01 A sector where every purchase is a gamble
The wrong part problem
The single biggest problem in auto parts retail is the wrong part. Sellers list products by OEM code or generic names that mean nothing to a car owner, customers guess, and returns pile up. The dysfunction runs deeper than listings. In many workshops, mechanics tell customers that a part bought elsewhere does not fit, whether or not that is true, because they would rather sell their own at a markup.
Fatih Ersöz came to us through a referral. He had described his idea, a system that matches every part to every compatible vehicle, to a mutual friend in the parts trade, and everyone he asked told him it could not be built. When he pitched it to one of Türkiye's largest e-commerce platform providers, their reaction was blunt: nobody in the country could write such a system. Our friend told Fatih he knew exactly one team who could. Fatih still says that introduction is where everything started.
02 Parts matched to vehicles, suppliers matched to prices
The system nobody would build
The first project, delivered around 2022 when Uzman Parça was still a small shop with an ordinary online store, was the parts management system.
It did two unusual things. First, it matched parts to vehicles and multiplied listings: the same physical part could be published as a BMW 116i brake disc at one price and a Fiat Egea 1.6 Multijet brake disc at another, priced to what each market bears, and always described in language a car owner actually understands. Second, it connected the XML feeds of four to five wholesalers and continuously compared them, so for every product the system found the cheapest supplier and placed the order there automatically. Competitors did that work by hand, logging into supplier B2B portals one by one. The same system also pushed inventory to five sales channels, including Türkiye's biggest marketplaces, so the whole operation was run from one place.
- Vehicle-to-part matching with listing multiplication and per-vehicle pricing
- XML integrations with 4-5 wholesalers, cheapest source selected automatically
- Five sales channels managed from a single system
- A catalog covering about 50 vehicle makes, 2,276 vehicles, and 1,180 categories
03 The week the market drowned in price updates
The currency shock
Then came Türkiye's currency shock. The exchange rate moved by a lira a day, and suppliers updated prices several times per day. Competing sellers sent staff crawling through supplier portals and XML files for hours, product by product, and still could not keep up. Whole teams existed just to chase prices, and most sellers eventually gave up, locked themselves to a single supplier's feed, and ate the losses whenever another wholesaler had the same part for 100 lira less.
Uzman Parça had built its infrastructure before the storm. The system kept finding the cheapest supplier on its own, in real time, with zero people employed to do it. While a wave of firms went under, Uzman Parça grew straight through the crisis. That was the threshold moment: the system stopped being a convenience and became the reason the company survived and pulled ahead.
04 The custom e-commerce platform, two years later
A store built around the car
Around 2024, Fatih came back with a new problem: ready-made e-commerce platforms could not carry the catalog. Where rivals sold one generic listing per part, Uzman Parça generated six or seven vehicle-specific ones, and the biggest providers admitted they could not handle more than 30,000 listings. So ETREXIO built the store from scratch, an eight-month project at the time, before our current AI tooling existed.
The store treats the vehicle as the context for everything. Customers pick their car and see only what fits. A garage feature stores their vehicles, with about 60 percent of users saving one, which means thousands of cars sitting in the system with chassis numbers and mileage, feeding predictive maintenance reminders. The maintenance assistant turns a daunting job into a ten-minute task: pick your car, choose between the most affordable, best value, or highest quality package, and the full maintenance basket builds itself, at 40 percent or more below workshop prices. Around 30 percent of all orders now come through it. And when there is the slightest doubt about fitment, the team calls the customer, takes the chassis number, and confirms before shipping. Mechanics no longer dare tell an Uzman Parça customer their part does not fit. They know it was checked.
- Vehicle-first catalog: customers only see parts that fit their car
- Garage with maintenance reminders, saved by roughly 60 percent of users
- Maintenance assistant: a complete service basket in about ten minutes
- Automatic SEO content and schema generated for every part
05 When the AI engines started doing the marketing
The ChatGPT moment
One day a friend of Fatih's, planning maintenance for his own car, asked ChatGPT what parts to buy and where. The answer recommended Uzman Parça. We were skeptical, so we tested it properly: fresh accounts, foreign accounts, different tools, no history to bias the answers. The recommendations held. AI engines were suggesting Uzman Parça alongside Türkiye's largest marketplaces, ahead of every direct competitor.
The reason is unglamorous and structural. The platform generates SEO-grade content and schema markup for every single part automatically, so its coverage and depth are unmatched in the niche. When an AI engine looks for a trustworthy answer about car parts in Türkiye, Uzman Parça is simply the best-documented source it can find. That is what GEO looks like when it works: the search engines and the AI engines both send customers, and nobody on staff writes a word.
06 Twenty people of work, done by seven
The outcome
Today the platform carries more than 60,000 listings and holds the return rate at 4 percent, a record in a category where wrong-part returns are the defining cost. In a recent 30-day window the store processed over 2,150 orders and signed up around 1,300 new members, and revenue has grown 4x in the two years since the custom store launched. Around 33,000 customers are registered, and the catalog spans roughly 50 vehicle makes, 2,276 vehicles, 1,180 categories, and 98 parts brands.
The team behind all of it is seven people, most of them in the warehouse picking and packing. There is no software department. One technical staffer acts as a product manager and talks to us. Fatih puts it plainly: without this system they could not have grown at all, and even if they somehow had, they would need at least three to four times the staff. His exact words became our favorite quote: this system saved him from employing at least twenty people.
