The process
You pay at step four.
Not before.
Most parts websites take your money and then go looking. We do it the other way round: we find the part, photograph it, and show it to you — and only then is there anything to pay.
SPARRAPS is request-first. There is no cart and no checkout, because there is no shelf of pre-listed inventory to add things from. You describe what you need, and a national network of godowns goes looking for it.
That sounds slower than ordinary online shopping, and for common parts it usually isn't — most requests are answered within a few hours. For a mirror for a fourteen-year-old Chevrolet Beat, it can take longer, and we would rather say so than pretend.
What you get in exchange for the wait is the thing no catalogue can offer: access to parts that are not listed anywhere, for vehicles the manufacturer walked away from.
What the sourcing screen shows while your request is live.
The five stages
- 01
You post a request
Choose your vehicle — maker, model, year, variant — and name the part. The vehicle matters more than anything else here: the wrong year or variant is the commonest reason a part does not fit.
If the part is in no catalogue anywhere, describe it or photograph the old one. That path is not a fallback for us. It is the main road.
- 02
We route it to a godown
Your request goes to one godown at a time, not broadcast to everybody at once. Each is given a window to answer, and if they pass or the window closes, it moves to the next.
A godown can answer in two stages: 'checking' means somebody is walking the aisles right now; 'I have it' means the part is physically in their hand. Nobody can commit before they have looked.
- 03
Somebody finds it and photographs it
Four angles, plain background: front, back, the serial plate, and the wear face. Then they declare the part's true condition grade — not the grade you asked for, the grade it actually is.
Declaring an honest grade never counts against a godown. If it did, they would learn to tell you what you wanted to hear, and the whole grading system would be worthless.
- 04
You look at it and decide
You are looking at photographs of the exact component that will arrive at your workshop. Not a catalogue render, not a similar unit — that one.
Accept it, and you pay. Decline it, and the request goes straight back out to the network. Declining is a normal outcome, not a complaint.
- 05
It is packed and shipped
The part is wrapped in SPARRAPS packaging with a SPARRAPS label, and handed to a courier. Tracking is under our name from door to door.
You never learn which godown supplied it, and they never learn who you are. That is deliberate — your relationship is with us, and so is the guarantee.
What happens when nobody has it
Sometimes the first pass through the network finds nothing. This is the honest part of the business, and we handle it by telling you plainly — including how many godowns were checked, so you can see a real search happened.
Then you choose. There are two options and neither costs anything.
- Keep looking
- Your request stays open indefinitely. No timer, no expiry, no charge. It sits in the network, and when a godown takes in new stock — or acquires a scrapped vehicle, or a new partner joins in your region — they can pick it up. Weeks later, or months. When somebody does, you are notified and the request rejoins the normal flow: photographs, your approval, payment.
- Cancel
- Close the request. Nothing was charged at any point, so there is nothing to refund.
A rare part for a discontinued vehicle turns up eventually. The person waiting for it is deciding whether to keep a car or scrap it — holding the request open costs us nothing and is worth everything to them.
If the grade we find isn't the grade you asked for
Say you asked for Grade B and the only unit in the network is Grade A. The godown photographs what they actually have and declares its real grade. The price moves to that grade's tier automatically — up for a better part, down for a worse one — and you accept or decline at the new price.
Without this, a large share of requests would die for no good reason: a perfectly good part sitting on a shelf, unusable because it was one grade off what somebody typed into a form.
How long it takes
We will not give you a number we cannot keep. What we can tell you is the shape of it:
- Common parts for current vehicles — usually found the same day, often within a few hours.
- Parts for older or discontinued models — longer. Sometimes days, because somebody has to physically search shelving that was never catalogued.
- Genuinely rare components — this is what a standing request is for. It may be weeks. It may be months. It is also the only realistic alternative to scrapping the vehicle.
Whatever the case, you will see what is happening rather than waiting in silence.