What the Data Says About the State of the Bike Industry

Workstand’s David Wert joined the Nerd Collective at BLC 2026 to share platform data, industry trends, and what they mean for independent bike retailers navigating a rapidly shifting market.

Every year, the Bicycle Leadership Conference brings together leaders in bike industry to take stock of where things stand and chart a course forward. This year, Workstand’s David Wert joined a panel called the Nerd Collective (consisting of experts from Circana, PeopleForBikes, and the Breakaway Research Group) to share data, compare notes, and ask the hard questions that matter for independent bike dealers in 2026.

Here’s what we presented, what the data showed, and what it means for your shop.

The 2025 Market: Honest About the Headwinds

Let’s not sugarcoat it. 2025 was not the year the industry was hoping for. Unit sales were down across most channels. Direct-to-consumer sales fell 8%, used bike sales dropped 12%, and overall IBD sell-through was flat to negative in many categories. The post-pandemic boom has fully unwound, and the industry is working through elevated inventory, more cautious consumers, and a pricing environment still adjusting to years of discounting followed by tariff-driven cost pressure.

What’s holding things up, at least in dollar terms, is a meaningful increase in average selling prices across nearly every category.

The Average Sale Price (ASP) increase is being driven by a mix of factors: discounting is winding down (especially in e-bikes, where the post-covid discount cycle has largely played out), tariffs are pushing costs higher, and more expensive electric bikes are becoming a larger share of total sales. In 2025, electric bikes finally overtook mountain bikes as a share of total dollar sales by category.

E-Bikes Are the Story — In Search, Sales, and Consumer Intent

If you want to understand where consumer interest in cycling lives right now, look at search data. Workstand analyzed 1.35 million consumer searches on independent bike shop websites in 2025. The results were unambiguous.

Nearly 50% of all internal site searches showed electric intent and Google search data corroborates this entirely. E-bike and related terms continued to dominate cycling-related search volume in 2025. Shops that haven’t organized their website and inventory around e-bike discovery are leaving a significant portion of in-market traffic on the table.

Ridership: Growth Where You Might Not Expect It

One of the more nuanced findings from BLC came from PeopleForBikes’ participation research. Overall ridership has actually increased post-pandemic but it’s worth digging one level deeper and then a more complicated picture emerges.

The growth is entirely driven by casual riders. Core ridership — people who ride two or more times per week — has declined. The Physical Activity Council’s data reinforces this: the drop in committed ridership is largely concentrated among paved-surface riders (road and fitness cyclists), while casual and occasional riding has risen.

This matters enormously for how IBDs think about their customer mix, their marketing, and the products they prioritize. The opportunity is less to sell to the committed cyclist but to draw the casual rider deeper into the sport. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly the opportunity that e-bikes represent.

Financing Is Growing — and Driving Higher Spend

The trend is clear: when financing is available, people spend more. The bike industry is tracking in line with broader retail here, and the numbers behind the Buy Now Play Later (BNPL) trend are significant.

For IBDs, the practical takeaway is straightforward: offering financing options (PayPal, Afirm, Klarna) raises the ceiling on what a customer is willing to spend. The good news is that integrating these payment methods into an ecommerce checkout has never been easier — which means shops of any size can take advantage of a trend that’s already driving consumer behavior across every retail category.

One note of caution: BNPL adoption is also contributing to growing consumer debt which grew 2.4% in 2025. It’s a tool worth offering, but not a trend to celebrate uncritically.

Ecommerce Performance: Strong Growth With a Caveat

Workstand IBDs saw ecommerce sales grow 13% year-over-year in 2025, outpacing most of specialty retail. But the composition of that growth tells an important story.

A note on the above: fewer sessions but more orders suggests shoppers are arriving with clear intent to purchase. When customers are ready to buy, accurate real-time inventory matters even more, because outdated stock information can cost you the sale.

Mobile, Social Commerce, and the Rise of AI Search

The way consumers discover and buy products is evolving faster than at any point in the past decade. Three forces are reshaping the top of the purchase funnel simultaneously: mobile purchasing, social commerce, and AI-powered search.

Mobile
Workstand’s platform saw 52% of ecommerce transactions complete on mobile in 2025 — above the US average of ~44% and in line with global averages. For specialty retail serving an enthusiast audience that likely skews desktop-comfortable, this is a notable result. Mobile-friendly checkout (including digital wallets that streamline the payment step) is no longer optional.

Social Commerce
TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and Facebook Shops are growing fast but, context matters. Social commerce represents about 6.9% of total US retail ecommerce in 2025, with roughly $87 billion in sales. TikTok Shop alone grew 108% in 2025 after a 407% explosion in 2024.

For the bike industry specifically, the social commerce opportunity is nuanced. TikTok’s top-performing categories are health, wellness, beauty, accessories, and fashion — low-price, impulse-driven purchases. High-consideration, higher-AOV specialty retail like bikes doesn’t fit the social checkout profile well yet. The bigger near-term opportunity in cycling is using social platforms for discovery, not necessarily transaction. Use it to get in front of casual riders and e-bike curious consumers before they’ve decided where to shop.

AI Search
AI-assisted product discovery is happening now, and it’s already affecting how traffic reaches IBD websites:

When AI summaries appear in search results, traditional link clicks drop by about a third. Only 1% of users click on links within AI overviews. This means your product descriptions, blog posts, category pages, etc. now need to be written in a way that AI systems can understand, surface, and recommend, not just indexed by Google’s keyword algorithm.

The BOPIS Opportunity: 36% of Online Orders Came In-Store

One of the most striking data points from the presentation: 36% of online orders at Workstand IBDs in 2025 were for in-store pickup. For context, in-store pickup accounts for about 10% of total ecommerce nationally. The bike industry is running more than three times the retail average on this metric and it represents a significant strategic opportunity.

This is what we mean when we say the website drives foot traffic. That 36%  happened because those shops had inventory visible online, an ecommerce experience that worked on mobile, and a checkout flow that made pickup a real option. The transaction started online. The relationship was built in the store.

Early 2026: Cautious Optimism

The early-season data for 2026 is, for the first time in a while, pointing in a positive direction. Based on inventory movement at 1,762 locations across the US and Canada, 5% more product left IBD floors in January and February 2026 than the same period in 2025. The growth is concentrated in P&A, while bike unit categories remain under pressure.

This doesn’t fundamentally change the longer-term outlook. Industry forecasts project overall bike unit sales declining from roughly 11.8 million in recent years to under 10 million by the end of the decade. This is driven by a slow, consistent decline in adult non-electric bikes, with e-bikes and kids’ bikes partially offsetting that trend. ASPs will continue to rise, which means the revenue picture isn’t as dire as the unit picture. However, the industry needs to reckon with what it means to serve a market where bikes cost more and casual riders are the growth segment.