RETAILERS PHOTO BY LUKAS LEHORSKY ON UNSPLASH
Modern bike shops The retail industry has faced many challenges in recent times, with the trend of consumers looking online for an easier way to shop starting long before the pandemic hit in 2020. But with the added pressures seen over the last few years, how important is it that bike shops modernise? “Cloud POS Citrus-Lime is present in a high percentage
of independent bike shops in the UK already,” said Steel. “There’s always a distribution curve of the early adopters, then the followers and then there’s everyone else. “Change is really difficult. But if you understand what the
outcomes are for people - what do they want? What are they looking to achieve? “On a Venn diagram there’s overlap between bike shop A
and bike shop B in terms of what their challenges are. But to say, ‘oh they’re all the same because they all sell bikes’ would be a mistake. Their aspirations and the things they’re aiming for are not uniform. One bike shop may be 25% workshop servicing and one might be 75% workshop servicing. They might make the same amount of money overall, but the challenge and the resource demands are different. “Those perhaps who have held for as long as possible, I
think even those individuals are starting to recognise the slightly quieter shop and fewer people arriving. It’s not that their service level has dropped, it’s that the attention has been drawn in a different direction, and that’s online.
‘VISITING A STORE IS CRITICAL AND IT’S A WAY TO KEEP THE HIGH STREET THRIVING’
“There are many things now where if it’s not found online, it’s assumed that they no longer exist.”
Be in the race Steel continued: “Sometimes what we’ll hear is, ‘I don’t want to compete online’. They’re still in the race, they’re just guaranteed not to win. For us, the focus is how do we continue to keep the independent store because that’s what’s important - that hub, that space for cyclists and people passionate about the activity, driving them into that space builds that community.
“The nice thing about workshop services is you can’t get your bike fixed over the internet. I might start my workshop service experience online, but it always finishes in store. So it creates those reasons to return and business has always done better face to face.” Customers are also more likely to buy other products when visiting physical bike shops, raising the average transaction value as a result. For online, the items per transaction could just be one, but in store, it’s probably two or three. “It might just be small things like I’ll get some inner tubes while I’m here, or I’ll get a couple of energy bars,” said Steel. “If I visit the shop to drop my bike off I’ll then pick some of these bits and pieces up while I’m there. “Visiting a store is critical and it’s a way to keep the high
street thriving. Any opportunity we can take to do that fits right into the mission brief for Citrus-Lime.” ●
18 | January 2023
www.bikebiz.com
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