Spare parts & configurable products
Sell what must be identified or specified first
Two kinds of product cannot be sold from a list. One has to be configured — length, material, connection, coating — before a price exists. The other has to be identified — which of the 3,000 parts in this machine is the one that broke. Both are core technical B2B, and both are catalog problems before they are storefront problems. This area covers configurators, bills of material, spare-part identification and compatibility.
Understand
- Configurable products — Options, rules, constraints, and how a configuration becomes a price and an order line.
- Bills of material and assemblies — The structure that turns a machine into a list of orderable parts.
- How buyers identify a spare part — Machine, serial, drawing position, old part number — anything but your SKU.
Set up
- Build a configurator — Option groups, options, rules, pricing.
- Model a bill of material — Assemblies, positions, quantities.
- Exploded drawings and hotspots — Click the drawing, get the part.
- Compatibility and fits-with — Which part fits which machine.
- The customer's installed base — Let a buyer register their machines and shop from them.
Work with it
- The buyer's path: configure and order — What a configured order looks like end to end.
- The buyer's path: find a spare part — Machine → drawing → part → cart, in under a minute.
- Maintain BOMs and drawings — Revisions, supersessions, discontinued parts.
Keep it healthy
- Configurator problems — No valid configuration, wrong price, constraint loops.
- BOM and drawing quality — Positions without parts, parts without drawings, dead supersessions.
Where this fits
If you are here because of a project rather than a feature, start from the scenario instead: Sell spare parts online and Sell configurable products phase this work and set out what to do first. Manufacturers is the industry view — variant configuration, contract prices and punchout in one place.