Tariffs, Data & Growth: How Smarter Supplier-Reseller Connections Beat Cost Pressure

[0:00] Johannes Crepon: Thanks, everyone, for joining. Very excited about today’s webinar on tariffs, data and growth. The theme is this: tariffs are obviously disruptive for businesses and not in everyone’s favor, but they can also be an asset. If you’re a supplier dealing with your trading partners, nobody likes price increases, but if you’re well equipped to handle tariffs and have transparency into how they affect pricing, that becomes an asset you can use in your favor with your trading partners. My name is Johannes Crepon, CEO and co-founder of PDM Automotive, and I’m here with Jeb Pierce of MobyTrade. Jeb, do you want to give a quick intro of yourself and MobyTrade?

[0:58] Jeb Pierce: Absolutely. Thanks to the PDM team and Johannes for having me. I’m Jeb Pierce, CEO and co-founder of MobyTrade. We’re a tariff and trade intelligence platform built for the auto industry, working with companies on both sides of the aisle. Some of the largest auto parts retailers are clients, and we help with their direct imports, and we also help a lot of auto parts suppliers manage, track and navigate a tariff landscape that’s gone from very calm waters to constant volatility. In plain terms, we make sure that no matter what changes in trade policy, they can understand and account for landed cost and financials on every SKU, make more profitable decisions and strengthen customer relationships. Johannes Crepon: Perfect. Quick look at the agenda: a brief background on PDM and our Growth Partner Program, then a talk from me on the mechanics within PIES®, the automotive data standard for product information, and how tariff information is managed within PIES®.

[2:06] Then Jeb will give us the current tariff landscape and what the supplier community needs to know, and maybe, if he has a crystal ball, what’s coming. Then we’ll bring the two together: how is sophisticated management of your tariff data an asset, and how does it add transparency when you work with your trading partners? We also have a special offer toward the end, so it’s worth sticking around. A quick background on PDM for anyone who doesn’t know us: we’re a SaaS platform focused on the automotive aftermarket parts industry, and traditionally our biggest focus has been cataloging.

[3:05] We built the platform to be the most advanced solution available. We support ACES® and PIES® to help our customers comply with those standards. We also recently launched a new product we’re really excited about called Customer Connections. It helps you, as a supplier, understand how your cataloging activity translates into success with your sales channels, meaning your big trading partners, distributors, retailers and so on. On top of that, we have an optional managed service, our Growth Partner Program, which I’ll share more about later. The next three slides are about PIES® and how tariff information is maintained within it, because any supplier in automotive isn’t dealing with three, four or five SKUs.

[4:14] You’re dealing with thousands of SKUs. So it’s very important to have the data in a format that makes it easier to maintain, keep updated and accurate, and easier to share downstream with your trading partners. PIES®, as the industry standard for product information, is the way to go. Within PIES® there’s a segment called EXPI, the extended product information segment. It lets you maintain tariff-related information such as the HTS code and the Schedule B code, for import and export, plus Canada-specific codes, and also country of origin, because where a product comes from is very important to the duty on that product.

[5:15] The next segment, which isn’t obvious on the surface, is the product attribute segment. Jeb is our tariff expert here. Jeb, say you have two products in front of you, two pipes in different materials. How does the material affect the tariff rate you actually pay when you import the product? Jeb Pierce: The three main culprits are steel, copper and aluminum. A lot of people have struggled with this concept over the last year or so, because the tariff is a percentage applied to the derivative material content of the product.

[6:11] So if something is 25% aluminum, you’d be tariffed on that 25%, not on 100% of the value. There have been a lot of miscalculations where people overpaid because they paid the tariff on the entire value. Tracking all of that meticulously, where the steel was smelted and what the percentage makeup is, is essential. Especially in auto, those are the main areas where people have overpaid or underpaid, and Customs has been very proactive about monitoring it. Johannes Crepon: And it’s not one bucket or the other. It could be 70% of one material and 30% of another; that’s how granular we’re talking, right? Jeb Pierce: Correct. And as you get more complicated, with secondary HTS codes across the product line, tariffs can stack in different ways. That’s where you see things go from 25% to, especially for goods from China, 115% or more.

