New Shopify Tool To Sell Auto Parts Online: Horsepower By FeedStation

Caecey Killian October 2, 2026 12 min read 0

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Every one of us buys parts, which makes it strange that so few of us ever think about what it takes to sell auto parts online. What happens on the other side of that Add To Cart button explains almost every bad experience you have ever had ordering for a project, including the price that seemed off, the part that said in stock and was not, and the control arm that showed up for the wrong car. None of that is random. All of it traces back to data moving correctly between a distributor’s warehouse and the website you are looking at.

FeedStation announced public availability of Horsepower on October 1, 2026, putting the app in the Shopify App Store for any eligible merchant after several months of invitation-only beta. The company has spent years running inventory, pricing, and product data for automotive sellers across Shopify, Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, and Horsepower aims to apply that same engine at a single storefront. We asked FeedStation founder and CEO Michael Linnane to walk us through what actually happens behind a parts listing, because the better that machinery works, the better your Saturday goes. One disclosure first: Michael is a longtime friend of this publication and of mine personally; nobody paid for this article, and nobody outside our desk read it before it ran.

“The best technology doesn’t make your business more complicated. It quietly removes the complicated parts.” – Michael Linnane, Founder

Dropshipping Is Not The Dirty Word It Used To Be

Here is the first thing that surprises people about what it takes to sell auto parts online at any real scale. Several of the largest automotive retailers you order from are dropshipping those parts, which means the box on your porch never touched their building, because the order was routed to a warehouse distributor who shipped it under the retailer’s name. The word carries a stigma it earned during the era of cheap goods crawling in from overseas, but in the aftermarket it works differently, and it is increasingly how the business runs. A seller skips the cost of a warehouse, skips buying inventory in bulk, and skips the risk of sitting on parts nobody wants, which is why a two-person shop can offer a catalog it could never finance on its own.

For the buyer, that model is mostly good news, since it is the reason a small operation can sell you the same bar a national chain sells and often ship it from a warehouse closer to your house. The catch is that the seller no longer has eyes on the shelf, so everything they tell you about price and availability is relayed secondhand from a data feed. The quality of that relay is the entire ballgame, because a supplier changes a cost overnight, a part gets superseded, and a warehouse runs dry at two in the afternoon. Every one of those events breaks something on the storefront unless a system is watching it.

“One of the biggest challenges in automotive ecommerce isn’t selling parts; it’s managing everything that happens behind the scenes,” Linnane said. “Sellers are expected to keep inventory, pricing, product data, fitment information, and supplier connections perfectly synchronized across multiple systems that are constantly changing.”

ACES And PIES Are The Gate Every Listing Goes Through

To sell auto parts online at all, you need the data living in two industry file standards maintained by the Auto Care Association at autocare.org. ACES, the Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard, carries vehicle fitment, so it is what knows a part belongs on a 1969 Camaro with a small block rather than the 396 car. PIES, the Product Information Exchange Standard, carries descriptions, attributes, dimensions, brand names, images, and packaging. Neither one is a file anybody opens in Excel, because both arrive as structured data built for machines, and software has to translate them before a storefront can use a single field.

That translation is where most new sellers hit the wall, and it gets worse when the data arrives from several places at once. One catalog carries the better description, another has better images, a third has the fitment you actually need, and the manufacturer revises all of it next quarter. Brand names are their own mess, since a single company like Addictive Desert Designs shows up across suppliers under six different spellings, and somebody has to decide those are all the same outfit before the site ends up with four duplicate listings for one product. When that merge goes badly, you are the one who pays for it with a wrong year range, a photo of the wrong finish, and a bracket that misses by half an inch.

“The seller shouldn’t have to spend their time figuring out which spreadsheet has the best description of a control arm,” Linnane said. “The technology should be able to figure that out.”

Horsepower pulls from the catalog sources a seller already subscribes to, including SEMA Data, Epicor, PDM Automotive, and ASAP Network, then assembles the strongest version of each listing field by field. Support for ACES and PIES is built in, so there is no second subscription to a translation tool. “Most shop owners don’t want to become experts in data standards,” Linnane said. “They just want accurate product listings that customers can trust.”

Pricing And Inventory Never Sit Still

Most people who set out to sell auto parts online start by chasing distributor access, and that is the part they celebrate. Turn 14, Keystone, Motor State, Meyer, and Premier all hand over inventory and cost feeds once the account opens, but that access is the starting line rather than the finish. Pricing moves minute to minute and inventory moves by the second, because every other dealer on that same feed is pulling from the same warehouse. Typing those numbers into a spreadsheet and walking away is how a seller loses money on every order for a week without noticing.

The spread between suppliers is wider than most people expect. Pull up one common part number in the platform’s warehouse search and four suppliers show four different costs, with MAP, MSRP, jobber pricing, core charges, and handling times listed beside each, sometimes fifteen dollars apart on the same day. Horsepower handles that with pricing expressions instead of manual edits, so a seller writes a formula, sets a floor at maximum MAP and a ceiling at maximum MSRP, and the system recalculates whenever supplier costs move. That ceiling matters to you as a buyer, because it is a hard stop that keeps a bad cost feed from turning into a listing well above sticker.

