Product review of DustyMoto v1.0

We had the extreme pleasure of taking a look at a brand new product in the Powersports industry today called DustyMoto. The funny thing to me is how things pop into existence, and after you look at them, you sit back and ask yourself what took so long? It’s such a basic concept, yet has a powerful conclusion when followed through.

All of our customers and pretty much all business all over the world have the same problem. We buy products that we fully intend to sell, but due to economic pressures or product changes, we end up stuck with them. We all have them, those dusty old parts that have been getting used as a paper weights, that we’ve given up ever getting rid of. Of course, we could post it up on ebay or craigslist, but that requires too much effort and tracking. We’ve expensed them out years ago, so they’re no longer on our books, but hey, they’re still sitting here making me look at them and shuffle things around them.

We always have the option of throwing them away, but we have that glint of hope that one day someone will walk into our store and ask for just that thing. The problem is, I’m limited to the people in my area and chances are not very good that I’ll have the one person looking for it find his or her way into my place of business to buy it. I know I can advertise on the web or something, but that isn’t that simple to do. I have to have a website, a way to get people to it and a way for them to know I have the products.

In comes DustyMoto version 1.0 with a solution that makes so much sense it makes you slap yourself and ask “why didn’t I think of that?”. In simple terms, instead of trying to market products and get people to the website to buy them, what they do, is allow business owners to supply their old parts on a central network that lots of other business owners use. So now, instead of having to advertise or get customers finding your parts, you have other business owners that actually need them, checking your inventory automatically before they go elsewhere.

So as an example: I have part 12345 that has been out of date for years now and I’ve never had anyone in Atlanta ask for it. I thought about throwing it away and I’ve written it off the books years ago. I go to dustymoto.com and add the item to my list of inventory that I wish to sell and move on. The next day a business owner out in Texas has a dusty old 1972 Honda they need to fix and they need that very part. They know they can’t find it in Honda’s order files so they check DustyMoto and find out that you have just what they need. The order is placed through Dustymoto and you ship the item out to them the next day. Problem solved.

We took a look at this product today and it really is a nice system and seems to handle everything you need it to. One thing we felt was missing however, was the ability for a business system such as Lizzy™ to handle these transactions automatically, requiring no input from the user. As a result of this conversation, plans have already begun to have Lizzy™ and DustyMoto joining hands very soon so that the flow goes something like this.

Dealership adds item to a service ticket in Lizzy™ and a purchase order is created to order it. Later in the day you go to the purchase order and ask Lizzy™ to see how many of the items on the order could be retrieved from your fellow business owners, instead of ordering them from lets say, Honda. Lizzy™ submits a request to DustyMoto and receives a reply back that 5 of the items can be gotten from the network itself. With the click of a button, Lizzy™ moves those 5 parts to a DustyMoto purchase order, places the order with them electronically and removes them from the original order.

As you can see, once the product has this automatic processing built in, it will be a dealerships best friend with respect to handling and moving old inventory. But even in its current form its better than the alternative, and after all, there is always someone, somewhere that needs what you have. The trick is in finding them.

–glenn hancock