[7:23] Hopefully people have been able to get some of those refunds back, because it was pretty costly. Johannes Crepon: This ties back to the point that to pay the right tariff rate, you have to have the information, and information is best maintained in a system. You need to know the material of each product. If you have three pipes in your catalog, you need to maintain that material information, and that’s where the attribute segment, also part of PIES®, comes in. And as Jeb explained, it’s not just one material or another; it can be a composition of materials that determines the cost of the product when it’s imported and the tariff rate.

[8:19] Within PDM, for many other use cases, we’ve long had the ability to go beyond the ACES® and PIES® standards, with fields that don’t fit the standards’ rigid categories but let you maintain information needed for more nuanced, granular decisions. The use case here is being able to say a product isn’t purely steel, aluminum or copper, but a composition of materials. The PIES® standard lets you maintain the basic information very well, and it’s important to also capture the nuances introduced in recent months so you can classify products correctly. At a high level, the Growth Partner Program, a service we launched a few months ago and are seeing great success with among early adopters, is essentially a fully forward-deployed sales team.

[9:34] Think of your organization as a supplier selling products to your trading partners. As PDM believes, catalog data is a core asset for being successful with your customers. But catalog data isn’t the only connective tissue between you and your trading partners. There’s more, and communicating tariffs well has been added to that list. The Growth Partner Program is a commission-based service, so we only benefit if we deliver real value. It helps you communicate all of this information, starting with cataloging and extending to tariff information, so you’re more structured, with an additional resource when you communicate it.

[10:33] Keith, who runs the program at PDM, is on the call and will join a bit later, so he’s happy to answer questions. With that, I’ll hand it over to you, Jeb. You’re in charge of the slides. Jeb Pierce: Thank you, Johannes, and thanks, everyone, for taking time out of your busy schedules to talk tariffs and data with us. The way we think about PDM and MobyTrade: PDM helps you with your catalog and with moving goods onto and off the shelf, with more sales. MobyTrade comes in on how goods get into the country and what the cost structure looks like for every importer. One thing we’ve been talking about with a lot of our customers.

[11:32] You can have the best shelf placement in the store or online and still lose money, because your landed cost isn’t what it should be as tariffs and trade policies shift, and then you have to communicate that effectively with your partners. I’ll spend a few minutes on the current landscape, the reality check, and then how we help customers at MobyTrade solve it. Much of this started in early 2025 with the new administration, with the big moment around Liberation Day in April 2025. Zooming forward to today, the last 120 days have brought a lot of change. IEEPA tariffs were struck down, and it’s been like whack-a-mole: they were replaced by Section 122, which is now set to expire. USMCA is being reviewed for renegotiation in July. And there’s the looming Section 301 investigation around forced labor that affects about 60 countries most people import from.

[12:38] Talk to your lawyers if you have questions, but in my conversations with trade lawyers, that will be much harder to take away in a coordinated international trade situation than IEEPA was. Just these changes in the last 90 to 120 days mean that if you’re forecasting your costs and sales and communicating them to retail partners, those forecasts can go stale extremely quickly. They need to be updated week over week, with partners and the latest data. The last point here: volatility is the new normal. These tariffs aren’t going away; they’ll be replaced by something else that’s probably stickier than the one before. One trap we see companies fall into is managing tariffs every couple of weeks.

[13:42] And managing them by broad category, like brakes. The companies doing really well manage granularly, down to the HTS code within their parts catalog database, plus country of origin. Having that information is one thing; communicating it to your partners is another. The second thing we see suppliers do really well is take that information and communicate proactively about increased costs or prices, which gives them an advantage over their competitors. There’s a full suite of things that help companies do this. I mentioned audit and recovery, because people may have imported on the wrong HTS code, or overpaid on steel and aluminum derivative parts, especially in auto. You can go back, audit, and recover that cash within a certain time window.

