Do you feel you have a good grasp on your market? Of course someone knows… right? This is a surprisingly challenging puzzle to crack with most attention focused else where, like selling bikes. At Bicycle Market Research, we have been hard at work in the background cataloging all of the bicycle brands in the western world. Naturally, the next step is to pivot to identify all of the retailers helping to get bikes into the hands of riders.
Australia as a test market
As discussed in our other posts, Australia is an under served market when it comes to bicycle industry data. One great resource I was introduced to is The Latz Report, who regularly publish data about the ~9.4m riders in Australia. That is a lot of people who rode their bikes at least one time in 2022. Our system uses automated parsing of retailer locators on brand websites to identify where their products are being sold. By automating the process, we can ingest much larger amounts of data than manual methods, and has allowed us to catalog many brand’s representatives across continents.
We have completed roughly half of the 214 bicycle brands selling through Australia. 29 of those completed do not have any retailer locator on their sites at all, and are often found via mass merchants. With all this said, we feel that we are approaching a complete view of the retailers in Australia, since there is generally good overlap between brands. Nonetheless, we aim to complete 100% of those brands that are viable.
Similar to reports from the USA where the largest four brands command less than half of the total retailer market, Australia appears to be quite diverse in brand representation. Using the data we have now, it is interesting to see that ~241 brands serve the market overall; 214 of those sell into ~1,390 retailers, and all of these businesses are vying for the attention of 9.4m riders in Australia. This is a fun market to track with surprising results.
Looking to the future
As mentioned, we are about half way through these monitors. The aim here is to produce reports and resources for industry participants to learn about different markets and optimize their decision making. After we complete the monitors, then it is time to clean the data. Ultimately, cleaning data is a big part of data science that cannot be overlooked.
Do you want to accelerate development in one market, or gain access to the data before it reaches a retail release? We provide custom consulting, contract development, and ongoing data services to groups around the world.