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| Top 100 Methodology For the past three years Boulder Sports Research, Inc. has been conducting research to determine who the best specialty bicycle retailers are in the United States. In developing the process Boulder Sports Research has insisted that the process have a clear, understandable and replicable methodology that would be the best possible list of distinguished retailers. Many methods had been considered. The following is the method that was used to build the 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 list of Top 100 Specialty Bicycle Retailers. In order to determine the best retailers in the United States are, we employ the opinions of the local sales representatives who know and visit the retailers on a regular basis. We assume that these industry representatives should be the most aware of what their customers are doing in their markets. Six leading bicycle suppliers and six leading accessory suppliers with sales reps were used. The sales reps are invited to a special link on our website www.bicycleresearch.com where they vote. Only the reps that identify themselves properly have their votes counted. Each sales representative votes for the top three retailers in their territory in market share, store appearance and community outreach. We instruct the sales reps that "community outreach" can be anything from local advocacy efforts to working with local events, clubs or racing teams. This gives a local rep the possibility to vote for a maximum of 9 different retailers. In employing the opinions of the local sales representatives, we make some assumptions. We assume that the leading companies are doing business with the leading retailers. We assume that the density of sales reps for each of these companies is closely representative of the amount of business in a geographic area. In other words, the density of company sales reps is higher in Southern California where there is a great deal more business than in a more sparsely populated area of the country. We assume that the sales representatives will vote for retailers that they do business with since they are most familiar with them. Because the voting represents a broad range of product categories, we also assume that no specific category of retail shop will be overlooked or too heavily represented. The Top 100 List is certainly not the list of all the best pro shops, mountain bike shops or family shops. By employing a broad selection of industry suppliers with our methodology, we feel confident with the final list. While we are confident that those on the list deserve to be on the list, we acknowledge there will be shortcomings with any methodology and some retailers who deserve to be on the list may not make it. As researchers we look very closely at the validity of any process used to collect data. There are a few areas that we acknowledge. First, how can we really say for certain that a retailer in the South Atlantic area is really equal to a retailer in the Pacific Southwest? How can we say that a rural retailer who gets the same amount of votes with a retailer in a major metropolitan area are equals? This is one of the reasons we do not rank retailers from 1 to 100. At Boulder Sports Research, we are committed to constant improvement and the highest quality research. We are open to any comments and recommendations in order to further improve this list. 2006 Top100 results 2007 Top100 results 2008 Top100 results |