Five rookie graduates take on a bike selling challenge and here’s what happened
This year’s Auto Trader Graduate Sell a Vehicle project included an exciting new addition, Bikes!
Working with the Auto Trader platform, a generous new budget of £11,500, and alongside our appointed bike dealer Ritebike; our team of 5 eager early careers employees were given 45 days and tasked with sourcing, advertising, and selling a motorcycle.
Let’s talk a bit about the process and reveal whether or not we managed to make a tasty profit…
Sourcing
Being rookies to the bike market we thought the best place to start assessing the types of motorcycle available was with AT’s extensive data. Working to a deadline, we couldn’t afford to sit on a slow mover, so we opted to filter bike types by average days to sell times of less than 20 days. Our Ritebike contact Matty also parted with some of his expert wisdom and recommended choosing low-CC bikes as these are ridable on a learner licence and therefore tend not to stick around on the forecourt long.
The above info gave us a solid list of around 10 bike models which fit our criteria. A comparison of private and retail list prices and a round of group voting later, we had then narrowed down our choice to 3.
Armed with our preferences we excitedly got in touch with Matty to find out if one of their team of buyers could find what we were looking for. A few days of anticipation later and we received confirmation our bike had been found! A KTM Duke 125 just 2 years old. Perfect!
Advertising
After a quick AT Vehicle Check to ensure the bike had no warning signs, we went ahead and confirmed our buy.
Next was the fun part, pricing and advertising. Auto Trader had similar bikes currently listed so we opted to find a sweet spot of being just tucked in a smidgen cheaper than the main bike-superstore competition, and still within the average price bands for similar bikes on site.
Auto Trader have well defined best practices when advertising vehicles which provided us an easy guide to follow. An attention-grabbing title, detailed description, 20+ images, and a video walk-around of the bike all made for a winning ad, if we do say so ourselves.
As an added bonus, Ritebike already utilised PPC as part of their package. We followed suit with our bike and included PPC which gave around 30% more exposure in search results.
The Sale
So how did it go?
13 days later and a call with five overjoyed fist-pumps confirmed that we had a buyer! A sale price of £3790 and costs of £2624 gave us a whopping £1165 net profit.
Such was the success, we opted to follow our blueprint and managed to turn over a further 2 bikes before the project deadline of 45 days were over. Similar models and still sticking to Auto Trader best practices for the next bikes gave similar success and our total profit for the project was £4262. Winner!
This project has been a huge learning experience for the whole team. We have been introduced to new AT tools and seen the use of the mass amounts of data available on the platform first-hand.