Possible demise of CRC / Wiggle

Has there been an update on the situation, what else is there to say on the matter that hasn’t been said already.

Put an order in yesterday afternoon, got an email this morning that it’s been dispatched.

Marko, if you’d refreshed and the price had reduced would you have insisted on paying the original price?

Good point and I think we all know the answer to that one. I’m still surprised that this an acceptable practise. Every other site I’ve used just deletes your basket after after a set time, or sends you the ‘did you forget something’ email and then deletes your basket, again after a set time. Naive of me to assume the basket was still good to go after 24 hours I guess?

Not the sort of company I want to give my money to anymore, so I hope they go bust and we can have some fresh competition in the market.

I don’t use Amazon if I can help it BTW. 

Put an order in yesterday afternoon, got an email this morning that it’s been dispatched.

Similar here: placed order at 2pm yesterday lunchtime, got despatch e-mail by 8pm (Wiggle+, DPD next day selected). Thought it prudent to buy spare Ragley mech hangers for the kids next bikes.

Wiggle have been my go-to for a while now. Convenience and ease of most things in one place and (until website overhaul) was easy to find what you needed. Signed up for Wiggle+ a few years ago as it got me a huge discount off a new bike at the time – the next day delivery has been brilliant.

I just tried to have a browse to see if there were any real bargains to tempt me off 9 & 10 speed… christ that website is badly designed.

How can something so obviously in terms of use be designed so badly?  outsourced to somewhere backward in the world where they don’t have ecommerce?!

back to merlin….

Well despite the hate, CRC have been my go-to for probably 99% of my bike related purchases in the last 20 years or so, back to when they had an advert in MBUK and you had to phone someone and order stuff! Rarely use anyone else because of a combination of convenience, what I think is a good range, decent prices and absolutely woeful local bike shops. Yes their most recent website changes are bobbins and yes its a chew finding stuff but vs getting out the house, going into a shop, explaining to them what you want, getting it ordered in, going back in to collect it etc, its still not a massive hardship. I for one will be massively disappointed if they go pop.

PS – trousers and seat ordered on Thursday is out for delivery this morning… Shame I can’t get to my bikes at the minute because of building work 🙁

back to merlin….

I’ve tried Merlin a few times this year for parts and they just seem to have a REALLY limited range and prices aren’t any cheaper than anywhere else. I’ve just had a look, opened the website, dropdown for components and clicked on the first thing I saw – chain guides. They list 3 chain guides. THREE!

Agree merlin aren’t any cheaper, but at least the search works.  Always been ok for me when I’ve needed something.  always good customer service too.

I spend alot with wiggle and crc in the past pre awful redesign.  But barely used them at all for the last few years.

In fact, I should thank them, as really there is nothing wrong with the kit I have, and I should really be spending the money on actual stuff that I need rather than want.

Not the sort of company I want to give my money to anymore, so I hope they go bust and we can have some fresh competition in the market.

Do you not think it’s unhealthy to want a business to fail, just because you don’t like the way they do business – you could just ignore them? There are a lot of other options already, you could just choose to shop somewhere else and hold a bit less bitterness inside.

Most people who work there will just be trying to earn a living, as will all of their suppliers, their staff and others who right now will be sweating on them pulling through.

It’s hard to imagine that if they go soon that big UK distributors won’t be taken with them, or at least massively impacted. We nearly all fed the monster.

I just tried to have a browse to see if there were any real bargains to tempt me off 9 & 10 speed… christ that website is badly designed.

You have to wonder how many of their problems are down to their truly appalling website design and functionality. Its amazing that a company of that size, that relies on e-commerce for its entire income, can get it so catastrophically wrong.

I imagine it’ll be used as a future case study on business studies courses about getting the basics and fundamentals right and what happens if you don’t

I’m really quite sad about the likely demise of CRC/Wiggle. I’ve ordered a LOT of stuff from them over the years and they were my go to site.

