IRVINE, Calif. (BRAIN) — Nearly 500 U.S. bike shops have signed up with BikeExchange, a service launched in Australia in 2007 that creates an online marketplace for bicycle products and ties into sales through bike shops.
BikeExchange added U.S. operations in February 2015, opening custom e-commerce shops and a new advertising channel for bike retailers. The site is owned by the same company that owns CyclingTips.com, which opened U.S. editorial and sales operations late last year.
BikeExchange's U.S. CEO is Matt Gordin, who was formerly BikeExchange Australia's largest retail customer and one of its first adopters.
"BikeExchange enables sellers to tap into incredible volumes of online traffic. It takes their shopfront online, but assumes responsibility for so much of the back-end work and costs. It means retailers can stick to what they do so well, which is looking after their in-store customers," Gordin said.
"Sellers can choose a number of ways to sell more product on BikeExchange. They can have their own e-commerce-enabled website with us or simply list all of their products on BikeExchange and drive sales into their store," he said. "A major feature is our fully integrated ad placement, which means ads now auto-load and update daily. The big plus here is that stores with major POS systems don't have to do any additional work to be a part of BikeExchange," Gordin said.
The company said U.S. retailers are signing up at a rate of about 30 a month. The site's annual traffic is now at 2.5 million visitors and increasing by 15 percent per month.
More information is available at info@bikeexchange.com and bikeexchange.com.
