My indignant wife rants into her mobile phone: "There's a lorry driver here with a huge box, it's raining, he hardly speaks any German and he just wants to leave me standing on the pavement with the box."
Oh dear, my mail-order test is off to a good start. The very first bike ordered "undercover" to my home address causes trouble - and five more bikes are coming soon, which have to be sent back after a quality check in the editorial office. With the help of a 5-euro note and friendly gestures, the box finally ends up in the cramped cellar of our old building. But the excitement also has its advantages: Because these experiences are precisely the aim of my incognito ordering campaign.
How good are Canyon, Radon, Rose, YT Industries & Co.
BIKE has been testing the bikes of mail order companies together with specialist brands for many years. Quite a few mail-order bikes come out on top at the end of the comparison - partly due to their good price-performance ratio. This magazine is also fuelling the boom in the mail order business that was once triggered by Amazon. In the last ten years, the share of mail order companies in bike sales in Germany has risen from 6 to 23 per cent. One in three BIKE readers now receives their new bike in a cardboard box. This trend has continued unabated to date, as mail-order bikes are often of a high technical standard, are innovatively designed and have top components. Compared to local dealers, they can be cheaper because the latter's profit margin is eliminated. Mail order companies are replacing on-site customer consultations with online customer advice and purchase processing. Because appropriately programmed websites advise many customers at the same time, this sales channel is more efficient than personal advice in the shop. Two to zero for the mail order business? Not necessarily, because there is one important point that our usual tests cannot reflect: How good are the successful mail order companies actually in terms of ordering, delivery, service, assembly and returns? Do they do what a good retailer does?
Our test orders are designed to find out, because the usual magazine tests have a weakness: all magazines except Stiftung Warentest order their test bikes openly from the manufacturer. The bikes are often delivered by the manufacturer's staff. The best mechanics assembled the test bikes. We wanted to eliminate these aspects in this test of six established mail-order brands.
And so we ordered incognito from Canyon, Propain, Radon, Rose, Votec and YT. You can read about our experiences with the respective bike suppliers in the article. The PDF is available in the download area below.
You can find this article in BIKE 8/2019. You can read the entire digital edition in the BIKE app (iTunes and Google Play) or the print edition in the DK shop reorder - while stocks last:
