Well, through that crazy time in the late 1990's some very bold individuals decided why not automotive. Their boldness, coupled with very unique investment opportunities, laid the groundwork, for us to be there, on the front lines, though the birth, and launches, of two multi-million dollar automotive B2C, business to consumer, retail Internet startups, like CarParts.com and Wrenchead.com, who paved the way for an industry to sell parts and accessories on a scale the industry never thought in their wildest dreams would ever happen.

So how crazy was it? Try $50 million dollars worth. After all, we are the automotive industry. Not to long ago, 1 out of every 4 American's worked in the Auto Industry. Since Wall Street said back then, "size matters", hence the craziness, which resulted in a mad rush to be the

first to conquer it all. I remember in 1998 sitting in a living room in Santa Monica, CA, listening to someone tell me, he was an automotive enthusiast because he owned an SUV. Since he had just gotten the $50mil from a huge Internet investment company, CMGI, and had a very unique Internet URL, CarParts.com, I had to agree. He had just put together a site graphically, focused on aftermarket accessories, but had nothing else. No employees, no suppliers, nothing. That turned out to be my job. Make him a real company. By mid 1999, with almost 100 people, and having moved twice, we were doing over a million plus per month in sales. The industry was shocked. They all said, how could this be? But as always, money talks, and soon everyone wanted a piece of the action.

During the same time, except on the East Coast in White Plains, NY, another star was born with the same kind of financial backing, called Wrenchead.com, a site focused on replacement parts. It had board members like CBS and Goldman Sachs. This site had a slow growth curve due to personnel challenges. At this point I like to tell the story about how I happened to go to a high school reunion in New York, and stopped by to check Wrenchead out. I was made an offer I could not refuse, so off to New York I went with my family. Again the results came quick and fast as we overcame our barriers, and seriously turned this site around. Just like CarParts the results at Wrenchead were overwhelming.

It was a heady year at the start of 2000. Wrenchead advertising on TV for the Daytona 500 in February was so heavy, that it resulted in the single largest page views ever recorded for an automotive retail Internet company. But like all good things, they come to an end. The Wall Street technology crash in that year changed everything. It was no longer sexy to be B2C business-to-consumer; you needed to be B2B, business-to-business, if you still wanted to IPO.

I decided I had to try to convince them otherwise. For months we hammered away at developing a new system that would be focused on allowing people to search by product attribute. An idea that made sense. After all if you wanted to buy a camshaft for an engine you were building, the current way, search by vehicle year-make-model, had nothing to do with that. We finished it just in time for the 2000 SEMA show. We unveiled it to the manufacturers and had 165 sign up to participate in the new site launch. When I got back from the show, the tech people had just finished, so we were all set. But Wall Street had other ideas. Being profitable wasn't good enough, they wanted the IPO, and were convinced B2B was the only way to go. Shortly thereafter, an arrangement was made and the Wrenchead retail unit was sold to NAPA, who prompted turned it off shortly thereafter. Neither had any idea what they missed, and since everything was scrapped, the ability for attribute selling on a massive scale, has not been delivered since. Not long after, an arrangement was made for the retail site of CarParts to be sold to JC Whitney, who struggled with what to do with it, since running an Internet operation was completely different than running a highly structured print cataloging business.

When it was all said and done, $100 million dollars had been spent. Crazy yes, industry changing absolutely, will we ever be the same, no.

In the following year it was clear, being a B2B company wasn't going to help get an IPO to happen either, so each company became a technology company, CarParts became CarParts Technologies and eventually disappeared a few years later, and Wrenchead became WHI Solutions, which exists today.

You ask, how can so much money be used? Well, back then, everything was a static page, meaning it took teams of people and lots of graphic designers working everyday building landing pages. The only databases available were flat file types, which required lots of technical personnel along with automotive industry veterans, who all worked together to build and maintain a massive industry archive covering, Accessories, Performance, and Replacement products. Barbaric you might add, but it was no different then when years ago, people switched from radios to televisions, from house phone to cell phones, from writing letters to texting.

I call the years 2002-2006 the electronic cataloging era. Everyone wanted to produce a data catalog that could be the next standard the industry would use. Companies like DCI came to the forefront in the SEMA community. While everyone was looking for solutions, the electronic catalog world of Automotive saw its own upheaval. Companies were bought, sold, or merged. CCI & Triad came together and became Activant. Profit Pro, MacDonald, and Icarz became part of Wrenchead. All kinds of smaller providers surfaced to compete too. During this time we saw the acceptance of relational databases and template driven websites. No longer were hordes of people required to build and run a site, which truly opened the door for the small business owner to jump in.

At this point I'll digress a little. I still had not gotten over throwing away something really worthwhile, so in 2003, I joined together with a technology firm who understood the formats we needed, formed a new company partnership, and launched an industry-wide portal called Parts-World.com, with our own private money.

This bold move, which was totally under-funded from the start, still was able to create something that in the past would have taken 20 times the funding. We had all kinds of enthusiast sites, category focused sites, brand sites, and industry sectional sites for accessories, performance parts, replacement parts, all under the umbrella of the master portal Parts-World.com. Unfortunately due to the downward trend of technology firms, no one was much into spending money with tech companies back then, and my partner was having a rough time. We had the opportunity to sell everything to Amazon, who wanted our database system, but I had the misfortune to learn that 50/50 partnerships only work when you both agree. My partner wanted his tech company to be bought to, since that was the drain on us. As you can imagine, what does Amazon need a small tech company for, so no deal. Oh well, life goes on.

I finally managed to survive my partner, along with a few core dedicated individuals, who had been there in the early years, we worked hard to try to make it on our own, as we watched everyone else who was jumping in too. Now it seemed everyone had a site. But just when we all thought Web 2.0 was going to take hold in the automotive marketplace, the economy begins to falter. The 2007 Christmas season seemed slower than normal for truck accessories. By the spring of 2008 the truck accessory market knew something was wrong. It didn't have so long to wait, as we all remember the automotive economy collapsing in the fall of 2008.

2009 became a race for survival. The playing field had major players like JC Whitney and US Auto Parts, who both were selling parts to all three major market segments, Accessories, Performance, and Replacement. Another group of companies now were strong on the web, Auto Anything, Four Wheel Parts, Summit Racing. The second tier sites, most all privately held did their best to hold their own too, while many third tier sites, closed, went out of business, collapsed, or sold.

We begin a new decade in 2010. The automotive Internet industry is still young, but loaded with entrepreneurs who will change the landscape again in the future. Now more than ever, with Open Source participation, being an accepted technology solution, we have more tools available for all of us to work with every day. We've all found that building something only a select few can operate is a bad thing. Open Source allows you the entire universe of talented people to be available at your fingertips.

We would like to be the first to say that Web 3.0 will be all about attribute selling and layered navigation. Forget the rigid year, make, model, structure. It will be all about what it takes to sell that specific product. The ones, who master that, will be the ones to watch.

HAPPY SELLING!

Now in partnership with Ne8