How to sell used parts online

Selling used parts online has three parts: choosing where to publish, writing listings that get found and managing what comes back from the portal. This guide covers all three, with what it takes to keep a large catalogue up to date.

Where to publish

There is no single portal that serves for everything. Each one has its buyer and its way of working:

• Wallapop: buying and selling between private individuals in Spain, with heavy mobile traffic and integrated shipping.
• eBay: the portal with the greatest international reach and the one that handles part compatibility best. We cover it in depth in how to sell car parts on eBay.
• Ovoko: European marketplace specialised in scrapyard spare parts.
• Opisto: French used-parts network, widely used by workshops.
• RecambioFácil: Spanish used-parts portal with demand from workshops and private individuals.
• Milanuncios: Spanish generalist classifieds, with a high volume of parts searches.

The usual approach is not to choose one, but to be on several at once: the same part has different buyers on each site.

Listings that convert

A used part is bought when the buyer is sure it fits. The listing has to answer that without them having to ask:

• OEM reference. It is how workshops search, and how buyers who have already removed the old part search.
• Compatibilities by vehicle. Make, model, years and engine. On eBay you can associate up to 3,000 vehicles with a single advert, so a common part appears in a huge number of searches.
• Donor's VIN, where applicable. It is the definitive proof of compatibility. On Ovoko, when the VIN is missing, publishing is resolved by generating a valid VIN so the advert is not left out.
• Photos of the actual part, from several angles and with defects on show.
• Price with shipping made clear, so there are no surprises at the end.

Publish once, sell everywhere

Publishing by hand on six portals is doing the same work six times, and every sale forces you to repeat it to withdraw the advert. That is why the catalogue lives in a single place —your ERP or your online shop— and goes out from there to all the portals.

Portal Hero connects directly with the main scrapyard ERPs and today publishes more than 3 million active adverts across Europe, with automatic translation of the text into each language. When a part sells on one portal, its advert is withdrawn from the rest, which is what prevents selling the same part twice.

The sale does not end at publishing

After the advert comes the order, and that is where time gets lost. Every order carries its shipping, its invoice and the VAT of the destination country, which is not the same whether you sell to France, to Germany or within Spain.

The order comes back to the ERP with its complete data, so the portal sale is handled just like any other in-house sale: same delivery note, same invoice, same stock deducted. More than 95,000 orders a year go through there.

One inbox for everything

Chats from every portal arrive in a single inbox. The team stops jumping between applications and no question goes unseen. It is the highest-volume channel of day-to-day work: more than 800,000 conversations a year.

Next step

If you sell scrapyard spare parts, scrapyard software shows how all this fits with your ERP. And if you would rather see it with your own catalogue, talk to us.