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Pedaling a Successful eCommerce Strategy for your Retail Bike and Repair Shop

May 31, 2024 / 8 minute read / By Nick Borowitz

Pedaling a successful eCommerce strategy for retail bike shops

2024

Bicycle dealers must create a robust eCommerce strategy that utilizes every platform available to keep competitive in today’s bike retail landscape.

The fervor has calmed since the pandemic strained and almost broke the supply chain of bicycles and the products needed to maintain them. However, retailers must create a successful eCommerce strategy for their bike and repair stores to remain competitive in today’s bicycle market.

The good part is that it is easy to establish a presence in the always-on world of eCommerce. The hard part, and not much of a hard choice, concerns preference, local sale opportunities, what kind of website you want to present to customers, how you market to them, and how to reward purchases.

What does making those choices look like? As a bicycle shop owner, how would you approach the selection process? Where do you get started?
No problem, we’re here to walk you through the finer points of the process!

Lets boil it down to some simple factors:

Unifying Bike Shop Checkout at the Point of Sale In-Store and eCommerce
How to Choose Between a Template vs. Custom-Built eCommerce Website
Leveraging Bicycle Point of Sale Marketplace Integrations to Sell More Products
Using a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy to Reach More Customers

Unifying Bike Shop Checkout at the Point of Sale In-Store and eCommerce

The checkout experience in any store can determine if a customer decides to return. The same mindset applies to the online checkout process.
Can they quickly enter their payment information and move to the “finish order” screen? Maintaining that speed is vital to keep them shopping instead of leaving in frustration.

Combining the checkout options can keep them returning so they can choose it online and pick it up in the store. That can take a few different forms:

Checkout Option	How It Works
Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPIS)	The customer purchases products from the website and picks the order up directly in your store.
Curbside	Similar to BOPIS, but they have the option for a store employee to bring the order to their vehicle after notifying of their arrival.
Same-Day Shipping	After the customer completes the order and payment is processed, the store ships the order out to arrive the same day, or directly next-day.

Within the checkout process, bike shop dealers should offer a variety of payment options to their customers when finishing the purchase. Providing choices helps increase the chances that the customer will purchase more products in one transaction.

These can include:

Buy Now, Pay Later: Customers can enroll in a payment program that allows the retailer to receive the payment in full without risk and lets the customer make payments on the purchase.
Contactless Payments: Customers can tap or use the chips on their plastic cards to pay without holding physical currency.
Digital Wallets: Similar to Contactless, this allows the customer to use digital payment options like Google Pay, Apply Pay, Android Pay, and others.
Checkout at Register:

Learn More: How to Get Started and Open Your Retail Bike Shop

How to Choose Between a Template vs. Custom-Built eCommerce Website

Okay, you’ve decided how to let customers check out in-store and online. You know what options to offer when it comes time to process payments. But how do you start with the eCommerce experience in the first place?

When you choose an eCommerce website provider, the options for a template-built website and a custom website are typical. Both will have their pros and cons. One similar cross-over will be that you can often add personalized branding to both.

It can also be daunting, so let us simplify it for you!

Website Type	Pros	Cons
Template eCommerce	Ideal for limited web design knowledge or resources. Pre-designed layouts and features. More affordable and quicker to launch. May lack unique branding elements and design flexibility.	Limited customization options. May only support select programs. Could hit break-even points compared to custom.
Custom Design eCommerce	Tailored to specific needs and wants. Provides almost complete control over design. Long-term scalability and flexibility. Ideally accepts numerous 3rd party applications. Flexibility for custom website functionality, in addition to design/layout.	More costly upfront costs for design and development. Might require professional knowledge for modifications. Due to the custom nature, these projects tend to be higher investment and take longer to launch.

Various factors also determine the type of eCommerce website you pick. The fundamental question is what you want to do with your bicycle retail website. That can be followed by what kind of functionality you are looking for, what volume and type of retail bike shop you are, how you want people to interact with it, integrations you need and want or already use, and countless more.

For those questions above, you will want to find a provider who knows what they’re doing and supports your online growth as a bicycle retailer. That can be in the form of consistent contact and interaction, making modifications as your business expands to meet new demands, and it is easy to get a hold of.

