Utilizing Your Current Customers To Supply Your Inventory Needs.

Are Used Bikes A Quick Fix For Inventory Woes?

With the current inventory situation, the bicycle industry (and many others) are experiencing; used bikes could be a great source of the product to offer. With the brisk sales of bikes beginning to slow somewhat, many suppliers’ inventory levels are still virtually non-existent. The best option may be to search for quality used bikes in your business’s price points most needs.

How To Find Good Used Bikes

Your customers may be the best source of used bikes and the easiest to reach. Emailing your customer base and letting them know what bikes and what price points you are looking for may drive those with seldom-used bikes back to you to unload their bikes. You may also want to try posting ads on social media sites and Craigslist. The goal is to drive the sellers to you who may not have been looking to sell, but a simple way to clean out the garage may give them the nudge they needed. Just be very clear about what you are looking for regarding brands, age, condition, and price points.

Alternative Cash Flow Generator Tool With Used Bikes

Some companies specialize in used bike “drives” if you will. These used bike drives are an exciting concept and are relatively painless. Primarily, you advertise people to bring their bikes down on a specific day or weekend, and the company will buy anything they bring. Then the company writes you a check, and the sellers get the amount as a gift certificate to your store. The bike drive is a great way to generate cash flow and sales without the hassle of having to deal with the used bikes themselves. Chad Pickard, the owner of Spoke-N-Sport with two locations around Sioux Falls South Dakota, expects to generate about $40,000-$50,000 dollars in upfront cash with his sale in late July. Customers have gift cards that can only be used in his stores, “securing future purchases” in Chad’s words. Gift cards are always an excellent way to ensure those future sales and gift cards have an added, but unintended benefit in that many take quite a while to be redeemed, and a percentage will never be seen again. Here’s an interesting article that looks at gift card statistics – “what happens to unused gift cards.”

How To Value Your Used Bike Purchases

The most straightforward tool and the one most retailers will use is Bicycle Bluebook. Ensure that you are carefully evaluating the bicycle for any repair work it may need and adjusting pricing accordingly. The margins can be pretty good if you do an excellent job with the initial evaluation and pricing.

Protecting Yourself

Protecting yourself is a consideration when buying used bikes. First, if you are using your customer database to pull trade-ins, you will probably have very little reason to worry. The biggest thing to do is log the customers’ driver’s license and the serial number of the bike and have the seller sign a document that states the bike is theirs to sell—requiring a receipt while ideal may be pretty hard to produce for many people.

For help becoming more profitable, check out the P2 Project, a peer to peer, networking group, that members overwhelmingly feel has improved their business, or for more information on the P2 Consult, program contact David@NBDA.com or P2 Consult.

Words by David DeKeyser