£100 fee for using Cyclescheme vouchers at Planet-X

BobGeldart

Planet-X charge a £100 fee for accepting Cyclescheme vouchers! Do any other shops charge a fee for using the scheme?

spanielsson

BobGeldart wrote:

Planet-X charge a £100 fee for accepting Cyclescheme vouchers! Do any other shops charge a fee for using the scheme?

I wonder if Cyclescheme know about it? I'm sure it goes against what it's really about.

Chip \'oyler

So much for the Holy Grail that is PX :roll:

-spider-

Well I think it's better than not accepting it at all. Many other retaiers are little different.

Cyclescheme, eh? I can't give you a discount because the profit is really tight on these. Whereas, offer the cash and you can usually knock something off the price.

Find the best buy you can. I'll still not be getting a PlantetX..

silveringsurfer

That's not that much of a suprise in these financiallly tough times but it is poor practice. The shop takes a 10% hit on the bike scheme so all they are doing is passing it on to the customer. The problem with them doing that is that if you pull out of the scheme early - say you leave for another job, then you have to pay the whole amount back. I wonder if Planet X will contribute the £100 at that point? :roll:
Find another retailer who would rather sell you a new bike at a reduced cost than fleece you for every penny. I know my lbs has taken more than that £100 from me since getting a bike from then on cyclescheme and my guess is that they are not worried about taking the initial hit on profits if everyone does the same.

mingmong

I know they do a full carbon with ultegra for a grand. I'm having me one to complement my MTBs :-)

Is the £100 quid not for building the bike up? Can you buy it boxed and assemble and save?

skellator3

cyclescheme take 10% off the shop to administer the system, so the cycle shops actually pay to run the scheme, so i take it planet x are just getting their 10% deduction back off you,

passout

Ribble, who also have tight margins, charge a £50 admin fee for cycle-scheme which they have agreed with the cyclescheme people. Some other places don't include sale prices in the scheme. I think this is fair enough as it can cost them something - upto 10% (a max. of £100) I've heard.

HOWEVER PXs £100 fee plus the potential for a build fee does seem a bit much - hardly worth the hassle unless you really wanted to pay over 12 months anyway. It's a little bit like one of Ryan Air flight prices before you've looked at availability & tax.

BobGeldart

Guess I'll just have to be happy with a Kona 'Jake The Snake'.

Anonymous

Cyclescheme charged my LBS £100 for the trouble.

Consequently if margins are tight you are lucky they take it at all...

Pross

Perfectly fair, as others have said the Cyclescheme companies take 10% of the price from the bike shop. Best thing to do is get the company to buy direct from the shop as that way you can avoid the fee or take advantage of sale prices. The schemes do very little for their slice of the pie. I originally thought they stumped up the cash and leased the bike to your company thus ensuring no lump sum for the company to find (which can be hard if quite a few people want bikes) but that isn't the case.

Scrumple

Quit moaning at the shops and PX.

It is the ROBBING cycle shemes that are making money for nothing more than loaning the bike shop the cash up front.

THEY are PROFIT making companies, not government backed schemes.

They make cash out of administering schemes that you can legally do yourself. Except employers find it easier to hive off the admin.

Rip off - and a £100 fee to the scheme from someone like PX who sell £1000 bikes at tight margins is a massive hit. Why should they pay and not you! Shops are finally waking up to this. The alternative would be for them to just raise prices, which is unfair to the normal buyer.

I wish big emplyers would do it all themselves and give back more to the shops.

alfablue

Spa Cycles (who have very good prices) add 12.5%, which will still get the bike for less than RRP, whilst some shops will only sell at RRP under CycleScheme. I recently ordered a bike from Condor, who charge £50 for the scheme, but that is on a pretty competitive price to start with. I can't blame P-X or any other shops for doing this given the commission they have to pay, I still get a fantastic £1k bike for £650 plus the fee, effectively on an interest-free loan.

