BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
The Bicycle Association’s market data service, offering UK sales data covering bikes, parts, accessories and services, is being promoted at COREbike 2019, where dealers are invited to join the project, free of charge, live at the event.
BA associate director Simon Irons, who leads the project, said: “Early sign-ups are really encouraging with nearly 200 bike shops already on board after only two weeks since our soft launch. We’re now really excited to come to CORE to introduce it in person to dealers.
“Participation is absolutely free of charge to dealers under £5 million turnover, it involves no extra work, yet the benefits of having detailed and up to date retail data from the UK market and your region are massive when it comes to the decisions dealers make day in day out and which have a direct effect on profitability.”
Examples of how dealers can use the data include range planning, informing inventory management, quantifying and optimising promotional strategies, benchmarking performance against the market and region, and knowing where to best spend on targeting innovations and new products.
Irons said that the ‘real advantage’ is that with accurate data updated monthly, decisions can be made on quantitative insights and ‘not just gut instinct’.
He added: “The system works by linking participating dealers’ EPOS till systems to our secure data processing partner, SMS. The BA never see any dealer’s data and the system which SMS developed for us was built from the ground up to ensure that nobody’s data can ever be ‘reverse engineered’.
“The reporting dashboard will only ever display figures where any one retailer’s contribution is less than 50% of the market. This guarantees anonymity.
“Confidentiality is the key obstacle in many dealers’ minds – once we and our partners SMS clarify that this has been safeguarded by the way this scheme is set up, dealers can sign up with confidence for what is a real win-win partnership. For no cost or effort beyond signing up, dealers can tap into the sort of detailed, accurate and timely sales data which the UK industry has been crying out for.”
Dealers are invited to sign up online or visit the BA stand in the entrance corridor at CORE.
