Ridership Was Never the Problem

By Chad Pickard

Rick Vosper published a piece this week asking a fair question. Ridership is up, so why are sales still down? His data is solid. More Americans are riding bikes than at almost any point since 2000.

Here's what worries me. When this industry gets asked a question like that, the answer usually sounds like Buy Local.

Buy Local asks customers to shop with you because you pay local taxes, employ local people, and sponsor the local race team. All true. All good. And none of it has ever been enough to justify walking into a store. Worse, Buy Local has become one of the justifications for not doing anything else. It lets a retailer believe the customer owes them the visit. Customers don't shop out of civic duty. They want what they want when they want it, and they shop where getting it is easy.

So let me offer a different answer to Rick's question, and it starts where his data points. The new riders are casual riders. Casual riders don't have a shop guy. They don't have brand loyalty built over twenty years of group rides. When a casual rider decides they want a bike, they do what every other consumer in 2026 does. They pull out their phone, or they ask someone like them. And someone like them doesn't have the twenty year history either. Nobody in that conversation is going to say "call Dave at the shop." The phone is the shop.

And this is where the real problem lives. Walk into almost any specialty bike shop in the country and you'll find real expertise. People who can look at how you ride and put you on the right bike, then keep it running for years. That expertise is why the specialty channel exists. But for too many shops, the expertise stops at the shop door. It never makes it to the website. It never makes it to social media. The most knowledgeable people in the industry are invisible in the one place their next customer is looking.

Think back to 2020. Every gym and studio closed and it seemed like everyone wanted a bike at the same time. Shops with inventory had the best year of their lives. Then the bikes ran out, and even before they ran out, the cracks showed. Maybe you turned off your phone. Maybe you stopped answering emails. Maybe the website slid because there was no time and, honestly, nothing to sell. I only have anecdotal evidence, and I'm not piling on. I owned a shop for over 20 years and I know exactly what drowning in demand feels like. But here's what that moment did. It sent a wave of brand new customers to their phones to find a bike, and it sorted every retailer in the country into two groups. The ones whose websites showed real product, real stock, real prices, and clear messaging. And everyone else.

Guess which group Amazon was in. Scheels, Dick's, and Jenson were there too.

I'll tell you who else was in that group. My small shop in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Our messaging wasn't perfect, but a customer on our website knew what was in stock, what wasn't, and that there would be a wait. That was the whole trick. From the end of 2020 into 2022, we had more than 50 bikes on customer order at any given time, and often more than 150. The customer trusted what the website told them. Nobody needed an Amazon budget. They needed the truth, visible.

I'll never forget one call from that stretch. A customer told me she'd called over 50 shops looking for a bike. Fifty. What made her excited enough to say so? Our website was accurate. She was the extreme case, but the pattern behind her wasn't rare. Customer after customer had called shops about bikes listed on their sites, only to find out they weren't in stock. Those websites weren't just failing to sell. They were teaching new riders not to trust the specialty channel.

Here's what separated those shops, mine included, and it wasn't the website itself. Plenty of shops checked the box that said "have a website" and stopped. The shops that won treated the website as the last step of something bigger. It starts with clean inventory data. Color, size, make, model, UPC, SKU, part numbers. Websites are rigid, and they're only as honest as the data feeding them. Behind that data sat a defined, repeatable process for ordering and receiving inventory, one that any employee could learn and run. That's the part nobody sees from the outside. An accurate website isn't a design decision. It's the visible proof of a repeatable process working behind it.

That sorting didn't reverse when inventory came back. Those casual riders learned where buying a bike is easy, and it mostly wasn't the specialty channel. Remember, they're new to cycling. The value of the local shop is completely lost on them. They haven't experienced it yet, and no campaign is going to explain it to them before their first purchase.

Here's the part that might bother you. It's 2026. Does your website reflect how your customer's shopping habits have changed? For too many shops the answer is no product. Or product with no price. Or a price with no way to tell if the bike is on the sales floor, in a warehouse, or eight weeks out. The customer Rick's data describes is standing at your digital front door right now, and for a lot of shops that door doesn't open.

This isn't a bike industry quirk. The NBDA consumer research shows over 80 percent of bike purchases begin with online research before the customer ever contacts a shop. Across all of retail, 2026 data puts it at 86 percent of shoppers starting their product research online, even when they buy in-store. The sale is won or lost before your bell rings, and every other retail category already knows it.

Some will say these casual riders were never going to spend real money anyway. Maybe. But you'll never find out what a customer will spend if they can't get in the door. Fix the doorway first. The margin conversation comes second, and it's a better conversation when the customer is standing in front of you.

Vendors, you own a piece of this too. Your dealer locator and your product catalog decide whether a customer can connect your product to a local store. Getting clean catalog data to platforms like Citrus Lime and Workstand is what makes that connection work. And here's the truth about specialty retail online: nobody is getting rich on ecommerce. The website's job isn't to be a store. Its job is to connect the customer to the store.

We as an industry all need to do better.

Price came up a lot in the comments on Rick's piece, and price is real. But a customer can't even weigh your price if your website won't show it.

So here's my challenge, and it takes five minutes. Hand a phone to a non-cyclist. Someone new to riding. Someone who has never heard of you. Ask them to buy a bike from your website while you watch and stay quiet. Can they find a bike? Can they tell if it's in stock? Can they see what it costs? Do they know what happens next? Here is the gap.

If you hesitated before handing over that phone, you already know the answer.

Ridership is up. The customers are there. Rick found them in the data. The question isn't whether they're riding. It's whether they can buy from you. If you ran the five minute test and didn't like what you saw, that's fixable, and it's the kind of work I do with shops every week. Schedule a call and we'll walk your customer's path together.