with Chris Labatt-Simon, the COO of SureDone, about the benefits of this platform for auto parts and accessories sellers. Here’s what he has to say.

Can you describe your product/services as if I knew nothing about it or the market?

If you think of your systems and data like a wheel, there’s the hub in the center and the spokes reaching out. SureDone is a software platform that sits in the middle, as a hub, communicating to every other system —the spokes — and pulling in data, aggregating and manipulating it, and then sending it out to another spoke (another system).

Think suppliers, marketplaces, business intelligence tools, ERPs, CRMs, and advertising platforms. The data could be products, inventory, pricing, orders, tracking, and more. We’re connecting everywhere and exchanging this data, so it goes where it needs to be. SureDone connects all this data and applies rules and automations. We’re like a multichannel e-commerce platform but better.

In addition to this, we have a year-make-model (YMM) plugin for both BigCommerce and Shopify that lets you use your fitment data inside SureDone. This includes both eBay Motors EPIDS and ACES Vehicle IDs.

What’s your experience with the automotive and power sports industry?

Our first customer was a powersports seller who bought used motorcycles on Craigslist, parted them out, and resold the parts on eBay and their website. We built our software for this customer. They went from $100k a year to over $1mil a year in their first year of scaling with SureDone. Now we work with brands, mid-market, and enterprise businesses but still hold to our roots in the auto, moto, and power sports industries.

Further proof of our investment in this vertical is our YMM plugin. How many platforms that compare themselves to SureDone make this kind of investment into how a customer uses the data they store?

What’s the standard ‘elevator pitch’ for your company?

SureDone acts as middleware, consolidating and aggregating product, inventory, pricing, order, and other data from internal systems like ERPs and WMSs, partners, suppliers, websites, marketplaces, and elsewhere. It then allows you to transform and normalize the data and send it back out—whether it’s back to marketplaces, websites, internal systems, or B2B partner connections.

What are the most common misconceptions people have about your business in general?

One common misconception is that “managing a few channels is easy enough.” In reality, as you add more channels, like eBay, Amazon, a BigCommerce site, and connections to partners and internal systems, managing orders, syncing inventory, and ensuring marketplace metrics are met can become overwhelming. Without automation, our customers need to hire more staff, which adds costs for salaries, benefits, and HR management. But when they bring in SureDone, they can connect all their channels, automate tasks, and scale their business—whether handling 100 orders or 10,000 orders a day—without additional staff.

Another misconception is that “it’s too expensive and not worth the investment.” However, automating your data and business rules can reduce the time spent on manual and repetitive tasks and free up a team to focus on more strategic initiatives like content creation, customer support, and advertising. This saves costs and drives growth by allowing your team to focus on what matters.

What is your favorite part about your job?

I enjoy helping prospects and customers make their businesses more efficient. I love talking to people about what and how they sell and sharing ideas to help them succeed. Whether or not they become a customer, I enjoy leaving them with more information than they had at the start of our conversation. I also love connecting people—whether it’s customers to other customers or prospects to companies that can solve their challenges.

Pictured here: The SureDone team at the 2023 SEMA Show in Las Vegas.

When you’re talking to potential customers, what are the 4 most important things you want them to know?

First, we’re focused on the automotive, motorsports, and power sports industries. Our team—from sales to support to development—understands the unique challenges of this space, like fitment, high SKU counts, data quality, and industry-specific terms like ACES and PIES.

<< Learn more about understanding ACES and PIES data in this Spork blog post >>

Second, our software isn’t just about e-commerce. It’s about connecting data—whether that’s for B2B or B2C purposes—syncing systems like PIMs and ERPs or even moving data between warehouses and distributors.

Third, seller success comes from three things: clean data, competitive pricing, and trust. Focusing on data quality, optimizing your pricing, and building trust through ratings and professional presentation will set you apart from the competition.

Fourth, there are products available that claim to have hundreds more features than we do. We’re fine with that. Our belief is you should be good at what you do, so we try not to be everything to everybody and focus on the most important needs of our prospects and customers.

You talk a lot about data and connections. What’s your secret sauce?

