CarParts.com and CarGurus Turn Proprietary Data Into Moats

CarParts.com and CarGurus are each leveraging their own proprietary data to differentiate their platforms from competitors, executives at the two companies said in their Thursday (Aug. 6) earnings reports.

CarParts.com, an over-30-year-old eCommerce company offering automotive parts and accessories, has been building both a digital layer and a physical layer that includes supply chain, distribution, fulfillment, inventory and last-mile capability, CEO David Meniane said in a Thursday press release reporting the company’s second-quarter results. “In a world where AI is commoditizing digital execution, the advantage is not simply having both layers, it is how effectively we connect them through data, AI and customer ownership,” Meniane said. “A new entrant can rent a frontier model tomorrow. It cannot rent three decades of fitment data, purchase and return history, and catalog depth built on hundreds of supplier relationships.”

Data from customer interactions improves recommendations, returns improve the company’s catalog, and fulfillment decisions improve future ones, Meniane said during a Thursday earnings call. AI ties those signals together and enables CarPart.com to outpace competitors in terms of advertising efficiently, getting the right part the first time, recommending other relevant parts, pricing dynamically, and then packing, shipping and routing the order, Meniane said. “Digital tools are becoming replicable. The system we have built around them is not,” Meniane said in the press release. “That is where we are investing.”

CarGurus, a 20-year-old multinational automotive platform offering an automotive shopping site for consumers and a predictive intelligence platform for dealers, captures nearly half a billion rich first-party shoppers signals each day across demand, pricing, inventory and shopper behavior, CEO Jason Trevisan said during a Thursday earnings call. With this data, CarGurus continually improves its consumer experience and its dealer software and analytics, Trevisan said. “This creates a differentiated data advantage that we believe helps dealers make better decisions while enabling a more personalized and trusted consumer experience,” Trevisan said. “We believe faster innovation leveraging our proprietary marketplace data makes CarGurus increasingly valuable to both dealers and consumers and strengthens our competitive position by providing a better car shopping experience for both consumers and dealers.”