One gap in our understanding of the bicycle market has been in regards to used bicycles. To close this gap, Bicycle Market Research has begun building out the infrastructure to monitor this market segment via online channels. We began by identifying 10 major used markeplace resellers or platforms. Progress has been pretty swift, with half of these being deployed into production on our monitoring infrastructure.
With this most recently deployed monitored, we were able to look back over more than a decade. In plotting this data of bikes listed as SOLD, a dramatic graph is produced:
Clearly, something is going on with this marketplace over the past few months. Looking at macro factors, there has been a tremendous amount of pricing pressure and inventory accumulated at retail. This likely has led some retailers to list product on third party marketplaces to try and increase sell through.
The above graph obfuscates the longer term trend, which we can illustrate by graphing on a log scale for the vertical axis. The following graph shows both the trend of $1,000-$5,000 per day sales, with much more frequent trading over the past year. Some of this market activity will also be the result of pandemic induced buyers wanting to change bikes or leave the market.
Finally, we look at the average selling price of bicycles on this platform. This shows a much less dramatic long term trend, with gradually increasing selling prices.
It should be noted that this is a sample size of one platform focused on one primary category of bicycle, and does not represent an overall trend in the used market segment. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that as we build out this dataset, there will be plenty of interesting case studies to dissect.