It’s our “Automation Engine.” It focuses on where to get the data and what to do with it as opposed to requiring complex code to build the connections and transformations themselves. No waiting months for a connection. No need to hire teams of programmers. Unlike integration systems that are not e-commerce specific, Automation Engine understands what a product is, what an order is, what tracking is, and more.

How flexible is your software? How can you make it so people can use it the way that fits best into their processes? And how do you deal with rapidly changing data?

We know different businesses want to use SureDone in different ways, so we built it to be flexible. We have a comprehensive user interface that lets customers search for, surface, and manage products and orders. Our bulk engine allows you to upload a million rows of data and export hundreds of megabytes of data in one go. Our Automation Engine, which connects to data sources or uses internal SureDone data, ingests and syndicates information automatically.

Our entire user interface is built on top of our open API. This is unique in the industry and means that anything you can do in the user interface can also be done programmatically. We have customers who never even log into SureDone and have fully integrated their internal systems to communicate with our API for data management and exchange.

All this sits on top of a mature 4th generation auto-scaling infrastructure. We’ve built tools that can handle massive data changes at scale—and we’ve even open-sourced these. Our technology architecture was built to handle large amounts of data with frequent changes. This ensures that companies with volatile data get their changes up quickly—which is important during competitive times (like Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday) to reduce oversells and increase profits.

The same goes for the SureFit plugin. Instead of sending all the fitment data to the channel, we cache all of this in SureDone databases designed to handle the massive amount of information. Our plugins then query these databases on demand to generate results. We’ve found this to be far more scalable and performant than other platforms.

How does SureDone ensure that customers get up and running quickly and successfully?

First, we recognize that one size does NOT fit all when it comes to onboarding customers. So, while every one of our onboards follows a strict process to ensure quality control and reduce risks, every one of them is also unique.

It starts in sales with a technical discovery process that allows us to understand the complex needs of a prospect. Then we formulate a defined project plan that incorporates training, data work, and automations. This plan is then placed into our onboarding portal which also allows the customer to view their project status at any time.

We then work with the customer to get them onto SureDone—from data imports to creating specific rules. All the while, the customer is working with the same, dedicated onboarding specialist who learns their business needs and acts as their advocate.

What do you attribute to SureDone’s success?

Our software is amazing, but I attribute a large portion of our success to the team—many of whom have been with us for over seven years. And our sales team is focused on finding the right fit, not just closing deals.
Our onboarding team is incredible, acting as true advocates for our customers, and they won’t stop until the customer is up and running. Our support team takes ownership of problems without finger-pointing—customers always mention how great support is before they even talk about the software.

And our product and development teams? Instead of being hidden away, they’re super engaged, joining customer calls, attending events like SEMA, and working with support and onboarding to understand the needs of the people using our software.

Last, our CEO is a huge part of our success. He’s approachable, knowledgeable about e-commerce, and still gets on calls with customers, no matter their size or how long they’ve been with us. He’s the original writer of our software and gives the team the authority to solve problems. It’s rare to find a CEO like that.

Where do you see the market for e-commerce operations software going over the next 5 years?

I see e-commerce operations software becoming more integrated, intelligent, and essential for businesses of all sizes. AI will play a huge role, not just in automating processes but also in providing deep insights into what, where, and when to sell and at what price. We’re exploring how to integrate AI into our platform to help businesses better understand their best opportunities. It’s not just about spinning content—AI will help companies make smarter, data-driven decisions in real-time.

I also expect a strong push toward consolidating technology stacks. Connections and data are going to be at the heart of everything. Until we see more consolidation, companies will need solutions that can normalize and move data intelligently and with scale between different systems.

Last, global expansion will also drive the market. Businesses will look for tools that help them support complex international operations like currency, language, and regulations. The companies that can manage these elements, while scaling efficiently, will be the ones that thrive.

To Sum Up

SureDone’s e-commerce operations platform, for the automotive, motorsports, and power sports sectors, is a great solution for managing constant inventory and pricing updates. With its automation engine and open API, SureDone helps you connect your systems, reducing the need for manual, repetitive tasks that can lead to errors. Their year-make-model plugin for BigCommerce and Shopify makes it simple for ecommerce parts sellers to use their fitment data and offer customers a quick and accurate search option. Learn more at SureDone.com.