Christy Adler

I manage our largest volume supply location. This particular location works exclusively with wholesaler closeout parts. My responsibilities are to minimize returns, facilitate accurate invoicing, and improve sales for that location and RockAuto as a whole. By making the catalog more accurate for the customers, better educating the employees at RockAuto about closeout parts and increasing inspection standards for reshipped parts, I was able to reduce their return rate from 1.25% to 0.67% in less than a year. I was able to reduce the cost of returns by renegotiating the return policy with this supplier. Since these parts are purchased as a closeout, they do not carry any manufacturer warranty. That means, that any defective returns sent back to the supplier were just being discarded. As a result, I convinced them to agree to credit for parts without sending them back as long as they couldn't be resold which cut down on the return shipping costs that were usually assumed by our company. Not only did it make things cheaper for us, but it made it easier on the customers as well. I have also facilitated targeted email promotions. The supplier picked a part type or set of part numbers that they would be willing to give better than usual pricing on. Through Microsoft Access, I was able to find the list of vehicles that each part would fit and the compile a list of our previous customers that own one or more vehicles that are applicable to this sale. Using Visual Basic in Access, I wrote up an email with the individual customer's name, the applicable vehicle, a picture of the part and a link to that exact page in our catalog in URL using a program that converted URL to HTML so send the actual email. This was a never before used marketing technique in our business and it had double the turn out than our usual promotions.