The days of passing along price increases across an entire catalog and assuming customers will accept it are gone, says Syncron’s Ben Groeneveld
When costs go up, it’s tempting to raise prices across the board. I’ve seen plenty of parts suppliers take that approach, particularly when tariffs are driving up costs.
The problem is that customers don’t buy every part the same way. If an OEM supplier has five alternatives sitting on the shelf, there’s only so much of an increase you can pass along before you start losing business. But if you’re selling a specialist component with few alternatives, you may have more room to protect your margin.
Apply the same increase to both, and you could end up losing sales on one and margin on the other.
Price sensitivity changes the math
Tariffs have made pricing decisions even more difficult. The 25% Section 232 duties on imported auto parts have been in place since May 2025, and Commerce now opens a window every quarter to add more parts to the list.
Enlyte’s Trends 2026 report found OEM parts prices rose 4.21% in 2025, compared with 3.89% for aftermarket prices. Mitchell reported this spring that shops were using 1.5% more aftermarket, recycled, and remanufactured parts because of higher OEM costs.
Buyers have alternatives, and they’re paying attention to what those alternatives cost. The days of passing along the same increase across an entire catalog and assuming customers will accept it are gone.
That doesn’t mean OEM suppliers should stop raising prices. It means they need a much clearer picture of where they can raise them without losing business, and where holding the price might actually deliver a better commercial result.
The limits of manual pricing
Part of the problem is how pricing is managed. Plenty of parts suppliers still rely on spreadsheets, cost-plus markups, and periodic price reviews, often with the final prices loaded into an ERP system.
Many of those systems were originally set up to support production. They weren’t designed with the aftermarket in mind, where you’re dealing with thousands of parts, multiple sales channels, and customers who have very different expectations about price.
Even when you know a blanket increase isn’t the answer, figuring out which prices should go up, which should stay put, and which might need to come down is a massive undertaking. Try doing that manually across thousands of parts.
What it looks like when a supplier gets it right
A 2025 study McKinsey & Company prepared for MEMA on aftermarket digitization includes an example that fits this exactly. A Tier 1 supplier’s aftermarket business was managing 25,000 SKUs across more than 30 data sources and seven global platforms. Revenue was flat and margins were sliding 1 to 2 points.
It gave its sales team real-time price and discount guidance on every deal, scored against more than 15 criteria to sort customers into much smaller segments. Return on sales rose 4% to 5%. Within about two years, it went from the worst-performing business unit in the company to the best.
And that result isn’t an outlier. The same study found that among parts manufacturers, digital leaders earn margins of 20% to 25%, while laggards earn 10% to 15%. It also names pricing, along with inventory, as a top digitization priority for parts suppliers.
There’s a lesson in that example about discounting. You can spend months getting your list prices right, then give away the margin one deal at a time because your salespeople don’t have the information they need to negotiate effectively.
Give them better guidance on individual customers and transactions, and they’re in a much stronger position to know when a discount makes sense and when they’re giving money away.
What it means for the rest of the aftermarket
Repair shops have a stake in all of this, too. They need to understand where suppliers are competing hard on price and where they have more room to negotiate. That affects negotiations, sourcing decisions, and ultimately the prices shops and their customers pay.
There’s valuable information flowing the other way, too. Shops know which parts customers are buying, where they’re choosing alternatives, and when price is costing someone a sale. That’s useful intelligence for anyone trying to set more competitive and profitable prices.
There’s plenty of pressure to increase prices right now. But suppliers need to know where passing those increases on makes commercial sense, where it could cost them business, and where they’re already selling themselves short.
Ben Groeneveld is Industry Principal for Global Supply Chain Solutions at Syncron, where he works with equipment manufacturers across automotive, construction, agriculture, and trucking on aftermarket strategy and implementation. Previously at Oracle, AGCO, and Navistar, he has 20+ years of experience helping OEMs navigate supply chain disruption and optimize parts operations.
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