Why We Built LandedParts

I've been a car guy for decades — my first car was a 1989 325iC, red on black, and I never really got over it. These days the garage is a '99 911 C4 built to look bone stock while being almost a full restomod underneath, an '84 Guards Red 944 I'm the second owner of, and a '65 912 I'm still out in the garage dialing in as an outlaw build. Long enough to know the actual annoying part of owning something like this was never the wrenching. It was the sourcing. Tracking down the right part, from a vendor who actually has it, at a price that doesn't turn into a different number once shipping and duties show up. Six tabs open, a forum thread from 2014, a phone call to a guy in another state who "might have one." Every car person reading this already knows exactly what I mean.

The other half of me is a technology guy — I've spent my career building things, and I have a hard time leaving an annoying, repetitive problem alone once I've noticed it. So somewhere along the way "this sourcing thing is dumb" turned into "I could probably build a tool that fixes this." LandedParts is that tool. One search, across the vendors that actually carry the parts people with older, European, or performance cars need, with the real delivered cost shown up front instead of a sticker price that isn't the whole story.

Here's the part I want to be upfront about, because this audience has been burned by vague "how do you make money" answers before: LandedParts makes money through affiliate programs with some of the vendors we search. Not all of them — some pay us a referral fee if you buy through them, some don't pay us anything at all.

And here's the part that matters more: we don't tell you which is which, and it never changes the order you see results in. I made that call on purpose. If I let commission decide what gets shown first, I'd be building the exact kind of biased, self-interested tool I built this to replace. The whole point was to stop trusting a price you couldn't see the full picture on — I wasn't going to turn around and do the same thing from the other side.

So if the vendor you end up buying from happens to be one that pays us, that's great — it's what keeps this thing running and lets me keep improving it. And if it's not, that's also great, honestly, because it means a fellow car person found the right part at a fair price, which was the entire reason I built this in the first place. Either outcome is a win. I just want you to end up with the part you needed, from someone who actually had it, at a price you can trust.