Description & Glossary

Last updated: April 25, 2024

Aftermarket Websites® offers the most robust and best value in website programs available for brick-and-mortar resellers of specialty automotive parts and accessories. Our websites are NON-CUSTOM, PLATFORM-based websites specifically designed to help Web shoppers—when they search by product brand, part category, part description, or part number—find local resellers. These websites are provided at below market value by Automotive Accessories Marketing USA, Inc. (AAM) and its SUPPORTING BRAND partners, whose support is an investment in the health and success of local resellers. These sites operate on AAM’s PROPRIETARY PRODUCT DATABASE, which includes product descriptions, images and other media, pricing, dimensions, and a product category structure (taxonomy).

Aftermarket Websites® customers receive a robust array of services and capabilities, including:

• The ability to add product data from more than 100 SUPPORTING brands for Base sites and an additional 300+ NON-SUPPORTING brands for PRO sites
• Ongoing SUPPORT
• TRAINING to help you build unique features for your site
• INTEGRATIONS with service providers such as credit card processors, UPS, FedEx, and TaxJar tax-management software
• Automatic product updates of SUPPORTING AND NON-SUPPORTING BRANDS
• New feature releases
• Continual updates powered by feedback from you, our customers

Aftermarket Websites® sites are purpose-built for LOCAL resellers and installers of specialty automotive aftermarket parts and accessories. Your website will be built to function at your DOMAIN NAME. Its PRODUCT UPLOADER enables you to quickly load products with descriptions and other attributes from AAM’s database to provide search engines with information about the products you offer. Your website has been built to encourage Internet search engines to perform WEBSITE INDEXING of your site, in which Web browsers “crawl” your site for information (e.g., the brands you offer, product categories, part numbers, and product descriptions) to associate with your business’s name, address, and phone number.

Aftermarket Websites® sites feature shopping carts capable of supporting e-commerce orders of local or national customers; however, your site’s primary function is to help local shoppers find your local store. Your Aftermarket Websites® site is not designed to bring e-commerce shoppers from across the nation to place orders on your site. It is built to encourage phone calls and visits from Web shoppers who find your store in their Web searches. As an Aftermarket Websites® site owner, you must measure the success of your site in terms of increased search engine findability and physical foot traffic—not in e-commerce orders.

Aftermarket Websites® sites are not built for, or offered to, sellers desiring to build a freestanding e-commerce business. Stores interested in expanding into a robust e-commerce business should fully investigate the costs in capital, labor, operational expertise, and the technologies—many of which Aftermarket Websites® may not now, or ever, support—required to begin to participate in digital, direct-to-consumer retailing. Highly functional and custom e-commerce websites typically cost 50 to 200 times more than an Aftermarket Websites® site. All Aftermarket Websites® customers are required to have at least one physical brick-and-mortar store location and must display the phone number and physical address for that location on their Aftermarket Websites® site.

Purchase of your Aftermarket Websites® site involves an INITIAL SITE-SETUP FEE and then a recurring monthly SUPPORT & SUBSCRIPTION FEE. The monthly SUPPORT & SUBSCRIPTION FEE will be charged against a credit card, which will remain on file with a secure third-party credit card processor. It is your responsibility to maintain current credit card information to ensure that your site fees are paid. Failure to pay your SUPPORT & SUBSCRIPTION FEE will result in the deletion of your website from Aftermarket Websites’ CLOUD-BASED HOSTING. Once deletion has occurred, your site cannot be restored, and a new INITIAL SITE- SETUP FEE will be required should you desire to rebuild your website.

There are several steps to launching your website. First, you must secure a DOMAIN NAME. The Aftermarket Websites® team will then work with you to develop your site, within the capabilities of the PLATFORM, to present your business. You will need to provide images, logos, and other information pertaining to your business. If you wish to include INTEGRATIONS, you will need to secure those relationships and communicate the related information to the Aftermarket Websites® development team. Once the development is completed, your website will be moved to its CLOUD-BASED HOSTING site, at which time we will need your help to connect your DOMAIN NAME to your site.

Glossary of Terms

CLOUD-BASED HOSTING

Your website is hosted on what are known as CLOUD servers. “Cloud” refers to hosting services from a cloud vendor that allows the entire computing capacity of an infrastructure or data center to be distributed and delivered to multiple users simultaneously. This type of hosting service offers great flexibility, speed, lower costs, and high reliability. Aftermarket Websites® uses Google Cloud services to host your website. Cloud hosting, like all hosting, is subject to minor disruptions of service. These disruptions are outside the control of Aftermarket Websites®.