“If one of your major suppliers updates costs on every item across the board, how long would it take for every affected price on your website to be correct?” Linnane asked in a recent post. “Minutes? Hours? Sometime tomorrow? After someone notices you’re losing money on every order?”

Why Being One Count Off Costs More Than The Sale

An inventory count wrong by a single unit is not a rounding error, because somebody already paid for that part and is now waiting on it. The seller eats the cancellation, sometimes eats return or restocking fees, and almost always eats a one-star review explaining that the site lied about availability. None of it was technically their fault, since the distributor sold the last one four seconds earlier, but the customer does not care about that distinction and neither would I. My car is on jack stands, and the clock does not stop because a data feed hiccupped.

“Accuracy is everything in automotive ecommerce,” Linnane said. “If your website says a product is available when it isn’t, you’ve created a poor customer experience before the order has even shipped.” Because every supplier organizes products differently and updates on its own clock, reconciling all of it is the hard engineering problem underneath the entire business, and it is the most expensive mistake available to anyone trying to sell parts online.

What All Of This Means When You Are The One Buying

Strip out the software talk and the payoff lands in four places. The price you see is the current one, because rules recalculate against live supplier cost instead of a number somebody typed in last spring, which means you are not paying a padded guess and the store is not accidentally breaking MAP in a way that gets its account pulled out from under your order. In stock actually means in stock, since continuous reconciliation across suppliers is the difference between a shipping confirmation and an apology email three days later.

The fitment is also more likely to be right, because merging ACES data from the best available source beats trusting one catalog and hoping the application table matches the car in your garage. Last, smaller sellers stay in the game. When a specialty shop can run the same data quality as a national retailer, you get more places to buy from and more oddball parts available, instead of the whole market funneling through three giant sites that stock nothing for your platform.

What It Costs To Sell Auto Parts Online And How Fast You Can Start

Getting set up traditionally ran weeks or months, because supplier connections, catalogs, fitment, pricing rules, and listings all have to come together before the first sale clears. Linnane says that compresses into an afternoon now. “If you install Horsepower at noon, connect your Turn 14 account a few minutes later, choose the brands you want to sell, and confirm your pricing rules, you can realistically be selling products on your Shopify store that same afternoon,” he said. For established shops, the platform maps existing SKUs behind the scenes, so a seller keeps their numbering system, their accounting integrations, and their search rankings intact.

The app itself is free to install and includes a functional trial, after which pricing scales on the number of supplier connections rather than order volume or product count, with no percentage taken on sales. Current pricing lives at feedstation.com/apps/horsepower-automotive. Rudy’s Performance Parts ran the platform during the private beta, and COO Tim Eied described the workload it replaced. “Being able to manage supplier catalogs and keep pricing and inventory up-to-date saves our team a tremendous amount of time,” Eied said. “It lets us focus more on our customers and growing the business instead of constantly managing spreadsheets and product data.”

Where This Goes Next

Linnane does not think the shakeout in automotive ecommerce is five years out. “I think we’ll see more change in the next 18 to 24 months than we’ve seen in the last decade,” he said. “The businesses that succeed won’t be the ones working harder; they’ll be the ones using better tools.” The longer play is a Horsepower Marketplace built so independent sellers can reach more customers without surrendering a large cut to the big platforms.

FeedStation will be running live demos at the 2026 SEMA Show, November 3 through 6 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, in the North Hall Business Services section at booth 11622. If you want a sense of how much of the aftermarket’s direction gets decided in that building, our piece on the 2026 SEMA Board of Directors race is a decent primer.

What It Means For The Guy With A Good Idea

For the shop owner or specialty builder who has wanted to sell auto parts online for years without pulling the trigger, the barrier that used to require an e-commerce department has gotten a lot shorter. Small brands have been proving that for years, the same way Screaming Chicken built a business on Camaro tail lights by knowing one niche better than anybody else bothered to. For the rest of us who just want the right part at the right price without a phone call, the upside is the same thing viewed from the other side of the counter, because every one of those back-end systems exists, so the number on the page is true when you click it.

“Most people get into this industry because they love cars, not because they love spreadsheets,” Linnane said. “If you’ve been thinking about starting an online parts business, don’t wait until everything feels perfect. Start with a solid foundation, learn as you grow, and let technology handle the work that used to require an entire team.” Horsepower is available now in the Shopify App Store.

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AboutCaecey Killian

Caecey Killian covers builds, installs, and product features for Car Junkie Magazine. He has spent years on the floor of the garage chasing horsepower across SBC, LS, and modern muscle platforms, and that shop time runs through every article he writes. His current CJM project is Project Street Reaper, a 1976 Camaro built around a fresh SBC 350. He is also known for Project Mighty Mouse, a 1977 Chevy Nova running a 1962 small-journal 327 SBC, with build coverage published across multiple online automotive magazines. His media background spans long-form build documentation, install coverage, and product features across the magazine and the Car Junkie Magazine YouTube channel. He writes the way he wrenches: specific, honest about the mistakes, and grounded in real garage work.

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