How PartsBase Used OroCommerce to Power a $2 Billion Aviation Network

PartsBase supports aviation, aerospace, and defense teams that need to find parts fast, sometimes when an aircraft is grounded, and every hour of downtime costs serious money. Alongside its core membership platform, PartsBase also runs a public eCommerce PartsStore and a major industry event, PBExpo. To scale sales, onboarding, and new self-serve programs, PartsBase uses OroCommerce as the digital control layer for customer accounts, subscriptions, entitlements, and eCommerce workflows.

Live Website

Customer Success by the Numbers

130%

YoY PartStore revenue growth

33%

higher AOV

5 Min

to onboard users to PartsBase, down from days

The Challenge

PartsBase is the central hub of the aviation industry, hosting over 90 million line items and facilitating $2 billion in annual transactions. But while their data was massive, their operations were bottlenecked by legacy technology.

They relied on a disjointed mix of systems: a gated legacy platform for members, a basic WooCommerce site for public sales, and manual back-office workflows. This created three major problems:

Disconnected Experience: There was no bridge between their private member network and their public store. Users had to manage separate logins, and data didn’t flow between systems.
Slow Sales Cycles: Onboarding a new customer was a high-touch, manual process taking days. This was far too slow for “Aircraft on Ground” (AOG) situations, where every hour of downtime costs thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Operational Friction: Simple tasks, like uploading vendor inventory, required manual intervention from sales reps, slowing down revenue and cash flow.

They needed a platform flexible enough to bridge their private and public networks and automate the complex logic required for aviation sales.

Rodrigo Garcia

COO at PartsBase Inc.

A huge part of PartsBase's success is in the ability to listen to our customers and their needs, and continuously invest in features and functionality that are being requested by them. In Oro, we found a platform and a partner that truly understands this customer-first approach and provides us not only with native features and capabilities necessary to launch a B2B marketplace but also with the flexibility to keep on iterating and improving our offering further.

The Solution

PartsBase deployed OroCommerce (with its native CRM capabilities) to act as the central engine for their transactions. Rodrigo Garcia, COO at PartsBase, puts it simply:

“OroCommerce is the brain of everything that we do. It handles the marketplace, the subscriptions, and the account provisioning. For us, OroCommerce is as mission-critical as it gets.”

The Bridge: Connecting Private and Public Sales

The aviation industry has strict rules. Not every part can be sold to everyone, and most inventory sits behind a membership wall. PartsBase used OroCommerce to replace their legacy store and connect it to their gated network. They built a feature internally called “The Departure Envelope.”

It works like a secure data handoff. When a logged-in member finds a part in the private database and clicks “Buy Now,” OroCommerce instantly transfers their identity, billing info, and shipping credentials to the PartStore checkout. The user never has to log in twice.

Behind the scenes, the platform handles the complexity: it identifies which parts are eligible for public sale, calculates taxes via Avalara, and manages the payment split between the vendor and PartsBase via Stripe.

In 2025, the PartStore processed over 130% more revenue than the year prior, and average order value rose by 33%, suggesting stronger buyer engagement and better inventory availability.

The Automation: PBExpress

To solve the delay in onboarding urgent customers, PartsBase used OroCommerce’s workflow engine to build PBExpress, a self-service portal.

Previously, a new account required a sales rep. Now:

The Workflow: A mechanic enters a wizard, pays a $300 subscription fee, and signs digital terms.
Automation: OroCommerce processes the payment and immediately commands the backend systems to create the account and assign the correct membership SKUs.
Result: A process that took days is now done in five minutes, allowing mechanics to search for parts immediately.

Innovation: Digitizing the Trade Show with PBExpo Direct

Realizing OroCommerce could enable diverse selling models, PartsBase used it to modernize their events business. Selling booths for PBExpo used to involve paper contracts and chasing checks.

They turned the booth sales process into an eCommerce product.

Visual Buying: Integrating with A2Z floor plan software, the OroCommerce storefront lets vendors view a map, pick a booth, and configure add-ons.
Instant Payment: Vendors pay the fee by credit card instantly.Sales Tool: Reps on the trade show floor now use tablets running OroCommerce to secure renewals on the spot.

The Results: Immediate Efficiency and New Revenue

By moving manual processes to automated OroCommerce workflows, PartsBase secured net-new business they were previously losing to friction.

When PartsBase calls OroCommerce the ‘brain,’ they are describing their actual architecture. Subscriptions, seller payouts, entitlement logic, and provisioning all live in this one system. That foundation makes new revenue programs like PBExpo Direct launchable and repeatable. They built the infrastructure to handle the complexity, and they are ready to keep adding to it.

The Results

New Booth Sales: In just the first five weeks, the self-serve portal brought in nearly $100,000. Surprisingly, 100% of these sales were from brand-new customers without ever speaking to a sales rep.
153 New Accounts via Automation: In 2025, the automated PBExpress workflow brought in 153 new customers. By cutting onboarding time to five minutes, they captured urgent business they previously lost.
A Scalable Future: The public-facing PartStore is projected to see aggressive growth in the coming year as new sales teams leverage the digital infrastructure.

How PartsBase Used OroCommerce to Power a $2 Billion Aviation Network