Category: Brick and Mortar

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What is a bike shop anyway?

One area of the bicycle industry that has remained quietly murky is how many bike shops there are in the United States. This seems simple enough to do. I can write some bots to pull retailer lists from brand websites and aggregate them together. But here is when we start running into the edge cases. 

  1. What if they are a service only shop? 
  1. Or a non-profit dealing with training? Is that still a bike shop? 
  1. Why are there random other businesses on these dealer lists? Auto and moto dealerships; general stores; snow sports, etc. 

We start to run into probabilities, and edge cases more than we would like. What we can do is augment this collection approach with a consumer centric one. Here, we ask the question, “where could I purchase, rent, or repair a bicycle?”. Then the breadth of possibilities opens. 

This article will be an initial attempt to unify the language of the bicycle industry around the types of businesses that consumers interact with to define the broader bicycle market. Below is a flow diagram detailing how to define each type of bicycle business. Below that we will analyze how many locations there are in the US and Canada fitting into these classifications. 

How many shops are there?

There is a lot in flux as to the count of retail locations. Nonetheless, the following is the result of our initial categorization efforts for the entire list of retail locations. Depending on your perspective on the industry, you might be surprised about the size of mass market, or the size of traditional bike shops.

Nonetheless, it is clear that consumers view both styles of purchasing equally when it comes to bicycle purchases. Looking at rest of market data from Circana, it seems that children’s bikes are much stronger in these mass market locations, due to their much lower prices.

Within the Bike Shop category, traditional independent bike stores dominate the location share. Although there was a sizable amount of acquisition of retail locations by brands before and during the pandemic, they still only account for a small share of total locations.

The big difference with Canada is an increase in outdoor retailers. This makes sense as we move to higher latitudes, there is a shorter cycling season and more need to blend categories.

Making the point more dramatically is Norway, where two thirds of retail locations are Multi-Sport. You can see my recent blog post about estimating the size of the Norwegian market here.

A bonus for you nerds who read to the bottom: did you notice how the roughly 18,000 locations is roughly the square root of the ~330 million Americans in the US?

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Australian Retailer List

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.

Contact us now!
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How do brands sell their bikes?

One of the projects in our road map is to develop a global view of all of the bicycle brands competing for consumer’s attention. A consequence of this is that we get to shed light on how different brands choose to distribute their products. We’ll begin with a brief look at the US market, then pivot to show the contrasts in the Australian market.

The chart above shows just how many brands are competing in the US via DTC approaches. Keep in mind that this is the number of brands, not how many units they sell. 80%+ of the more than 900 brands in the US bicycle market sell bikes direct to consumer. Whoa, that’s a big figure! Compare that with 44% in IBD and 21% in ROM. That’s a lot of jargon we threw your way, so lets pause here and define them.

  • IBD – Independent Bicycle Dealers. These are what most people would think of as a bike shop. For the purposes of our data, we include all bicycle dealers, whether they are owned by a bicycle brand or by a local entrepreneur.
  • ROM – Rest of Market. This has been defined by the Circana (formerly NPD and Leisure Trends) as mass merchants, Amazon first party, and online retailers.
  • DTC – Direct to Consumer brands sell their bikes directly from their owed websites, with physical inventory in the united states.

Naturally, this leads to the question of how large each of these markets are in total bike units and dollars. People For Bikes is the best source for this information. They provide their members with access to aggregate Circana data on IBD and ROM. Our company, Bicycle Market Research, has been working with People For Bikes to develop DTC and Second Hand bicycle market monitors in order to clarify how large these previously unknown segments are. In her 2024 overview, Jenn Dice, People For Bikes’ CEO announced plans to release some of this data in 2024. So stay tuned, and become a member if you’d like to benefit from greater insights into the US market.

Next, lest pivot to the Australian market to show how a much smaller market compares in their distribution.

