Alan Mayes

Customer loyalty is money in the bank. It also can be fleeting.

In these days of Internet shopping, it sometimes seems as though no one buys locally anymore. They do, of course, and you need to make sure that your customers are always buying their motorcycles, accessories and parts in your store. And there are some steps you can take to help assure that this happens.

There are three reasons that customers stray to other shops: pricing, selection and atmosphere. There are things you can do to address all three of these reasons and to make certain that your customers stay loyal to your shop.

Pricing

There are a couple of different approaches to the pricing game. One is to try to match everyone's lowest price in order to keep your customers. That can be a dizzying dance, eventually ending in your going out of business. There is no way that the average local shop, especially a small one, can afford to try to match every Tom, Dick and Harry's "warehouse pricing" that your customers are likely to see advertised in the national catalog-sized magazines.

Those warehouse companies are either buying in huge quantities to get their parts at a lower cost or they're buying seconds and blems. They have some pimple-faced kid in a cubicle taking phone orders. The kid likely knows nothing about motorcycles. Last week he may have been working at McDonald's.

One of the most often purchased items for bikes of any kind are tires. This is where you become a teacher whose job it is to educate your customer on why the tire from Wild Willy's Wonderful Warehouse in Wahoo, Wash., is not such a bargain after all. What WWWW's ad and cubicle-bound order taker failed to mention is that someone (the buyer) has to pay to get that bargain tire from Wahoo to the customer. And then the buyer has to find someone to mount and balance that tire. To the price of the cheap tire, add the cost of cross-country shipping plus the cost of mounting and balancing and it can wind up costing as much or more as the one bought in your shop.

Some shops have a two-pronged approach to mounting tires. If you buy the tire from them, they'll mount and balance it for free. Buy it from someone else and they'll still mount it, but it will be at the current shop hourly rate. "Leave it; we'll get to it and call you."

And what if there is a problem with the tire? Kenny Cubicle will have already moved on to Burger King, and the new phone voice won't know a thing about it. Your customers need to understand that you are their advocate with the distributor or manufacturer when they have a problem with something they purchased from your store.

Selection

If you have any kind of record-keeping system at all, it should be an easy task to know what your fastest-selling items are, no matter what the category. Always have those items in stock — always. Whether it's a certain size of tires, a particular grade of oil, common oil filters and spark plugs, whatever; there's almost no excuse for running out of those constant sellers.

If Joe Customer walks into your shop looking for spark plugs for the bike you sold him six months before, you'd better have those in stock. If he has to go across town to get them from another shop, he just might get the idea that the other shop is the place to go all the time.

With some items, there's a way to appear to have an even bigger selection than you really have.

Take Vanson Leathers, for instance. Vanson is a premium brand with good margins, but it has dozens of styles in any number of sizes and an almost endless selection of colors, plus textile and leather choices. No one, including Vanson, can stock everything.