ACES and PIES: The Complete Guide for Aftermarket Brands

Every rejected data file, every "part not found" on a retailer site, and a surprising share of parts returns trace back to the same two acronyms. If your brand sells into the North American aftermarket, ACES and PIES are the language your data has to speak, and speaking it badly is expensive.

This guide covers what each standard actually does, what changed in the 2026 releases, and where catalogs most often go wrong. It comes from the work itself: we build and repair these files for a living.

What ACES and PIES actually do

ACES (Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard) carries fitment: which parts fit which vehicles, under which conditions. An ACES application record links your part number to a specific vehicle configuration, a standardized part type, a position, and any qualifying conditions.

PIES (Product Information Exchange Standard) carries the product itself: descriptions, dimensions, weights, UPCs, pricing, attributes, images, interchange, and marketing content.

The simplest way to keep them straight: ACES answers "what does this part fit?" and PIES answers "what is this part?" Receivers, retailers, and data pools require both, and they check them against each other.

The reference databases behind the standards

ACES and PIES only work because every trading partner validates against the same Auto Care Association reference databases. VCdb defines every vehicle configuration. PCdb defines part terminology. PAdb defines coded product attributes. Qdb defines standardized fitment qualifiers. The Brand Table defines who you are.

This is where a lot of quiet damage happens. Pick the wrong PCdb part type and your part disappears from lookups industry-wide. Use a free-text note where a Qdb qualifier belongs and validators cannot read your fitment at all. Get one character of your brand code wrong and an import silently attaches nothing.

What changed in ACES 5.0 and PIES 8.0

The Auto Care Association released ACES 5.0 and PIES 8.0 on April 2, 2026. The headline changes:

ACES 5.0 adds fitment-specific digital assets inside the application segment, so a diagram or image can travel with the exact vehicle application it belongs to, plus expanded multilingual label support.

PIES 8.0 adds Extended Producer Responsibility packaging data to meet new regulatory requirements, support for multiple package configurations at one pack level, and file hashing for digital assets.

Auto Care supports the current version and the previous one only. If your files are further back than that, version migration belongs on this year's roadmap, because receivers will eventually force the issue on their timeline, not yours.

Where catalogs actually go wrong

After auditing and rebuilding catalogs from 66 SKUs to 8,336 parts, we see the same failures in almost every file.

Fitment buried in free-text notes. Notes are invisible to validators. One catalog we rebuilt carried 57,711 notes and zero coded qualifiers. Every distinction the notes described, diaphragm style, disc diameter, spline count, was real. None of it was machine-readable, so the validator flagged 301,762 cross-part overlaps.

Overlaps. When a broad application sits underneath more specific ones on the same vehicle, receivers cannot tell which part wins, and neither can the counter person. Overlap flags are the single most common reason files get bounced. The wrong fix is deleting applications until the report looks clean. The right fix is partitioning the parts with honest, coded qualifiers so every real fitment survives. We have taken catalogs from over 300,000 overlap pairs to zero without deleting a single application. Our ACES file auditing service is where that work starts.

Misused labels. Manufacturer labels exist for true good-better-best relationships. In practice they get stuffed with sizing data, typos, and marketing slogans, which breaks tiering at the counter.

Thin or templated PIES. Eighty-five identical marketing paragraphs across 8,498 items does nothing for a shopper or a search engine. Spec-aware, vehicle-aware descriptions do. So do complete attributes: if the spline count lives in a PDF spec sheet instead of a coded PIES attribute, it does not exist as far as the industry is concerned. This is the core of our PIES file creation work.

Trusting interchange numbers blindly. A shared cross-reference number is not proof that two parts are the same. On one engagement, 97 percent of the "duplicate" pairs a shared number implied were legitimately distinct products. Deduplicate by number alone and you delete real coverage.

What good looks like

A healthy catalog has zero free-text fitment notes, 100 percent coded qualifiers, zero unexplained overlaps, labels used only for true tiers, complete coded attributes, and coverage you can verify part for part against OE and competitor data. It validates clean before it ever reaches a receiver, and every change made to it is documented and reversible.

That last point matters more than most brands realize. Your catalog is a living asset. New vehicles, supersessions, and line extensions land every month, and a catalog nobody can audit is a catalog nobody can trust.

Do it in-house or hand it off?

Building this capability internally means standards training, reference database subscriptions, validation tooling, and someone who genuinely enjoys XML. Some brands staff it. Most discover their product people did not sign up to be data engineers.

That is the gap we fill. Prodolog builds, repairs, and maintains ACES and PIES data as a done-for-you service: you send an export, we return validated files with proof of every change. If you want to know where your catalog stands today, start with a free audit. We will grade your file and show you exactly what receivers see.