How has COVID impacted cycling retailers in the UK?
Since lockdown started, it seems everyone in the UK (and probably the world) have tried to get their hands on a bicycle. Bicycle sales have increased by around 677% compared to last year, according to this Forbes article. This has thus led to retailers facing stocking issues. I was able to confirm this when I decided to buy a new bike two weeks ago, and basically every model in every shop is sold out.
Having found the only bike available in my budget I decided to get it before someone else could buy it. The retailer promised to have it ready under a week. Well, it’s now been 2 weeks and I haven’t heard anything. I went on Trustpilot to see if it was just me, but apparently it’s very common with this company. I wanted to figure out if it was due to the pandemic or if they’ve always been like this, and also, whether it was a general industry problem or just them.
I scraped all Trustpilot reviews posted over the last year for the 4 UK retailers I was familiar with to try to understand how the pandemic had impacted their service levels, and thus, customer satisfaction. I added significant dates related to the lockdown to the analysis, to do an eyeball estimation of whether there had been significant changes after these were announced. I used these dates to do so.
This is what it looks like:
Looking at their average score just after the lockdown started on March 23 we can clearly see some companies’ Trustpilot ratings have suffered more severely than others. Evan’s Cycles, who just happens to be the shop where I purchased my bike, had the most severe drop, going from a score of between 3 and 4.5 stars to just over 1.5 stars! Tredz and Wiggle, who already were the highest scoring from these two kept their top spot, however, their score suffered from some added volatility after lockdown and they still haven’t reached their previous levels. Halfords seem to be the only company to have successfully climbed back to their pre-COVID levels, after taking a significant hit.
Given that there’s more people out there buying bicycles, I also expected to see a higher volume of reviews coming in after COVID. The following plot, which confirms this hypothesis, shows these numbers on a 15 day rolling count:
Wiggle usually collects the highest number of reviews, with ~230 reviews per fortnight. Their number of reviews doubled after the lockdown was announced, led by the spikes that happen just after the marked dates. The biggest change, though, happened to Evan’s Cycles, who went from an average of ~18 review per fortnight to ~174. If this is a fair proxy for their increase in sales, it’s no surprise that they’re struggling to deliver the bicycles!
Since I purchased my bicycle from Evan’s Cycles, I thought I’d dig in a bit deeper to try to understand what the main customer complaints are. I began by looking at the number of reviews they were getting for each of the star ratings:
The number of 1-star reviews reached its highest point around mid June, completely dominating the other reviews. I can’t really understand the sudden drop in the number of reviews. One idea could be that it happened because there were enough bad reviews to deter people from buying new bicycles from them.
Finally, I wanted to understand what the bad reviews are about and what the main customer complaints are. To do so, I looked at the most popular tri-grams (that is, three word combinations) in the reviews pre and post COVID to see if any clear points came up.
From the pre-lockdown reviews it seems customers had a fairly positive opinion of the company, with ‘excellent’, ‘great’ and ‘amazing’ being used to describe their customer service. There only seems to be one negative term there. In contrast, the top 15 trigrams for post-lockdown reviews are shown below:
Immediately, negative terms come up in the reviews, showing the lack of communication, including ‘phones lines closed’ and ‘chat never available’. There’s also a few trigrams related to time frames, such as ‘2 weeks ago’ and ‘3 weeks ago’, which are also an indication of the delays this company has faced.
It seems although COVID has overall had a positive impact on bicycle retailer’s sales, it has also caused them to be overrun. Especially when their staff numbers and number of open shops have very probably been affected. I share much of the frustrations shown by the reviewers and can only hope I’ll get my bike soon! Let me know if there are other industries that you think have been impacted by COVID in an interesting way.
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