I generally hate shopping but this was the one place for some reason I enjoyed working through the strange colours and extreme sizes to find what I wanted! As for standard parts, the offer of next day delivery for £20pa was really a no brainer until…

…the website change. I just couldn’t work it and have all but stopped buying from them. I wonder how many have done the same and at what cost to them?

I really feel for anyone who ends up losing work if it all comes to pass as expected. I’ve never had any major issues and the times I’ve contacted them the team have been helpful.

As an aside, I placed a small order on Saturday and it is out for delivery today.

I think a lot of online retailers have struggled with the explosion of standards.  SJS Cycles is one of the few where I can actually find what I’m looking for just using the filters but then they specialise in obscure parts so it makes sense that they are very precise in how the catalogue everything.

I’m not sure if it’s because CRC/bike-discount/etc are all using off-the-shelf solutions that are primarily built with clothing in mind.

I’ll be gutted if they go, still use them regularly. Placed an order Friday that was delivered Saturday with Wiggle+ next day.

I could do with some new riding trews and the Nukeproof Blacklines I have are great but the fit is hit & miss and don’t want to order something that might have to go back!

Seems like the decline had started prior to the new website being rolled/chucked out. There’s no way that the website (which would’ve been a bad one 10 years ago, never mind now) hasn’t turbo charged their decent though.

I can’t see both CRC and Wiggle surviving this. Hopefully any new owner can find the disk with the 2022 website on it and we’ll pretend the new one never happened

From me CRC and Wiggle always had distinct identities.  CRC was for Mountain Bikers first and foremost and sometimes has the feel of a mad jumble sale, where you could pick up something obscure or in a weird size at 87% discount. They didn’t always have what you needed but it was generally among the cheapest.

Wiggle always seemed a bit more sensible, they embraced multi-sport sooner and generally had a more consistent range priced slightly higher.

Typically, I always went to CRC first and maybe tried Wiggle if I was struggling to find what I needed.

I think combining the business diluted the identities, and it seems like they ended up with the bad bits of both rather than any sort of synergy.

Its quite something that two such dominant brands are facing issues following a merger.

Still, just ordered  RockShox Revelation for £180 reduced from £600 to help with their cash flow 🙂

I think a lot of people who have problems with Chiggle is down to their slightly unethical way of doing business, ie undercutting their competitors, likely by subsidising their prices, in an attempt to become a monopoly.

CRC was for Mountain Bikers

Can’t believe your just casting Chain Reaction Snow to the side like that!

Same as everyone else.  It’s utterly crazy that two of the biggest bike shops in the world have made their shop fronts incredibly difficult/impossible to navigate for their customers.

Each category should aim to be the best resource for that subject on the internet, with the customer immediately presented with the main relevant filters to narrow down the selection of in-stock products.

Bike Tyres > Riding Type > Wheel Size > Show Results, with further filters then displayed for brand, width, bead, tubeless etc and order by savings, price etc.

In stock items first, then out of stock listed at the end (if necessary for seo purposes)

Carry this out with a custom template for each category / sub category and the website would be hugely improved.

How companies of this size spent all this money on a rebrand / redesign without any thought to what the customer actually needs in order to easily browse and purchase their products is baffling.

I don’t think the website would have made much difference either. Amazon have a truly terrible website but it hasn’t stopped them.

I still cant help look at some of the Nukeproof full builds and the spec on those for parting out a frame. But my going forward thinking is will Nukeproof still be around in 6 months time or will they be swallowed up by another company and will they honour any previous warranties

I think a lot of people who have problems with Chiggle is down to their slightly unethical way of doing business, ie undercutting their competitors, likely by subsidising their prices, in an attempt to become a monopoly.

Undercutting competitor’s prices isn’t unethical. CRC wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did if they were losing money to gain market share. My understanding of their business model was that they could get very low prices by buying in huge volumes. A lot of their stuff was OEM stuff – if you buy 10,000 groupsets, you can get a huge discount from SRAM or Shimano and then sell it cheaper than an LBS can buy it for. Also, having very fast stock turnover keeps your financing costs very low. It’s impossible for an LBS to compete on price with an operation like that.

