Turning a small bike shop in Glasgow into one of the main players in the pre-loved bike market.

Context

When I first stumbled across Pro Bike Trader, they were just a small independent in an industrial unit in Glasgow. Nothing glamourous. The owner was a young and ambitious graduate who was buying and selling second hand bikes from Facebook marketplace. He had hired two mechanics to fix up the bikes that he bought and offered services to the local community.

When lockdown hit in 2020, they saw an unprecedented boom in demand. They made more money than they had before and wanted to future proof themselves for when this flurry had passed. That's where I came in.

Client Brief:

I built them a premium Shopify theme, tailored to their specific business needs. They don't just sell one product, or a set of products with stock counts and SKU codes. They buy and sell, so the product range is constantly changing. So we needed a quicker way than just manually uploading every single product. So I built templates for each product category, and the major brands and product sets. We specialised in bike parts for a long-time, so groupsets would have 105s, Ultegra, DXs, and so on. Then they would just need a fresh image and a grading, based on the grading criteria we had established.

The quicker we could get product online, the quicker we could sell it.

Getting Discovered

A new website comes with discoverability challenges, i.e, nobody can find you. We were also operating in a market that hadn't fully been established yet. If you wanted a second hand bike at the time, or bike parts, you went to marketplaces like Facebook or Ebay. We didn't want to be selling on Facebook, as these were the time-wasters and scammers that PBT wanted to distance themselves from.

Ebay, however, was where all bike builders and hobbyist mechanics were flocking to for cheaper parts. This sparked my idea to integrate our Shopify feed directly into Ebay so that we could sell in both places, simultaneously. Sales skyrocketed. We were experiencing demand like we had never seen before, and had to stop selling bikes for a while just to keep up. Every bike we bought was stripped down for the parts.

The sum of the parts are often worth more than the whole, and that was definitely true here. We could shift the inventory quicker and at a higher margin by selling the parts on Ebay. That was the beauty of the integration. It updated stock on both Shopify and Ebay simultaneously so that we never double sold an item, and every customer received a printed out welcome pack to Cycletrade (the name at the time). This welcomed them into the Facebook community that I had setup and managed, and directed them to our site so that we could avoid Ebay fees going forward.