.nl in the spotlight: superfietsen.nl

Can you tell us a bit about Superfietsen?

"On the superfietsen.nl website, we sell bikes and home servicing. We cover the whole of the Netherlands with fixed outlets in The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam. We also have a number of premium service points, where people can go to get work done on their bikes. Online, we mainly sell entry-level and mid-range bikes, while in the physical shops it's more about high-end machines."

Was superfietsen.nl your first-choice domain name?

"Superfietsen.nl began 5 or 6 years ago as AdoBike. We acquired our first shops by taking over an existing franchise chain called AdoBike, and we developed a webshop with the same name. However, we soon realised that AdoBike was strongly associated with The Hague, which wasn't helping us sell nationwide. So we thought maybe we should give the webshop a name that was a better fit. We took a vote amongst ourselves and superfietsen.nl was the winner. Fortunately, it was still available. So we developed a completely new brand and a new website. It's worked out well, because the website now attracts a lot of traffic from all over the country, not just the province where The Hague is."

How important is online visibility for you?

"It's incredibly important, and we work hard at it. We do product-level advertising on Google Ads and often buy search ads. We've also got a good presence on YouTube, and on social media such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Those channels are used to share product videos, tips, blogs, promotions and other content."

"Another marketing vehicle we use is e-mail. On top of all that, we're always looking to improve the website technically so as to optimise our organic findability. Findability is especially important for the big campaigns we organise several times a year. The campaigns are timed to give us a boost in the periods when bike sales traditionally peak: in the spring, at the end of summer when the new school and college year is approaching, and around Black Friday. We'd like to optimise website conversion as well, to maximise the probability of people going through with a purchase or booking a test ride."

And you recently started a business-to-business operation?

"Yes: Superfietsen Zakelijk, an arm of the organisation devoted to selling bikes on a business-to-business basis. We've got a good relationship with our supplier, who's able to set aside a certain number of bikes of the most popular models. Those bikes are then sold through Superfietsen Zakelijk. The customers are mainly self-employed people who can treat a bike as a business expense. But we also sold about 30 bikes to a staff agency."

"Our office is close to Rotterdam's docklands area, where a lot of companies have large sites and warehouses. There's considerable demand from those companies for bikes that staff can use to get around the premises. We also provide them with on-site maintenance using a mobile service van."

What about the future?

"We'd like to extend the B2B operation, because we reckon there's a lot of potential there. Our aim is to grow the business in a healthy way, and to critically analyse what we do and don't need to do to make that happen. We'll also be looking at the scope for harnessing new technologies and software, such as ChatGPT."