Posted by Jonathan
Hello! Welcome to our first AVSpares blog post. We felt this would be a great opportunity to introduce ourselves. We’ll tell you a little about our history as well as our ideas and future vision for turning AVSpares into the go-to platform for searching, buying and selling aircraft parts, aircraft tooling as well as MRO services. Never heard of AVSpares? Well, here is a little bit about us…
Where did it all begin?
We meant that metaphorically, but it doesn’t hurt to tell you a bit about where we literally came from. So to start, AVSpares.com was founded in the UK in 2007. The founders built the website with the aim to create a platform that was a free inventory listing service for the aviation industry. You can check out a screenshot of the original website below. We have to admit, the design and user experience has improved quite a bit over the past 15 years!
However, between 2007 and 2020, despite AVSpares changing ownership a number of times, the website never received the love, care or attention it truly needed. It quickly became outdated in comparison to its competitors. Users continued to signup to the website to source aircraft parts, including industry leaders. Therefore, we’re proud to have users from companies such as Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Bombardier, ATR, Gulfstream, Cessna and SpaceX onboard. In 2021, AVSpares was acquired by a UK based team with a wealth of experience in both aviation and technology. You can take a look at some of the people who make up our team here.
Over the past 12 months we have been working hard, rebuilding the AVSpares platform based on user feedback. Shout out to our users, you have been incredible! We’ve improved our customer service, simplified the user experience and added new features to help make the process of buying and selling aircraft parts, tooling and MRO services as quick and easy as possible.
So, what have we added?
Multiple Aircraft Parts, One RFQ, Multiple vendors
The first issue we tackled was the ability for a buyer to send multiple RFQs with a single click. Previously, when you wanted to search aeroplane parts, aircraft tooling or MRO service on AVSpares you could only send a single RFQ for a single item from our supplier. Users told us how long this was taking. They were spending hours scrolling through different parts and suppliers to send hundreds of RFQs and we realised we could improve that.
As a result, you can now select multiple items from different vendors. With a single click of a button, you can send RFQs to all vendors. Simply search a part number and select the vendors you’d like to send an RFQ. A window will then appear to the left of the search results (see image below). When you click ‘Send RFQ’ then multiple RFQs will be sent with a single click of a button, it’s that easy! You can view all the RFQs you send and receive here.
Automated Quoting for Aircraft Parts
Once we’d tackled the issue of multiple RFQ sends for our buyers, we moved onto a feature that a number of suppliers had requested – the ability to automatically quote for items with a fixed price. If you’re a supplier, you already know that responding to RFQs can take you and your team a lot of time. If you know the unit price of the item you’re selling you can easily setup automated quoting from within your My Account dashboard by clicking Quote generation settings. Once setup, you’ll be able to autogenerate RFQ responses from within your AVSpares dashboard. Want to double check a quote before it is sent? No problem, you can edit, update and approve the quote & PDF within the auto quoting section of an RFQ.
Vendor Marketplaces
A number of our suppliers mentioned in their feedback that they either don’t have their own website, or are unable to receive RFQs via their website. Our solution? Creating supplier (or vendor) marketplaces within our website which act like their own microstore within the AVSpares platform. Any buyer that lands on their microsite is able to view their company information and search that specific suppliers aircraft parts, tooling or capability listings. From a suppliers perspective, you’ll be able to add your own logo, banner image, company details and anything else you’d add to your own website.
Aircraft Parts and MRO Capability Inventory Upload Frequency
It’s our mission to ensure our buyers get access to the most up to date stock listings. The AVSpares platform now lists the most recently updated inventory at the top of the search results. This helps to ensure that buyers sending RFQs are likely to get a quick response. And that the RFQs suppliers receive are for items which are in stock. It also demonstrates that the more you engage with our website, the more likely you are to appear at the top of our search results and receive more RFQs. If you are a supplier and you would like to update your inventory, simply login to the AVSpares platform and go to Manage Listing.
Our vision for the future of AVSpares
As you’ll have seen, AVSpares has changed a lot since its inception in 2007. Our team has been working hard to deliver the majority of the improvements in the past 12 months. And the best news? We still have so much more we want to achieve with AVSpares.
Our aim is to create a platform that automates the majority of the manual, time consuming and often tedious tasks. From customer feedback, we know both buyers and sellers of aviation parts, aviation tooling and MRO services experience similar issues. And, having spoken to our users on both sides of the table, we can see the frustrations they encounter. Luckily, we feel a lot of them can be resolved through the clever application of technology.
On that note, all of our functionality and features are driven by feedback from our amazing users. We want to ensure that what we build is wanted (and needed) by you, our users. If you have any ideas for features, or would like to help with future features that we look to add, please reach out to our team on our contact us page.
In our next blog, we’ll be doing an interview with the AVSpares Managing Director, Stefan Fletcher.