[14:49] Then there’s reacting quickly to new tariff changes. Johannes touched on country of origin earlier. The important factor is not which country has the lowest tariffs but which has the lowest landed cost. A country could have a higher tariff rate, but if everything else in the shipment costs less, that matters, and you have to know it right away. You need it all in one place, monitored, with alerts when changes hit your full product range, whether you have 1,000 products or 150,000 or 500,000. We’ve talked about the tariff and financial side, which has gotten a lot of attention over the last 15 or 16 months, but where companies have really separated themselves is in how they communicate with the other stakeholders in their supply chain.

[15:52] Their customers and their own suppliers. That’s where all the financial and landed-cost information pays off. We typically see two examples. Supplier A is reactive: it’s out of my control, it’s written policy, I can’t do much. They’re stagnant, absorb the cost as long as possible, maybe push back on their own supplier a little, but don’t tell their customer, “Our costs increased; we need to negotiate or split this.” Eventually it’s too much, they suddenly try to raise prices, the customer is unhappy, and the relationship suffers. Supplier B takes all the hard work they’ve done on the data, whether with MobyTrade, their customs broker or someone else, packages it up, and proactively negotiates and meets deadlines with their partners.

[16:58] That way there are no cost surprises, they’re seen as a reliable partner, and over time that compounds into more shelf space, competitive advantage and better relationships. Everybody knows this is a people industry, not just data going back and forth. Building models is one thing, but communicating effectively with the people you do business with every day will serve you well long term. Finally, why this matters: these things aren’t going away. There will be a different tariff tomorrow and more HTS codes to worry about. Customs just had another executive order calling for more enforcement on all the data and products coming into the country. So set yourself up to model, scenario-plan and manage these costs, and to handle the communication side.

[18:02] The people who move first won’t just survive or weather the storm; they’ll build a compounding advantage over the years this continues. Johannes Crepon: Thanks so much, Jeb, for the high-level view and the deep dive. A lot of numbers and acronyms, but we’re used to that in automotive. The reason Jeb and I thought this would be a great webinar is that much of the value MobyTrade brings to the industry, and to our customers, depends on the right information being available. The MobyTrade dashboard gives you that transparency in one click, where before it was a juggling act of spreadsheets that went out of date.

[19:10] You get a dashboard that helps you understand that information, bringing transparency within your company and across your trading partners. The collaboration between MobyTrade and PDM is that PDM provides the information in a structured way, so the calculations and value MobyTrade delivers are easier to achieve. Then it flows downstream, because data in a system is only as good as the value it generates. We’ve seen a big shift, and it may sound obvious, in how companies treat tariff information. Years ago they’d use one generic number across the whole catalog because it didn’t really matter.

[20:20] It was roughly the same tariff rate whether it was a tire, a hose or a brake pad, right, Jeb? Jeb Pierce: It wasn’t all the same, but you could count on one hand how many times trade policy or tariff rates changed during an administration. For example, the HTS schedule, which hosts all the HTS codes, used to be updated maybe once a month as codes expired or became unnecessary. Last year, in 2025, I lost count of how many times it was updated, but by midsummer we were at almost 200. A really significant increase in changes and additions. Johannes Crepon: What has your experience been with supplier customers having the relevant information readily available?

[21:24] Say a company imports $100 million of goods a year. On average they could save some percentage, but to do that they need the information to fine-tune the calculation. What’s your experience been with companies having that information readily available? Jeb Pierce: A good example is the IEEPA refunds. When companies take their historical entries and upload them through the ACE portal themselves, about 50% of those submissions fail. MobyTrade has a 99% success rate across line items in getting those submitted and seeing refunds. It’s difficult because ACE only shows what you paid for a specific entry.

[22:30] It’s not line-item level, so you need to go back and prove you imported on a given date with your POs, invoices and master bill of lading. What we’ve done successfully with a few clients, who have tens of millions of dollars that can be refunded, is line up all their government-level data with their shipment-level data, submit correctly the first time, and start getting refunds, real cash back in their hands. Johannes Crepon: That makes a lot of sense. Keith, I think you’re on the call. I want to bring you in before we get to the offer, and for anyone with questions, there’s a Q&A section; I hope we’ll have a few minutes to get to them.

