The web brings breaker yards into the 21st Century.

The internet and its 35 million UK users (Nielsen/Netratings 2005) are helping to bring the traditional business of car breaking into the 21st century one such company site can be seen at http://www.carsparefinder.co.uk.

It could be said that scrap yards were the fore-runners of the fashionable modern concept of recycling used car parts. Breaking up used cars to re-use the parts has been a useful business as long as there have been cars it isn’t completely stuck to cars but bikes and van parts can also be bought in this way (http://www.bikesparefinder.co.uk).

With their traditional image breaker’s yards may have seem like an unlikely candidate for an internet re-vamp but in fact it is that image that makes them so well suited.

One of the difficulties of running a breaker’s yard has always been trying to widen the customer base. The type of customer who will go to a scrap yard and get their hands dirty looking for the right part is limited. Breaker’s yards can be intimidating places for the faint hearted even though the value they offer is exceptional. UK households are reported to have spent £18.1bn online in 2004 (2005 Office for National Statistics) and that’s a market that no business can afford to ignore.

The very nature of scrap yards, their use of heavy machinery and their usual industrial location does not lend itself to easy customer access.

The other big problem for yard customers is how time consuming it can be not knowing which yards have the car parts they need. It can require a lot of travelling around to find specific parts – if they can be found locally at all so it would be easier if you can get the parts you need from home like from http://www.vansparefinder.co.uk you can fill in a form and all breakers will receive your request.

For any business the internet community is not one to be ignored. Fast broadband access is growing rapidly and 72% of broadband users say they use that speedy access to make purchases (Ofcom Q1, 2005).

Through specialist sites the internet now enables customers to have clean, user friendly access to used spare parts from a network of suppliers. By making a request for a specific part they can then choose the one that suits them from the quotes they receive. The part is then shipped to their door. No more climbing over crashed cars or driving for miles in a fruitless search.

From the breaker’s point of view the system allows them to make a quote on specific parts requests and it opens up a market of customers that they didn’t have before. It is even possible for yards to ‘bar-code’ their parts based on the car make and model that they are breaking, so that the system can automatically quote for them when a request comes in.

As well as introducing new customers the system widens the geographical scope as requests can come from anywhere in the country.