RETAIL FOCUS | ONLINE MARKETPLACES
The online marketplace
Online cycle marketplaces are more than just ‘eBay for bikes’. Jonathon Harker speaks to four of the best-known players in the sector about how they work with the trade to provide a new option for bicycle retailers…
SAVVY BICYCLE retailers have a number of means at their disposal to retail goods besides their physical stores.
Online is perhaps the best known of these, with the huge benefit of extending your customer base, but setting up your own online shop may be daunting for some. And what about those that have a bricks and mortar store and an online shop, but are looking for another option to reach out to customers? How about marketplaces like eBay then?
Too generic and vast? Four of the UK’s best- known bicycle market-specific online marketplaces think so. And there’s more to them than selling stock too. Some can cater to the holidays and services market and even trade-ins. Intrigued?
‘BETTER THAN EBAY’ Let’s start with the basics. What do these bike- focused sites have over other auction sites and marketplaces? “eBay is just too generic,” says Linds of the
Gorilla Firm. “If you’re selling an amazing bike worth over £1,000 you can’t have any confidence in it being seen by the right people. A search in eBay for ‘road bike’ turns up anything from mudgards to car number plates.
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auction sites: “eBay is a very expensive way to sell a bicycle. Once PayPal fees have been added to the ‘Final Value Fee’ it will cost nearly 15 per cent of the selling price. Selling a £400 bike will cost between £55 and £60 if the buyer pays with PayPal. Selling a £400 bike on
Bikesoup.co.uk will cost a flat charge of £7.50.” Cost was a driver for Bicycles for Sale too:
“We are a lot cheaper than generic auction sites. We charge from £25 per month to list an unlimited amount of bikes, along with a company profile and images. Secondly, we have spent a lot of time and effort to rank highly on search engines.
Selling a £400 bike via BikeSoup will cost a flat sum of £7.50...
“By using The Gorilla Firm, you’re appealing to a market that already understands bikes and is much more likely to understand the value of what you’re selling. You put your item for sale in exactly the right location so it’s easy to find and also keeps the buying process clean and simple. You ask for a price, and the buyer either pays it, or they don’t. Simple, and all without the fannying about of auctions, ‘buy it now’, reserves, not to mention the ridiculous fees.” Antony Auty, MD of Bikesoup, also picks out prohibitive costs as a reason to avoid generic
“One of the main reasons we started Bicycles for Sale, was to help the small retailers get heard. They can sometimes become lost among all the big bicycle retailers. They have either not a large enough marketing budget or have never in the past been given the opportunity to explore different avenues.” Going Going Bike believes that dedication to the bike market is where the sites win out over generic sites like eBay: ”We’ve got better knowledge of bikes, more relevant content, dedicated functionality and personal service from fellow cyclists. We’re not a faceless corporation – we’re five guys dedicated to
BIKEBIZ JANUARY 27
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