DOMAIN NAME

Your Aftermarket Websites® site will operate using your unique domain name. Your domain name is your address on the Internet. You will purchase and maintain your domain at a domain registrar (such as GoDaddy), and it will remain under your ownership. Since you own your domain name, your contract with Aftermarket Websites® is open-ended; that is, you are free to close your Aftermarket Websites® site at any time and move your domain to another website platform. You are responsible for maintaining renewals of your website’s domain name.

EMAIL MARKETING WITH EMAIL CENTER

The PRO platform gives you access to the Email Center service, which lets you efficiently create and send emails about new products, special deals, and other updates to keep customers engaged. This service includes the ability to send unlimited emails, prepared templates for quick setup, drag-and-drop editing for easy customization, list management, and dedicated support. The default subscription lets you upload up to 1,000 unique email addresses at no additional cost. If you need to accommodate more email addresses, you can buy additional blocks of 1,000 at $10 per block per month—allowing you to scale your reach as needed.

INTEGRATIONS

Your Aftermarket Websites® site has built-in capabilities to integrate with certain technology and service providers (THIRD-PARTY SERVICES), which can expand the scope of services you offer. These integrations allow you to access companies whose services are not included in your website. Examples of these INTEGRATIONS include UPS and FedEx shipping, credit card processors, and TaxJar tax-management services. “Integration” means your Aftermarket Websites® site does not provide these services but can communicate with them to enable expanded capabilities for those using your website. You are responsible for establishing those accounts and they will be managed by, and billed to, your company separately from your Aftermarket Websites® account.

Aftermarket Websites® is not responsible for THIRD-PARTY SERVICES. If you use THIRD-PARTY SERVICES on the Aftermarket Websites® platform, you permit us to send your data to those services. If you use THIRD-PARTY SERVICES, you agree that Aftermarket Websites® does not provide a warranty for or support of those services. You are responsible for activating and deactivating these accounts, making any payments, and complying with the terms of third parties.

LOCAL

“Local” means that Aftermarket Websites® sites are built to support resellers and installers of specialty automotive aftermarket parts and accessories who operate out of physical business locations. Whereas many website platforms are designed to support e-commerce retailers of various types and sizes, Aftermarket Websites® is uniquely positioned to direct shoppers to find a local option for their product purchases.

MAP AND UNILATERAL PRICING

Many manufacturers in the specialty automotive aftermarket use Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP), unilateral pricing, or other minimum sale price policies, which are designed to protect a product’s value in the market and provide adequate margins for resellers and installers of those products. In support of those policies, your Aftermarket Websites® site has been formatted in such a manner that prices may not be established at less than that level when one is present in our database.

NON-CUSTOM

NON-CUSTOM means that your site will be built using the Aftermarket Websites® platform. Aftermarket Websites® does not commit to building unique functions, features, or capabilities into your website. This platform has many customization options built-in, which we will train you to use. Our platform is very robust and allows for great flexibility in modifying the look and content of your website. However, your ability to customize your website will be strictly limited to the capabilities incorporated into the platform. Aftermarket Websites® does not provide or offer custom scripting.

NON-SUPPORTING BRANDS

Your website will have access to AAM’s product data for hundreds of NON-SUPPORTING BRANDS. These brands do not provide product information directly to Aftermarket Websites®. This data is usually provided by industry data brokers such as SDC and DCi—or directly from suppliers—and are then validated and mapped into AAM’s PROPRIETARY DATABASE. While we strive to acquire the best and most recent data from the industry’s best sources, we do not modify or manually validate this data. Therefore, we cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or currency of all product and pricing information. Aftermarket Websites® listens to our customers and, when possible and the data is available, we will add specialty aftermarket brands to our NON-SUPPORTING BRANDS database. However, should you want product data added to your website that isn’t included in existing SUPPORTING BRANDS or NON-SUPPORTING BRANDS, you are responsible for uploading or inputting that data. The Aftermarket Websites® service does not include custom product mapping or uploading.

PLATFORM

This term refers to the fact that all Aftermarket Websites® sites share a common codebase, or technology PLATFORM, from which many sites operate. PLATFORM websites aren’t custom-built to your needs or desires and, while your site has significant capabilities for customization, the ability to customize is limited to features and design tools built into the PLATFORM. It is this shared PLATFORM that allows us to make sites far more affordable than custom sites. PLATFORM-built sites allow us to specifically meet the needs of resellers in our industry with far better functionality than generic sites. You should be aware that this means there are certain things your site does not do because our platform isn’t built to support the function. One powerful benefit of a PLATFORM is that when features and enhancements are added to it, your site automatically gets those upgrades.