[23:28] Keith, you run the Growth Partner Program here at PDM. I’m excited to hear your take on the relevance of tariff data when PDM helps suppliers engage with their trading partners. Keith: Jeb, Johannes, thank you both for having me. I’m very excited to talk with our suppliers about improving their tariff data quality, specifically with PDM. One example: there are resellers we work with through the Growth Partner Program, connecting our suppliers with them, who will not accept data unless the tariff code is assigned properly. It’s something we often have to work through with our suppliers. There are several other examples like that, and I’m happy to answer any questions from the team on this call.

[24:32] My email will be provided at the end, so if more comes up, you’re welcome to reach out any time. With that, back to you to answer questions and discuss the offers from MobyTrade and from PDM through the Growth Partner Program. Johannes Crepon: The tariff topic is always top of mind when we talk with customers. For customers on the managed Growth Partner Program, we have an offer of a free SKU-level audit from MobyTrade. Can’t get better than free, plus you potentially get money back, so it’s even making you money. We’re excited to discuss it with anyone interested.

[25:28] Jeb, you also have an offer for non-PDM customers, and it applies to all attendees. Jeb Pierce: Yes. For MobyTrade, we’re offering a flat 10% off the first-year subscription to the platform for everyone who attended, even if they left a little early. And I’m excited to work on the Growth Partner Program offer as well; I think a lot of people can get quick value out of it, and hopefully a little money back. Johannes Crepon: On questions: when you work with customers, Jeb, is it different with a supplier versus a reseller? Is your engagement different, or is it the same work?

[26:28] Jeb Pierce: Overall, the goal is the same: maintain compliance, pay the right amount at the right time, and have all the data in one place, because every party works with disparate internal and external data sources. The biggest difference between suppliers and larger retailers is who we’re talking with. Larger retailers, not surprisingly, have an internal trade compliance department handling much of this. On the supplier side, everything we do is tied to business outcomes: how do today’s trade measures affect our final customers? The end goal is similar, staying compliant and maintaining margins; the people we work with internally vary based on the resources available.

[27:35] Johannes Crepon: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but how have resellers been accepting price changes due to tariffs? We talk about transparency being important. Are there examples of how resellers handle it differently? Jeb Pierce: There’s a recent one; I was just talking with them. They’re dealing with so much volume, data and documentation across all their partners that one of the first things they scan for is: what’s the discrepancy between this bill and the previous ones? They can see it in their system. Has there been a conversation about it? Do I need to escalate? If it’s a discrepancy with no conversation, it goes in one pile; if there has been a conversation, it goes in a different pile. Given everyone’s workload, they set the first pile aside and move on with everything else.

[28:50] That’s one example with one of our retailer partners. Others say, and we’ve heard this from a supplier customer who works with one of the big retailers, that being able to sit down face to face, at their next business review, and talk through changing prices allows a really strategic conversation and helps box out competitors. Retailers and resellers don’t like random changes. They don’t mind talking about changes if there’s evidence: our costs went up by X for this reason. You can have that conversation early and often, rather than having it seem to come in at the last minute. Johannes Crepon: That makes sense. As you said, they have so much work that if something doesn’t smell right, they put it aside and move on, and you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for it to get attention again.

[29:57] Jeb Pierce: Right. Johannes Crepon: Awesome. We’re a little over time, so we’ll save the crystal-ball projections for another session with you, Jeb. Thanks, everyone, for joining. As Jeb said, we appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedules. If you have questions we weren’t able to answer, or anything comes up after the webinar, you know how to reach us. I’ll go back one slide to the contact information for Jeb and Keith. Feel free to reach out, including if you’re interested in either offer. Thanks again, Jeb, for taking the time to talk tariffs. We could do this all day. I hope this was valuable for everyone.

[30:56] Jeb Pierce: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, and I’m looking forward to the next one. Johannes Crepon: Thanks, Jeb. Bye-bye.