General questions about bike shop listings, visibility & reviews

All new stores will need to be approved by BikeRoar staff before being published.

This enables us to double-check the accuracy of the store details. We also double-check our existing stores to make sure that the new store is not a duplicate of an existing store listing.

Until the approval process is completed, the store will have a status of “Pending” in the “Manage Stores” page of your Workshop, and will not be visible to BikeRoar visitors.

This approval process is normally completed within 1 working day – sometime a little longer on weekends. You will receive a confirmation email from us as soon as the listing has been approved.

All requests to claim ownership of an existing store listing will need to be reviewed by BikeRoar staff before being approved.

This enables us to double-check the accuracy of both the store, and the person submitting the claim. This ensures that only people who are actually authorized to represent that store are able to take ownership of the listing. This prevents spammers and miscreants from misrepresenting your store.

Until the approval process is completed, the store will have a status of “Claim Store Pending” in the “Manage Stores” page of your Workshop, and will not be available for you to edit or update.

This approval process is normally completed within less than 24 hours – sometime a little longer on weekends. You will receive a confirmation email from us as soon as the claim store request has been approved.

Depending on what details have been updated, the changes to the store may be submitted to the BikeRoar store support team for approval.

This is a safeguard measure to double-check for any defamatory or offensive content, and is usually completed within 24 hours or less.

Once approved, your changes will go live and will appear to BikeRoar visitors on the public page for your bike shop listing.

Click here to find out how to edit your store listings

We perform a lot of traditional and online marketing to continually increase the number of consumers using the BikeRoar site.

Core aspects of this include regular articles and tips that we publish on the site, as well as fostering a very large and engaged audience through social media channels and cycling forums.

Once a consumer is on the BikeRoar site, there are two key ways that they will find your bike shop listing:

1. Local Bike Shop Search
If a consumer in your local area uses our “Find a Local Bike Shop” feature, then your store will appear as a result.

The store search results a sorted in order of the distance from the consumer’s location, so, the closer you are to them, the higher your listing will appear in the search results.

2. As a stockist on a product page
When you associate brands or products to your shop listing, that store will appear as a stockist for a matching product to our users that are in your local area.

Again, these results are sorted in order of distance from the user, however, stores with a product association will always rank higher than those with just a brand association.

3. From search engine results
We also optimize every managed store listing to improve its search engine ranking in Google and other major search engines.

The more information you provide about your store in your store listing, the better the listing will rank in search engines, which will help to increase visitors to it.

Store product reviews are a great pre-sale tool to help consumers find the right product fit. Stores should use this to help position a product and create the correct customer expectation.

A product review written by a store member also helps to boost your store’s credibility by conveying the level of knowledge and experience that you possess about your products. If a customer reads a well written review by your store, then they are more likely to be confident in approaching you on advice for a potential purchase.

A store product review is shown in two places:

1. In the “Product Reviews” tab of your BikeRoar store listing page
2. Together with other user reviews on the actual product page, which can help to gain extra traffic for your store as well.

When a BikeRoar user views your store listing, they can submit a review by clicking on the link to “Write a Store Review”.

Example of sticker

In order to get more reviews for your store, we strongly encourage you to ask new customers to write a review for you. Sure, many of them might not get around to it, but even if only a handful do it can have a lasting benefit to your store by resulting in increased sales conversions from your listings.

We also produce a window sticker that you can use to encourage reviews for your store. Click on the image here for an example of what it looks like.

If you would like us to send you one of these stickers free of charge, please let us know via the Contact Us page and we’ll send one out to you!

We strongly encourage you to write a reply to every one of your store reviews.

This can be done to thank the reviewer for their good review, or to address the concerns of a more negative review.

When a potential customer is reading reviews of your store, if they can see a well written, thoughtful and friendly response to reviews from the store, this increases their trust in the professionalism of the store.

In the case of a response to a negative review, the carefully written response can actually end up giving a more positive impression to a potential customer, and it gives you a way to present “your side of the story”.

Responses can be submitted via the Store Reviews page of your Workshop.

All store reviews are already approved by BikeRoar staff to ensure that no swear words or derogatory comments are used.

If you feel that a review of your store is 100% unwarranted, a request can be sent to us to review it for potential removal via the Contact Us page.

We also encourage you to write a reply to each of your store reviews. This can be done to thank the reviewer for their good review, or to address the concerns of a more negative review. This can be managed from the Store Reviews page of your Workshop.

“Impressions” simply refer to the number of times that something has been visible to someone.

In the context of BikeRoar and the Statistics for your store listings, it indicates the number of times a store listing has been visible to a BikeRoar visitor browsing the site.

In your BikeRoar Statistics, we refer to two different types of impressions:

Product Impressions
The number of times your shops have appeared as a stockist on a product page.

This is directly as a result of associating brands and products to your listings.

Search Impressions
The number of times your shops have appeared in a Local Bike Shop search result.

This occurs when people in your vicinity have performed a search to find their nearest Bike Shop.

Statistics on impressions are important because they indicate how often someone is presented with your store in a list of options to choose from. They can then choose to proceed and click on that link to “view” more details about your listing.

The ratio between Impressions and Clicks is usually referred to as the Click-Through Rate (CTR). For our purposes, this is very similar to  the ratio between Impressions and Views.

As views are a direct result of impressions, it is important to get as many impressions for your store as possible, as this should also result in a larger number of views for your listing, which in turn should result in more consumers coming into your bike shop to make a purchase.

The key way to increase your impressions is to associate all of the Brands and Products that you stock.

To find out how:
How to associate Brands
How to associate Products