Auto Parts and Home Supply Store Insurance

We place independent auto-parts and auto-and-home-supply retailers, including stores that run a small machine shop or a counter-install of a battery or a wiper. We do not write personal auto, personal umbrellas, or the customer’s car. If you take customer vehicles into a bay and keep them, that is the auto-repair / garage page. If you are a parts wholesaler with a warehouse and a route, start on wholesale. This page is the store.

Inventory has to be valued at the peak — winter batteries, summer chemicals, a tire or accessory spike — not at a January count. Oil, solvents, batteries, and propane or MAP gas are disclosable flammables. A silent bulk-oil room is how a fire claim becomes an occupancy argument. We ask about used-core bins, a machine shop (drums, rotors, a press), and whether you sell tires as a program or as a few SKUs. Tires in volume change the property and products conversation; a handful on a rack usually do not.

Counter-install of a battery, a wiper, or a bulb is completed operations when you do it. A machine shop that turns a drum for a repair shop is a service receipt we want on the application, not a hope that “retail GL” covers the lathe. If techs start taking cars overnight, we will move you toward the garage form instead of stretching a store BOP. Delivery to independent shops is commercial auto or hired and non-owned — a personal car on a parts run is how a claim gets denied.

Products liability is real: a defective hose, a mis-picked pad, a battery that vents. We report private-label and imported lines as facts. Cyber matters if you run a shop charge account and a e-commerce cart. Washington staff stay with L&I; we place stop-gap and competitive-state WC. We do not replace L&I. The landlord will want to be additional insured — we issue that certificate to the lease.

Auto repair, hardware, and wholesale are the related pages. A store that is half hardware and half parts can still start here if the parts counter is the story. A two-step warehouse that never sees a retail customer belongs on wholesale.

Risks we actually schedule

• A fire or theft on a inventory limit set after the winter battery run.
• Products claims on a part, a battery, or a private-label chemical.
• Completed-operations on a counter-install or a machine-shop job that was never coded.
• Delivery auto and hired/non-owned on shop runs in a personal car.