I live in an area that I think has a good market for ebike sales, there are huge numbers of commuters near the city that can benefit from ebikes. There is only one other supplier in the area and that is a bicycle shop that sells ebikes at a huge markup.
I am thinking of shipping in kits (likely BBS02) from China, purchasing good quality bikes and selling them through newspapers, gumtree and so on...
Has this been done before by any other forum members and what is your opinion on it? Have you had success in selling? What kind of price points did you find worked best. Thanks for any feedback you provide.
Cathal.....What is your selling advantage over what the rest of us are doing? My experience is that the bike world is very brand aware,suppliers like Raleigh,KTM,Haibike,Kalkhoff have been making bikes for many decades,customers feel very safe buying these historically known brands.
There are newbies like Batribike,Freego,Woosh,Kudos....we are all starting to be trusted after minimum 5 years trading,it takes time to build a good brand.
EN15194 and maybe soon type approval are becoming more recognised quality standards,expensive to achieve on small volumes.
There are newbies who buy the cheapest e-bikes from China,they usually sell cheaply on e-bay or Internet. They usually 'die' very quickly when they realise that selling electric bikes is not an easy sale,good PDI is important,holding spares,good customer relations,warranties....all eat into the small profits,they give up after the first container.
But the biggest hurdle selling e-bikes is how do you market your bikes? Electric bike customers are still rare people,you need a big net to catch a small number,big nets are expensive....shows,brochures,retail advertising are all very expensive.
The bike world has an established supply line which is borne out of experience. Customers don't really want to travel more than 50 miles to buy a bike and preferably less than 10 miles....which means local dealers,which need to make a profit-what appears to you as a huge mark up will quickly evaporate when you are on the other side of the counter.
I could see a bespoke service where you bought a good quality bike added a motor kit on a one-off basis,producing a e-bike tailored to the customer but it would have to sell at say £1200 (Don't forget £200 vat to HMRC in that)and you would be against established brands....the classic problem,how would you economically market your service?
We have all experimented with eBay Amazon selling,but eBay/PayPal/vat/delivery can take 30% plus out of the sale price,it is very difficult to sell electric bikes on eBay and make a profit.
Dont forget the Chinese have massive volumes in their own country,they only allow 50 USD to assemble a bike and components are very competitively priced.....Batribike recently experimented with building e-bikes in the UK,has that been a success?
Hope that helps.
KudosDave
