6
wolk after sales experts
03.07.2015
00119955
Methodology
As this report aims at covering the most important car parts webshops in Germany, we have examined the webshops in two ways. First, we applied search engines
by using relevant keywords to find appropriate webshops. The ranking within these search engines is one first indicators of the websites' popularity.
Another way was to screen marketplaces like Daparto and Teilehaber to discover the participating webshops. Furthermore, we checked eBay´s top sellers in all
automotive categories to find big players which do not sell through their own webshop.
This report displays only the most important shops which means that we focus only on shops with a turnover of more than one million Euro per annum. We covered
several shops with less turnover to also show some niche businesses like battery or lighting shops.
All detected companies have been invited to participate in our online survey. Furthermore, we had face-to-face interviews with other market experts and market
players to check our research results.
The key indicator certainly are the turnovers of each company. Due to the fact that many of the companies have offline and online business activities, we show two
different turnover figures. Our main focus within this report is the pure e-commerce turnover which includes the sales of products through several online channels.
Some of the companies even sell car-related services via their websites. This was impossible for us to separate this part of the total sales.
It is mainly possible to find out the whole company's turnover. The share of the e-commerce turnover however is hardly accessible. Therefore, we created a
procedure to estimate this share based on several indicators.
The e-commerce turnover includes all online activities and can contain also turnover generated with services.
How we estimated the e-commerce turnover.
In cases where the operating company runs an eBay shop, we were able to find out the turnover generated by this shop over the last 12 months.
If an operator uses more than one shop, we added up the individual values.
This shows the minimum turnover of the operating company. In many cases (especially relating to the medium sized shops), the eBay turnover is the largest share
of the total e-commerce turnover.
Furthermore, we looked if the operator is active on Amazon, Daparto or Teilehaber. Looking at the total amount of reviews within the last 12 months, we get an
indication whether the shop is selling more or less articles. There is no correlation between the amount of reviews and the generated turnover. The amount of
reviews varies on the follow-up activities of a company.
Another indication of a website's popularity is its Google-ranking. There are several firms which offer indices about the search engine ranking popularity. Within
this report we chose Searchmetrics with its SEO-index and the Alexa pagerank. Further it is possible to observe the activities of the use of Google Adwords, which
is an indicator on the company´s online marketing budget. All indicators are valid only for comparing the websites with each other.
