Saving a Buck Buying Used

There’s a cool money-saving site that you may find worth a look if you are maintaining heavy trucks or equipment. 

Truck Parts Inventory (TPI) is an organization that acts as a clearing house for used salvage truck parts around the United States and Canada. It’s Internet-based and serves as the pipeline into a huge database of used parts. All listings and transactions are done over the Internet at www.truckpartsinventory.com and deliveries are made by negotiated freight arrangements to any destination, depending on the urgency of the demand.

The interesting thing is that because the site is a consolidator of more than 100 used parts locations, there is a huge inventory of cataloged parts. The site boasts 669,000 parts, all of them for heavy-duty trucks with some suppliers also listing off-highway equipment parts.

And you can sign up as a user of used parts or a seller – just the thing if you have some old equipment sitting at a terminal that you just don’t know what to do with.

It’s a subscription service for the sellers, so you don’t have any cost for searching and ordering parts.  For truck service locations it can be a great resource, because their customers can have a choice of new, reman, aftermarket or good used parts with pricing according to the parts source.

According to the administrator Scott Tetz, TPI is easy to search. He says the site is fast and responsive, it’s free and, at the end of the day, it can save you a bunch of money.

At the website are logos for companies using the service and you see names like Penske and Waste Management, so it’s no small operation and, in fact, has been around for 20 years. 

So if you’re stuck for a part that may be on back order or just want to see if you can beat the price of new or reman parts, give it a shot. It could be a useful resource on your Rolodex.