Obviously I would prefer my employer to run the scheme in-house and avoid these fees, but they don't, yet using the scheme is still worthwhile and of benefit to me.

daveplanetx

The cycle to work scheme is a government initiative and employers can sign up direct with a bike company like us or any bike retailer , or they can sign up through a third party administrator like cyclescheme and onyourbike and others that are springing up , who in turn make theor margin by levvying the bike retailer with a % fee .

Cyclescheme and others make their money by charging Bike shops and retailers a commission on sales , generally 10% though a few are 15% . The third party providers generally pay the retailers on 30 days .

Most Finance directors / HR departments who get tasked with putting on a cycle to work scheme go straight to brand leaders cyclescheme or halfords ,, without realising that they simply need to get an invoice from a bike company and payroll dept and a decent accountant should easily take care of the rest .

We have a pretty open book policy and we dont have enough margin to absorb those costs , so we pass it on in the form of the cyclescheme fee , personally I think this is clear and fair , if we had 10% margin to play with surely we should offer it to all customers in the form of a lower price ?.

We do still have an 899 procarbon bike specced with ultegra , which even with the 100 pound cyclescheme fee represents probably the best value in the marketplace , though of course everyone is free to choose where they buy from and make their own choices .

Scrumple

Exactly....

Agree 100%

mingmong

daveplanetx wrote:

The cycle to work scheme is a government initiative and employers can sign up direct with a bike company like us or any bike retailer , or they can sign up through a third party administrator like cyclescheme and onyourbike and others that are springing up , who in turn make theor margin by levvying the bike retailer with a % fee .

Cyclescheme and others make their money by charging Bike shops and retailers a commission on sales , generally 10% though a few are 15% . The third party providers generally pay the retailers on 30 days .

Most Finance directors / HR departments who get tasked with putting on a cycle to work scheme go straight to brand leaders cyclescheme or halfords ,, without realising that they simply need to get an invoice from a bike company and payroll dept and a decent accountant should easily take care of the rest .

We have a pretty open book policy and we dont have enough margin to absorb those costs , so we pass it on in the form of the cyclescheme fee , personally I think this is clear and fair , if we had 10% margin to play with surely we should offer it to all customers in the form of a lower price ?.

We do still have an 899 procarbon bike specced with ultegra , which even with the 100 pound cyclescheme fee represents probably the best value in the marketplace , though of course everyone is free to choose where they buy from and make their own choices .

Well said.

milese

From experience most traditional bike shops will give you 10% discount on RRP for a cash sale if you ask for it.

They wont do this for cycle scheme, so all is fair.

However for non traditional bike shops who are offering much better deals its fair that they pass the cost on.

passout

It does seem fair but it's still worth shopping around - I'm thinking Ribble, Leisure Lakes etc.

alfablue

Ribble charge +£50, however, the "blood from stone" response (to put it very mildly) I got when trying to buy a bike from them on Cyclescheme led me to go to Planet-X instead.

passout

I used Ribble and found them fine. Mind you I visited the shop in person.

alfablue

Ribble charge is now £65

the_hundredth_idiot

I understand why Planet X, Condor and the like charge a fee for use of CycleScheme. I should really have a go at persuading my firm's HR department to just let us have cheques instead - or use the company credit card at a bike shop.

But it really does eat into the potential savings from using the CycleScheme. HMRC are apparently clamping down on the final payments to transfer ownership to the employee. That is, HMRC are pushing companies to use something higher than the fairly nominal fee most use at present.

Add a 10% upfront fee for using the scheme to a, perhaps, 15% fee for transfer of ownership at the end of the period and that's eaten into a big chunk of the tax savings.

alfablue

The Hundredth Idiot wrote:

But it really does eat into the potential savings from using the CycleScheme. HMRC are apparently clamping down on the final payments to transfer ownership to the employee. That is, HMRC are pushing companies to use something higher than the fairly nominal fee most use at present.
.

What is your source for this information?