burnthesheep wrote:
Especially with having to ship the used wheels multiple times if the LBS won't ship them for Pro's Closet once they sell.
point of order: pro's closet will issue a call tag and bring the wheels to its hdqts from the LBS.
the difference between this, and other industries like automotive, is that bike shops were immune to the secondary market until the rise of eBay. bikes were disposables. there was a terrific backlash to eBay, if you go back 15 or 20 years ago. bike shops felt that eBay, not amazon, was the big internet monster causing harm to their industry (at the time).
there is still some of this out there. now, as monty said, there's another way to approach this. if monty and i go to a race expo with wetsuits, we kill it. we take your wetsuit in for trade. then we sell your wetsuit. it might take us 2 transactions to make our margin. but, we put a big sign up at the booth, "wetsuits $25 and up." that generates a lot of interest. a lot of traffic. and monty and i aren't afraid to work hard. if we keep taking wetsuits in for trade, pretty soon we end up with a large selection of used wetsuits we can sell pretty cheap, as loss leaders. now we have wetsuits for everyone. we have $800 wetsuits, we have $80 wetsuits.
what sort of wheel business would the LBS have if he sold $2000 and $200 wheels? i don't know. i've never been a bike reseller. but i've been a wetsuit reseller and it's never hurt the wetsuit business.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman