CIN Podcast on bike rental impact on bike shop revenues

How can bike rental boost your bike shop?

There seems to be plenty of evidence that the bike rental and bike share market is growing and will continue to grow. Even more intriguingly, it is an area that appears largely resistant to a lot of the headwinds currently being endured by the cycling industry.

The latest Cycling Industry News Podcast takes a deep dive into the topic, tethered by the positive impact bike rental and demo bike fleet management can have on cash flow for bike shops and related businesses.

Regular CIN Podcast Host Sean Lally interviews Doug Stoddart Managing Director Bike Rent Manager on all things bike rental, including new customer creation and ensuring the industry meets customers on their terms.

Can bike hire create new customers?

Stoddart tells Lally: “You’re actually reaching people that previously wouldn’t have considered themselves to be a cyclist. And we don’t view it as ‘black and white’, that you’re either a cyclist or you’re not. There are a variety of different touch points in the world, that if you’re going to do any kind of cycling, you’re going to come in contact with the industry. Maybe your friends say, ‘Let’s go on holiday to New York and there’s an afternoon of cycling’, that’s what I would consider to be a touch point. And you don’t have to be a cyclist to do that. Or you might be on holiday in Wales, and you just do a couple of hours cycling around the local town… These are ways that crossover and transcend the normal definition of a cyclist. So yes, it is a very interesting opportunity to expand the customer base and reach people that otherwise wouldn’t have thought of it.”

Boosting shop footfall and seasonality

“If you’re in the sort of place where it’s feasible to run a high quality demo fleet with a nice place to actually test out those bikes… so it’s appropriate to the environment in which you’re operating your store, it can be an extremely complementary way of adding to your footfall and your revenue streams, and also the seasonality of your revenue flow throughout the year.”

Meeting the customer on their terms

“[We need to] really understand the modern biking customer, and all that entails and how to deliver the experiences they want. To my mind, it’s like when the first iPhone came out in 2007. Everyone’s expectations since then went through the roof. You’ve got Uber, you’ve got food delivered to your door. And yet, quite often the bike experience has not kept up pace with those technological advances. So, anybody who can do that, and actually meet that high expectation of instant information, instant booking, fantastic communication… that’s really meeting the customer on the terms on which they want to be met today.”

Easing the complexities of bike rental

“It really boils down to the fact that bike rental is quite tricky to do really well. If you think about retail, you come into a shop, you question ‘do I like the look of it? How much does it cost? Maybe try it on if it’s a shirt, so there are around four touchpoints.

“If you look at rental, there’s at least eight touch points. It’s ‘ do I want this thing? Does it look right? Is it available? You make the booking, you show up to the store, you maybe give a deposit, you maybe get it set up for your particular requirements on the day you ride it, you bring it back, then you have to repair it and maintain it and then get it ready for the next one.

“So it’s really complicated when you’re doing that in parallel for all the different reservations that you have going on at any one moment in time. What we really do is just take that complexity away from the stores that we’re dealing with, so they can then get back to you know, customer service, setting up bikes doing all the physical world stuff. And we take care of the admin.”

“And that’s what we try and do with Bike Rental Manager, take all of that technical complexity out of the equation, so people can get back to what they know, which is bikes and dealing with bike customers.”

Listen to the latest Cycling Industry News Podcast here and catch up with previous editions of the CIN Podcast on SoundCloud.

And find out more about Bike Rent Manager online.