Technology Newsmaker Q&A Ron Rossi

The Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) has contracted with IMR and The Martec Group to develop a new research study to measure the online retail market for sales of aftermarket parts and accessories.

Ron Rossi, director of market intelligence at AAIA, spoke to us about the goals of the project, which is expected to wrap up in early May 2014.

What do you anticipate will be your biggest challenges in this endeavor?

We don't know what we don't know. Right now, we're guessing how e-tailing is really working in the aftermarket, and it's a combination of business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions. What the research will help us understand are the types of transactions that are happening. It's a very complicated matrix, and we want to make some sense of it.

Is there any current data e-tailing in the aftermarket that you'll be able to make comparisons to?

There is a lot of research out there, but there has not been any research to our knowledge that is in the public domain that addresses specifically what's going on in the automotive aftermarket. We want to establish a single industry data point for e-tailing, because it doesn't exist today. Everyone is shooting from the hip when they talk about this.

What is the value of having that single data point for the industry?

We think this represents a significant change in industry dynamics. Our job is to be sure that our members up and down the supply chain understand the significance of what is happening, and can build their own business strategy so that they are not overwhelmed by this at some future point in time.

Until somebody spends the money on research, which is what the AAIA is doing, our members aren't going to know what's really happening. Everybody is going to be looking at different things and different numbers. What we want to do is to level the playing field so everyone can sing off the same sheet of music, and establish a baseline for this extremely important trend in our industry.

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