Curt Group, a designer, manufacturer and distributor of grill guards, running boards, towing hitches and other vehicle accessories, is revving up its e-commerce sites to put a better face on its family of brands.

It’s re-launching its five e-commerce sites to replace a disjointed online platform that often left customers unaware of its multiple brands or missing expected shipments of online orders, says Noah Gamer, director of e-commerce and digital marketing.

Noah Gamer, director of e-commerce and digital marketing, Curt Group

Curt’s older legacy e-commerce platform, for example, wasn’t designed to hold available inventory once a customer placed an order. “That caused a bit of frustration for customers,” Gamer says. “They’d place an order, and someone else got it.”

Curt last month relaunched the online presence of three brands—Curt towing products; Aries accessories for Jeeps and other off-road vehicles; and Luverne running boards, grill guards and other products for pickup trucks and vans—on e-commerce sites built on the Magento Commerce technology platform from Magento Inc. The sites—Curtmanuf.com, AriesAutomotive.com and Lucerne.com—were designed with a long list of features, including a more effective order management system to accurately process shipments of each order, Gamer says.

Curt, a portfolio company of Audax Private Equity that sells primarily to distributors, retailers and small automotive customizing shops, doesn’t release figures on revenue or the percent of sales processed online. But it relies heavily on e-commerce to drive sales and maintain its branded presence in the automotive market, Gamer says. The company changed its name last year from Curt Manufacturing Inc. to Curt Group as part of a rebranding effort to better reflect its family of brands.

The new e-commerce sites were designed to assist that branding through cross-promotions that link across multiple brands, Gamer says. “On our old sites, customers didn’t realize that we had other brands,” he says.

The new sites were built with responsive design, which automatically renders their content on any desktop or mobile device. They also include dealer portals, where Curt’s customers that sell through their e-commerce sites can download marketing materials, product specs and product installation videos. Among other new features: Improved search and navigation that lets buyers search for products by vehicle year, make and model, and sort search results by such criteria as size, weight and finish.

Curt plans to also relaunch on Magento this year its websites for Retrac Mirrors, a line of mirrors and grille guards designed for tractor trailers, and UWS Truck Accessories US, a line of storage containers and other products manufactured for trucks used by contractors and tradesmen.

Going forward, Curt will continue developing more improvements to ease online buying. “Now we have the flexibility to do more,” Gamer says.

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