E-Business
Issue No. 1 - July/August 2001
Turin Imports
Turin Imports lives in a tight space between a low-margin wholesale base in the motor trade, and Internet-driven globalisation that lets car aficionados source car parts from anywhere. Survival is hard work; going on to achieve prosperity, as Turin has, takes more.
Founded in 1973 as a specialist in Italian cars — Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Lancia — Turin in those times operated a workshop and a used car lot as well as the spare parts business.
Together, all three makes numbered less than 1 per cent of the vehicles on Australian roads and Turin’s market atrophied during the 80s as new car imports slowed, then stopped. (All three marques had ceased import by 1990. Alfa started again in 1998).
“By 1983 it was clear South Australia wasn’t big enough to sustain us,” says Turin principal, Rudi van Kalker. “So we began marketing nationally.”
Turin’s operations scaled down through the 1980s as Turin consolidated the mail-order parts business that had always been its real strength. This affected the client base: the 60-40 retail-wholesale mix prevalent in 1990 reversed itself during the course of the decade. Repair shops and mechanics, though an easier market to reach than consumers, is very tough.
“In the wholesale motor trade, if they don’t like the price they go elsewhere,” Rudi says. “With retail, it's more about how you serve the client.”
“Creating a web presence was not a necessity, we could have gone on as we were, but as the Internet developed we decided we had to be in it, partly as a means of getting some retail marketshare back.”
Rudi accepts the conventional wisdom that B2B offers more potential than B2C, but in Turin’s niche the opposite seems to be true. Fiat, Lancia and Alfa drivers take up e-commerce fairly readily as a means of searching for rare parts, but Rudi believes the motor trade has been generally slow to take ...