I think a lot of online retailers have struggled with the explosion of standards

I’d be genuinely surprised if the number of SKUs or picking bays or stock rotation had anything at all do do with running such a massive loss that can be otherwise adequately explained by pretty obvious external commercial factors

I’d be genuinely surprised if the number of SKUs or picking bays or stock rotation had anything at all do do with running such a massive loss that can be otherwise adequately explained by pretty obvious external commercial factors

I meant in terms of building a useable website.

Like I said, SJS’s website is very easy to use but they seem to be set up to have any obscure part you can think of so they have to be meticulous in cataloguing.

With a lot of other websites, it almost looks like they are using off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions that just don’t have the capacity to filter number of standards now available compared to what there was ten years ago.

I don’t think the website would have made much difference either. Amazon have a truly terrible website but it hasn’t stopped them.

You may think Amazon is terrible but plenty of people don’t. At the end of the day, it fulfils the golden rule of e-commerce sites… getting the customer from searching for a product through to ‘buy now’ in the shortest, easiest manner possible. They do this ruthlessly well. Everything else is fluff.

CRC/ Wiggle is a million miles from that. Last time I was on there I got so frustrated with it I sacked it off and just ordered everything off Merlin. Haven’t bothered with them since. By the sounds of it, plenty of other people have done the same

If you’re an e-commerce business and have got a website which is such a nightmare to use that people don’t bother with it and go straight to your competitors instead, then the writing is on the wall for your business. Its been like that for years too and they’ve apparently done nothing to address it

I can still remember my first CRC order – Marzocchi Bomber Z2s selected from the small advert printed in MBUK, order hand-written and posted off with the cheque to the shop in Belfast. Circa 1996?

undercutting their competitors, likely by subsidising their prices, in an attempt to become a monopoly.

The UK cycling market is supposedly worth £1.5bn pa. What was Wiggle’s market share? Halfords, Amazon, Evans, LBSs are still massive players for normal people before you even poke around the specialist online retailers like CRC Wiggle, and they’re selling to very price-sensitive customers.

If retailers are “subsidising” their own prices, then consumers should fill their boots because they won’t be around long.

I can still remember my first CRC order – Marzocchi Bomber Z2s selected from the small advert printed in MBUK, order hand-written and posted off with the cheque to the shop in Belfast. Circa 1996?

That would be the product that introduced me to the concept of ‘grey-market’ imports 🙂

From what I remember CRC were selling Marzocchi Bombers at 50% off RRP.  I remember reading in MBUK that they managed this by specing them on some complete bikes and then just removing the forks and selling them separately (what happened to the rest of the bike was never explained).

It did result in Marzocchi knocking a couple of hundred quid off the RRP of all their Bombers so that was good.

Edit: Actually, I think the grey market Bombers were 1998 rather than 1996 so might not actually be the same.

 meant in terms of building a useable website.

Ah Gotcha, TBH, they way the website turned out, I think they just let the office junior have at it. It’s basic stuff that’s missing. Take forks for example, you can search by offset, wheel size, axle spacing, and brand…er Suspension travel? No, not at all, I mean, why would that be useful..

it’s nuts

SJS works because every shimano part (and SRAM) has a part number, that’s built in, for example Y1W898040 – Shimano Ultegra FC-8000 53t Outer chainring

1st result on google after shimano is SJS – you cannot even search part numbers on CRC

even searching “Ultegra 53t” throws up 88 results on CRC, brake pads, chains, bikes ffs

search the same on SJS – 2 results, one for the 6800 series chainset and one for the 8000 series chainset, is that really that difficult to do?

I can still remember my first CRC order – Marzocchi Bomber Z2s selected from the small advert printed in MBUK, order hand-written and posted off with the cheque to the shop in Belfast. Circa 1996?

similar here, although it might have been Z1’s and 1997, and I always used their cheque spread facility, can still hear the Irish guy in my head I spoke to him that often

I can still remember my first CRC order – Marzocchi Bomber Z2s selected from the small advert printed in MBUK, order hand-written and posted off with the cheque to the shop in Belfast. Circa 1996?

similar here, although it might have been Z1’s and 1997, and I always used their cheque spread facility, can still hear the Irish guy in my head I spoke to him that often

Ahh cheque spread. The saviour of many a Student bike. I would not have wanted to be the person that administered that though.