Custom vs. template-built eCommerce websites for retailers

Explore: Template vs. Custom-Built eCommerce Websites for Retailers

Leveraging Bicycle Point of Sale Marketplace Integrations to Sell More Products

The ability to sell on your website is a vital component of any eCommerce strategy for retail establishments, no matter the vertical. But so is leveraging integrations to your bike shop’s point of sale that lets you sell through other marketplaces!

What marketplaces would a bike retail store sell on, though? There are plenty of options for bicycle sellers, and we’ll stick to the basics for ease.

Marketplace Type	Benefit to Bike Retailer
eCommerce Website	Your eCommerce website counts as a marketplace since transactions occur. The more activity and the longer you can keep customers, the better your SEO scores will increase.
Amazon - Fulfill by Merchant (FBM) and Fulfill by Amazon (FBA)	Arguably the most popular online marketplace that most people use. There are countless opportunities to reach new customers and order fulfillment options.
Walmart	Similar to Amazon for new customer reach and sale opportunities, merchants have choices for fulfillment options and, depending on location, comparable delivery times.
eBay	One of the oldest online marketplaces and the birthplace of PayPal, this website lets anyone sell merchandise. It offers a wider variety of products that might be harder to find elsewhere.
Mobile Shopping App	Branded mobile shopping apps gives customers a direct line to your retail bicycle business where they can shop products, book services, and interact with their user accounts.

Bike shop eCommerce and online marketplaces, like Amazon, eBay and Walmart

With the marketplaces established, let’s discuss how the integrations work. Depending on which marketplace outside of your website you choose, the integrations allow you to control the listing directly from the point of sale.

Listing products, modifying descriptions, adding images, adjusting attributes, and controlling the account can all be done from the screen at the point of sale or in the back office since everything feeds into one system.

Learn More: How to Use AI in Retail to Complete Tasks Faster

Pro Tip:

Anyone can get started with selling on the marketplaces. Once you identify what type of products you will sell, it can dictate your platform: the whole bicycle or just parts. Amazon and Walmart could be the best avenue if you can handle high-volume activity. If you happen to be a scrapper or someone who offers buy-sell in your store and wants an extra outlet that is simple to use, eBay can be a great choice.

Using a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy to Reach More Customers

A comprehensive digital marketing strategy for bicycle retailers is essential for reaching more customers and driving traffic to your eCommerce website. It has a two-fold benefit of improving your website’s SEO reach.

There are 4 main types of SEO for a bike shop to focus on:

Technical SEO: Optimizing your bike store eCommerce website for proper crawling and indexing by search engines.
Content SEO: Creating high-quality digital content that uses keywords which are commonly searched for and relevant.
On-Site SEO: Optimizing meta data, URLs, imagery, and more right on your eCommerce website to be easy to find.
Off-Site SEO: Using back-links from other high-quality websites and 3rd-party sources to drive traffic to your website.

Digital marketing strategy for bike retail shops

Opportunities for collecting customer information for digital marketing are ample, too, within their consent, of course! You can ask customers if they want to sign up when they check out on tablets in your store, provide them with a QR code to sign up on mobile or provide links on the receipt if they want to enroll online from the comfort of their home.

Here are the key components and how they work:

Digital Tool	Purpose
Tablet Checkout and QR Codes	Customers can use these to enroll themselves into your digital marketing efforts and receive promotional materials.
Automated Emails	These emails can be set to send automatically based on many factors and segments, including holidays and special occasions.
Push Notifications	When they provide their mobile numbers, retailers can send notifications directly to mobile devices with offers similar to email offers.
Loyalty Rewards and Memberships	These drive engagement by giving a personalized experience to each customer and providing rewards just for them to use.

Learn More: How to Use Automation to Sell More and Increase Your Reach with Email Marketing

Positioning Your Bike Retail for Success Now and into the Future of eCommerce

Getting started with an eCommerce strategy for your bike shop can be daunting. However, you can prepare your business quickly with a few simple steps.

You need to establish what type of website you want, which will help you decide how to implement digital marketing tactics—with that out of the way, picking what marketplaces to tackle.

Any retailer can find moderate success by taking the time to learn the nuances of different components. However, as with understanding what works, a bike store retailer should always look for new ways to expand!

Learn More Bike Shop Solutions