The aftermarket that's growing: consumables and eBike parts

While Italy's bike industry revenue slid from €3.2 billion in 2022 to roughly €2.5 billion in 2025, with margins collapsing from 7.6% to 3.2% over the same two years, one segment kept turning over at a relatively steady pace: the bike aftermarket — everything sold after the bike itself. Inner tubes, tires, chains and brake pads remain the backbone of that market, but the real growth today is coming from eBike parts — motors, batteries, dedicated chainrings — and it's rewriting purchasing priorities for shops and workshops alike.

Why the aftermarket holds up when new-bike sales don't

The decline in new bike sales is by now a well-established trend: from a Covid-era peak of 2.01 million units in 2020, Italy dropped to 1.7 million in 2022 (-10%), 1.36 million in 2023 (-23%), and 1.303 million in 2025 (-4%). But a fleet that stops growing at pandemic-era speed doesn't mean a fleet that stops riding — it means more bikes staying in use longer, which translates into steadier demand for parts and consumables. It's no coincidence that service work accounts for 60-90% of shop revenue and roughly 70% of actual profit: trade press in 2026 has noted that without workshop income, many shops would be underwater. Some 95% of Italy's 4,000-plus specialized retailers do repair work, which tells you the aftermarket isn't a side business — it's the core of the model.

eBikes are shifting the aftermarket's center of gravity

The number that matters most here is the shift in sales mix: eBikes went from roughly 10% of the Italian market in 2017 to about 20% today, and in Germany they've already overtaken traditional bikes, reaching 53% of sales in 2024. That shift shows up even more sharply on the repair side: eBikes made up roughly three-quarters of the bikes coming into workshops in 2024. That ratio can't be ignored by anyone running a shop, because it changes both what sits on the shelf and what each job is worth — a motor or a battery measured in Wh isn't comparable, in margin or in handling complexity, to an inner tube, and eBike warranty management remains, as of 2026, the single biggest operational headache for service departments.

The classic consumables haven't lost ground

That said, the traditional bike aftermarket best sellers haven't gone anywhere: inner tubes, tires, chains and brake pads are still the fastest-turning line items for any workshop, generating daily cash flow even when new-bike sales are soft. These are low unit value, high frequency parts, and that's exactly why their inventory management matters more than it looks. In 2022, around 40% of the parts ordered by Italian shops were never delivered, with component lead times stretching to 340-700 days — in some cases up to 24 months. A workshop with no real visibility into what's actually on the shelf risks running out of the most basic part at exactly the wrong moment, losing both the job and the customer.

What this means for running a workshop

Reading the data points to two distinct but connected priorities. For classic consumables, the challenge is turnover: knowing what moves, how often, and avoiding both stockouts and cash tied up in parts that never leave the shelf. For eBike parts, the challenge is different — higher unit value, often brand- and motor-specific, with warranty cycles that need to be tracked precisely. Workshops that treat these two worlds the same way — one undifferentiated stockroom, one generic customer file — end up leaving margin on both sides. Customer relationships have also become more of a discipline in their own right: in 2026, customer lifetime value and churn are cited as accounting for as much as 25-35% of revenue at a service-oriented business, and automated email follow-up is now considered standard practice, not a nice-to-have.

Against that backdrop, having a unified parts catalog and a customer history tied to the jobs actually done — instead of two disconnected systems, one for inventory and one for customer records — is what turns the aftermarket from daily cash flow into a planned source of profit. That's the kind of infrastructure a platform like CrankPal, built for workshops, aims to put in the hands of the people managing all of this every day.