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/wiggle-chain-reaction-cycles-pauses-invoice-payments-and-cancels-orders-as-insolvency-looms

You may think Amazon is terrible but plenty of people don’t. At the end of the day, it fulfils the golden rule of e-commerce sites… getting the customer from searching for a product through to ‘buy now’ in the shortest, easiest manner possible. They do this ruthlessly well. Everything else is fluff.

Amazon admit that the website was purely built around the transaction. The idea was always that you could go from typing in a description to it being shipped in the shortest number of clicks possible. Their MO was that you went to Dixons, looked at the TV’s, then went onto Amazon and bought it cheaper. There was never any intention/need to make the descriptions any easier to read, or put better pictures on. It was always just enough to confirm it was the correct one and get you to the confirm order page ASAP (with your card and delivery details already saved).

@thols2

My understanding of their business model was that they could get very low prices by buying in huge volumes.

And by losing £100m p.a. To subsidise it?

I think the website’s effect on the “possible demise” is being overplayed by many here, but it is still a pisspoor effort.

From my limited involvement in digital product/web development, I suspect the website was pushed through by assertive (but perhaps under-qualified) stakeholders and they’ve compromised on a weak MVP with too many compromises. Then it’s been parked.

What do others who work in software/web dev think?

And by losing £100m p.a. To subsidise it?

They’ve not been doing that until very recently though have they.
It’s not a business model it’s a “we’ve bought a load of stock and people have stopped buying stuff” model.

@chapaking – I reckon it’ll be a back end problem caused by trying to integrate 6 different stock management databases.

@dangeourbrain, I’m pretty sure they’ve been making losses for a few years. I believe that the stock price has tanked after their IPO?

Reflecting on this over the weekend.

I think the signs they have been becoming a wrong’un have been there a while. For a long time I perceived them as a ‘friend of the cyclist’. Maybe naive and I was under no illusions they were in it for profit but as a Portsmouth/Hampshire resident at the time I saw them grow. And it seemed like a success.

The rot started to sink in for me about 2014/15. They shafted a couple of friends (I’ve written about this before, sorry to bore on) – people who left good jobs to work for them, only to have their offers of employment pulled hours before they were due to start on the grounds of restructure. I guess that happens all over, however other people inside Wiggle later informed them that the restructure had been known about before they advertised for the roles – that they allowed good people to waste time applying and then resigning from their jobs all in the name of a business backstop for Wiggle incase the restructure didn’t happen. Good people don’t do that. Twice.

Then the merger/acquisition of CRC and then buying up of bike24. CRC was number 1 and Wiggle number 2 (or was it the other way around – I forget). Nothing wrong with it I guess and the competition commision allowed it to happen. But when bricks and mortar places do that it might be to increase the number of stores or to broaden the appeal with a bit of diversity. None of that here – CRC was just more of the same. It was purely to take out the opposition and reduce consumer choice.

This sort of thing must happen all over with companies making nuts and bolts and other unglamourous industries. But a bit like the Glazier’s and Man U, it just feels a bit more shabby when this level of mercenary capitalism comes up hard again the ‘passion businesses’ of the old school bike industry.

I’m pretty sure they’ve been making losses for a few years.

Assuming that the owners loaded it up with debt to fund the purchase, it’s quite likely that financing the debt is what caused the losses rather than selling at below cost. The owners bleed as much money out of it as they can, declare bankruptcy, then the suppliers end up out of pocket while the owners walk away with the cash.

I reckon it’ll be a back end problem caused by trying to integrate 6 different stock management databases.

Interesting idea.

The Wiggle/CRC one was working fine (as it should be since it’s the same warehouse), but you think they’ve added in their other businesses’ stock control systems – which don’t support the same granular filtering?