Unified Commerce for Canada's Powersports Leader
Powersports / Automotive parts & distributionAbout Royal Distributing
Royal Distributing is Canada's largest powersports distributor - 1M+ variant SKUs sourced from 700+ vendors, serving riders, snowmobile enthusiasts, ATV owners, and marine customers across every powersports category. Wholesale, DTC, and physical retail all requiring fitment accuracy, real-time inventory, and account-specific pricing from a single platform.
In powersports, every purchase decision narrows to a single compatibility question. A brake pad that fits a 2019 Yamaha MT-09 may not fit the 2020 model. A Ski-Doo Renegade windshield doesn't fit a Summit. When that compatibility check takes too long, returns the wrong answer, or never happens at all - the cost falls on the merchant: wrong-part returns, support escalations, and a customer who doesn't come back.
Royal Distributing needed a commerce architecture that treated fitment as structural, not incidental. Their in-house platform had long since stopped keeping pace with that requirement.
Their Challenges
Royal's in-house platform worked until it didn't. The failure wasn't sudden - it was the predictable outcome of fitment logic that lived outside the data model.
Data fragmentation. Product data, pricing, and inventory lived in disconnected systems. With 700+ vendor feeds, there was no single source of truth. Staff spent hours daily reconciling discrepancies between the ERP, OMS, and storefront - a manual process that introduced errors at every handoff and compounded with every new vendor.
Fitment architecture failure. Year-Make-Model compatibility - the one data point that determines whether a powersports purchase is correct - required manual validation. The platform had no structured way to map parts to vehicles, verify fitment at the point of purchase, or carry a customer's vehicle context across their session. When the compatibility check was absent or wrong, the cost fell directly on Royal: wrong-part returns, support load, and lost repeat business.
Channel fragmentation. Wholesale, DTC, and retail POS ran as separate systems with separate integration surfaces. Pricing, inventory, and customer data were fragmented across all three. Every improvement had to be built, tested, and maintained three times.
The Solution
Teifi replaced Royal Distributing's in-house platform with a unified Shopify architecture built around four pillars: unified commerce on Shopify POS, integration with Royal's proprietary fitment engine and PIM, YMM persistent fitment search, and special order and order routing.
The result is a single platform where every buyer type - wholesale dealers, DTC consumers, and in-store associates - operates on the same catalog, the same inventory truth, and the same fitment data. No separate storefronts. No duplicated logic. One architecture for every channel.
How we helped
Key Features
Unified Commerce on Shopify POS
For the first time, Royal runs wholesale, DTC, and physical retail on a single platform. Dealers access account-specific pricing. Consumers get a fitment-aware DTC experience. In-store associates work from the same catalog, inventory, and fitment data.One platform eliminates an entire class of operational risk- pricing discrepancies, inventory mismatches, and duplicated effort no longer compound across separate systems.
Integration with Proprietary Fitment Engine / PIM
Royal's proprietary fitment engine and PIM represents decades of powersports compatibility knowledge. Replacing it was never the right approach - connecting it was. Teifi built the integration layer between Royal's internal systems and Shopify: fitment mappings, product data, inventory, pricing, and order data across 700+ vendors- all flowing automatically. The manual reconciliation that previously consumed staff hours daily is gone.
YMM Persistent Fitment Search
Teifi Digital architected Royal's fitment layer to store Year-Make-Model compatibility as structured data on the Shopify product record. SearchSpring powers search and discovery on top of that data. When a customer selects their vehicle, that context persists across their entire session- collections filter to compatible parts, PDPs confirm fitment in real time, and cross-sell surfaces compatible products. A persistent MyGarage layer lets returning customers save multiple vehicles and shop fitment-filtered from the first click.
Special Order & Order Routing
Orders route to the correct vendor or fulfillment path automatically - handling 700+ vendor relationships without manual intervention. When a customer orders a part that ships direct from a vendor, the routing logic handles it. No manual triage, no delays.
Results
Royal Distributing ran wholesale, DTC, and retail on a single fitment-first architecture from day one.
1M+ variant SKUs from 700+ vendors managed on a single Shopify architecture - replacing manual re-entry that previously consumed staff hours daily and introduced errors at every handoff.
1.27M vehicle-to-SKU compatibility links across 25,896 vehicle combinations, 8 powersports categories, 33 manufacturers, and 77 model years - all resolved from a single fitment architecture powered by SearchSpring.
YMM persistent fitment search surfaces only compatible parts from the first interaction - across collections, search results, and PDPs - reducing wrong-part orders that drive returns and support load.
MyGarage lets returning customers access saved vehicles instantly on every visit - removing friction for multi-vehicle households and protecting repeat-purchase conversion.
Unified wholesale, DTC, and POS on a single platform for the first time - eliminating the pricing discrepancies, inventory mismatches, and duplicated effort of maintaining separate channel systems.
Special order routing handles 700+ vendor relationships automatically - orders route to the correct vendor or fulfillment path without manual triage.
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