Serving the ~ 25m population of Australia are 230 distinct bicycle brands. Although this is small compared to the 900+ brands in the US market, it does represent a brand to population ratio. In the US, there are ~300,000+ residents for each brand in the country. Australia is less than half of that at ~110,000 residents per brand. This makes competition between brands more challenging.

Looking at the Venn diagram at the top of this article, we see the channel distribution choices made by Australian brands. Here we have grouped IBD and ROM into a Retail category. Overall, 31% of brands choose to distribute via the Direct to consumer channel, while 85% distribute through retail. These ratios hold steady when we filter for brands selling electric bikes. These ratios are dramatically different than seen in the US. If we look at the breakdown by category below, we can see some strong differences between DTC and Retail markets in Australia.

While ~60% of brands offer electric bikes, regardless of channel, this diverges with Road and Mountain bikes. Here, traditional retail is much more likely to offer these bikes than DTC brands. This continues to a lesser degree in other categories. As most would guess, only a small portion of brands offer folding bikes. What was a surprise is how few brands offer kids bikes. This is because there is a long tail of specialist brands who focus on one area of the market. Those would offer a wide array tend to be more established and likely take a large share of the kids bike unit sales due to their better brand representation.

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Yelp and Bike Shops

Map of US states with Average Yelp rating of bicycle businesses

Coming from a background in brick and mortar retail, Yelp has been an omnipresent consideration since they rose to the top of review sites. Many retailers complain about the challenges of working with reviewers, and the semi-opaque rating system. As I’ve pivoted to focus on the data side of retail, I became curious what data there is to substantiate or refute some of the claims of retailers. Thankfully, Yelp provides a well documented API for interacting with their services.

Methodology

After signing up for Yelp’s API access, I was able to check for batches of bike shops in cities around the country. Overall, I checked the top 1,206 most populous cities in the country, looking for the key work “bike shop” within 25 miles of the central coordinates. By approaching it this way, there is a lot of overlap, so I then filtered for duplicate listings.

However, since in the US, Yelp’s categorization does not break out bicycle shops as a dedicated category, I looked in the general “bicycle” category, with the stated keyword. In total, I found 7,654 unique listings. There may be some businesses operating multiple DBA’s, but the total number is close to the figures reported by Georger Data Services of the number of bike shops in the US.

Insights

Within these numbers, we can see some interesting niches within their names:

  • 261 references of rent or demo ( 3.4% )
  • 73 references of tour ( 0.9% )
  • 179 references of repair or service ( 2.3% )
  • 480 references of ebike, e-bike, or electric ( 6.3% )
  • 53 references of mobile ( 0.7% )
  • 163 references of Pedego ( 2.1% )
  • 289 references of Trek ( 3.8% )

Overall, most of these businesses are highly regarded on yelp, with nearly two thirds of shops being rated a 4.5 or 5 stars. If we bring in rating of 4, we exceed 80% of all businesses. This flies somewhat in the face of conventional wisdom that yelp is challenging to navigate with customer reviews. Very few shops are rated at the bottom of the yelp scale (2.5 or below). Overall, this shows an alignment between the consumer perception of the importance of these ratings to businesses, and the scores that are used in these calculations. It should be noted that Yelp does have a business friendly policy when it comes to removing listings. In particular, references to employees individual names often fall under their privacy guidelines.

Ratings by State

The following map shows the average rating of these businesses around the country. Originally, I had the lower bound in red, but when this turned out to only be slightly below 4.0, it felt disingenuous to show it in red, as it might mislead people to think they are worse than they are. Nearly all states fall within a narrow range between 4.2 and 4.4. The outliers below 4.1 and above 4.6 generally have lower numbers of bike businesses, indicating that as the number of businesses increases, the average rating regresses to the national mean.

Overall, it seems that Yelp can be a good source of finding bicycle businesses in the United States. In addition, most of these businesses are highly regarded on the platform, with only limited outliers. For the genuine frustrations that retailers feel with ratings systems like Yelp, they may not deserve the villainous light that people often cast on Yelp. At least not in aggregate.