Cyclone Triathlon Marketplace

Aesthetically I like the large photographs and the level of detail, maybe try to get the people listing the bikes to provide some better quality pictures. Some of them were hazy and out of focus. I now realize the search function is right there in front of my face but I'm embarrassed to admit it took a while for me to see it. My eyes were drawn to the picture of the bicycle and I overlooked the text right in front of my face but overall I think the layout looks very good.

My other, more general, question is what is your competitive advantage? What are you doing differently and/or better than the classified section on here, Slowtwitch, Craigslist, or Ebay? I assume you are charging to sell on your site, is there a charge to buy? If so what is your value add to the free options such as this site or Craigslist?

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your comments and for checking Cyclone out!

I’ll address your second topic first. We want to provide a really focused-on-triathlon alternative to Craigslist and Ebay, but with greater reach than a local tri club bulletin board can typically provide. As far as this site’s classifieds section goes, we take a somewhat different approach to digital media - for example we promote many of the bikes on sale on our small but growing social media channels and are experimenting with other ways of finding buyers as well. Our fee is 10% on the sale of a bike, and includes all payment processing fees; there is no charge to make a listing on our service. Nor is there a charge to buy, and for buyers we’ve just added a feature called Bikewatch that lets you tell us what kind of bike you’re looking to buy and we will let you know when we get a match into our system.

Thanks as well for your feedback on the site design - we do try to encourage people to take high-res, attractive pics and describe both specs and condition in greater detail; it’s getting there, but there’s room for improvement. We’ll look into ways to make the search function more visible (and more useful; you might have noticed it’s a bit quirky and we want to add better filters for size, price, etc - plenty of things on our to-do list!)

Thanks for checking us out and feel free to get in touch with any other questions or feedback.

Best,
Kenneth