POINT OF SALE (POS)

The exclusive Aftermarket Websites® point of sale system is available only to PRO-level subscribers. This all-in-one POS service handles product lookup, inventory lookup, ordering, and payments.

PRODUCT DATA

Aftermarket Websites® sites are built to use AAM’s PROPRIETARY PRODUCT DATABASE. This database includes industry-specific product information as supplied by brands and data providers plus additional unique information, including AAM’s product taxonomy, series information, attributes, and other resources and media links.

For those sites with year/make/model capabilities, AAM’S APPLICATION ENGINE provides the product lookups. This process does not occur on your website. For that reason, you will not be able to add year/make/model cataloging with part numbers you create or upload manually. There is no process by which Aftermarket Websites® customers can add year/make/model data to the AAM APPLICATION ENGINE.

Your Aftermarket Websites® site has been built so that you can add your own product information, including brands, categories, and part numbers. As stated above, since year/make/model lookup is not driven by the data on your website, you will be unable to add application data. When you add or change a product on your website, it may take up to 24 hours for that change to be reflected on your website. Please note: Aftermarket Websites® does not update data for products or brands you have custom-loaded. It is your responsibility to maintain any data you create and upload.

SUPPORT

Aftermarket Websites® provides SUPPORT for you and your website for the duration of your account. This SUPPORT is provided at no additional charge but is limited in scope. The SUPPORT team is available by phone or email to answer support questions. You will also find SUPPORT documentation and videos, PDFs, and other self-help resources on the site.

We will support your website platform by periodically releasing, and automatically applying, updates, functionality enhancements and fixes, and patches that may address problems or potential vulnerabilities.

As your site is being built, we will support you as you create your brand lists, establish the look and feel of your site, make content-development decisions about your business, and introduce you to the Aftermarket Websites® side of third-party integrations. We will help you address basic set-up issues in areas such as learning about local tax calculation, shipping pricing, etc.

From time to time, we get requests for services that are outside the scope of SUPPORT. Examples of requests outside of SUPPORT include reformatting your website’s appearance after initial setup, adding new pages or brands after setup, manipulating prices or product data after setup, uploading custom content, setting up third-party integration accounts, and handling the setup process on the third-party side of the plugin. You will receive TRAINING at account setup to be able to accomplish these tasks.

SUPPORTING BRAND PARTNERS

In addition to your monthly fees, Aftermarket Websites® receives funding and data support from approximately 100 SUPPORTING BRANDS. These partners work closely with Aftermarket Websites® to ensure the very latest in product information, pricing, and promotions. Updates for these brands will maintain MAP, unilateral pricing, and other policies to ensure that you are not in violation of suppliers’ pricing policies.

TERMS OF SERVICE

Aftermarket Websites® does not require a contract for site creation or services; however, to become a customer of Aftermarket Websites® you must accept and agree to be bound by the Aftermarket Websites® TERMS OF SERVICE. This document will be shared with you before your site launch process has begun and may be found at any time in the Admin Panel of your website. Aftermarket Websites® reserves the right to update or modify its TERMS OF SERVICE from time to time, and continuing use of your Aftermarket Websites® site represents your acceptance of these TERMS OF SERVICE as modified, changed, altered, updated, or amended.

TRAINING

During your setup period, you will receive TRAINING to help you develop the skills you need to use the full functionality of your website. You will be taught how to work with sections, create image grids/banners/slideshows/custom pages, add/edit/remove products, use the product uploader, manage payment/shipping modules, make price changes, and effect customizations (as provided within the scope of the PLATFORM). During the TRAINING period, you are encouraged to ask questions about the site’s functionality and operations.

Aftermarket Websites® will also offer webinars or video-based training as new capabilities or enhancements are added.

WEBSITE INDEXING

Your domain name is your website’s address. Internet search engines such as Google, Edge, and Bing need to know not only your website address but also the products you sell, your physical address, phone number, and other facts about your business. Aftermarket Websites® designs your website so that search engines can easily “crawl,” or comb through, your website—a process called WEBSITE INDEXING—to identify the components required to help Internet users find your business. Aftermarket Websites® builds sites so that WEBSITE INDEXING identifies your website with brands, part numbers, product categories, and product descriptions.

WEBSITE MARKETING

Your website is your storefront on the Internet. Much like your physical storefront, if you want more traffic so that more people can find your business, you will have to do marketing. Aftermarket Websites® does not provide or offer marketing services for your website, but we can suggest popular marketing tools such as social media, email, and Google Ads.