HERMES is the B2B marketplace of 
BIKE — in pilot, 980+ connected retailers, 190,000+ normalised products
BIKE — in pilot, 980+ connected retailers, 190,000+ normalised products
BIKE — in pilot, 980+ connected retailers, 190,000+ normalised products
These are the questions brands, distributors and retailers have put to us across hundreds of conversations — at trade shows, on calls, in meetings. We have collected them here by category and tried to answer as directly as possible. If the one you have in mind is missing, write to us: we answer directly, and if the answer is useful to others it goes on this page.
The questions Trade Marketing Managers at the leading Italian distributors ask us.
HERMES is added to the channel, it does not replace it. The distributor carries on running its traditional B2B, where long-standing customers have purchase programmes, discounts and bespoke terms that stay intact and can be carried into the HERMES B2B e-commerce system as well. Control of commercial policy stays with the distributor throughout.
On the HERMES marketplace the distributor keeps the operational job it has always done — logistics, warehousing, advisory, the commercial relationship — while HERMES handles data intermediation and fiscal intermediation towards the retailer. It is an additional channel that captures sales which today end up elsewhere, mostly abroad, bypassing Italian distribution: it does not take traffic away from existing channels, it recovers a share that was already being lost.
On pricing, HERMES applies the price list the distributor puts into the system — promotional policy and how aggressive to be stay in the distributor's hands, inside the brand's MAP/RRP limits. Transparency does not come from a parity clause imposed from above, but from the fact that for the first time in the bike trade every offer is traced back to the canonical price list of the product and is therefore measurable — giving the partner real price intelligence (see Commercial model).
On HERMES, the invoice issued to the retailer is a HERMES invoice. The distributor invoices HERMES for what was sold, net of the agreed commission. This is fiscal intermediation by design, not an option to switch on — it is how the marketplace is built to work.
In practice, on the distributor’s side this means:
Logistics, shipping, warehousing, the commercial relationship and advisory towards the retailer all stay where they are today: with the distributor. HERMES handles data intermediation and fiscal intermediation, and nothing else.
Every distributor and every brand configures the rules it wants enforced in its own HERMES space: sales territories, categories of admitted retailers, specific exclusions, and any contractual constraints inherited from other channels. The rules a partner sets are always enforced by the system — no exceptions, no discretionary override.
The granularity is broad: rules can be defined by brand, by line, by product category, by territory, by retailer type. Configuration stays a lever in the distributor’s or brand’s hands, changeable over time, always tracked.
The point is less fragile than it looks, because an architectural property defuses it at the root. The retailer does not know which distributor is serving it through HERMES until the order is closed, paid and ready to ship. The supplier’s identity is protected by design until fulfilment, so even if the retailer wanted to, it cannot "go back to that distributor’s traditional channel" to replicate the marketplace price.
On pricing, HERMES applies the price list the distributor puts into the system. Promotional policy, how aggressive to be, seasonal lists — all levers in the distributor’s hands, inside the MAP/RRP limits the brand sets. What HERMES guarantees is not "every price identical by contract", it is something stronger: every offer on the marketplace is traced back to the canonical price list of the product underneath it, and therefore measured — the partner gets real price intelligence on its own numbers, and the system feeds aggregated market benchmarks.
So the advantage HERMES offers a retailer does not necessarily run through the lowest price — it also runs through convenience of ordering, the experience of using it, access to a far wider catalogue in one place, and market intelligence it does not have today.
Yes. Retailer exclusion policies are configured by the distributor in its own HERMES space, and the system always enforces them. If a retailer has an unpaid balance with distributor A, distributor A does not sell to that retailer — not on the direct channel, and not through HERMES.
On the marketplace, that same retailer could still buy those products from other sources available in the system — a distributor B who offers them, say. Distributor A does not become its supplier and does not enter the flow. The result is that the sale is not lost to the system, and the distributor’s policies stay exactly as they are, with no compromise.
HERMES respects the distributor’s MOQ standard. Logistics stays entirely with the distributor exactly as it is today — no single-item shipments imposed by the marketplace.
Minimums — by value, by quantity, by category — are aligned during partner onboarding, read from the processes already in place. HERMES models itself on the existing logistics; it does not ask the distributor to conform to a standard of its own.
Yes, and it is one of the cases where HERMES contributes most clearly. For a young brand still launching, publishing structured product data on the marketplace is an awareness channel towards retailers who do not know it yet.
It is a different dynamic from carry-over products, where the shop "orders with its eyes closed" because the brand is already on its radar: new products need exposure, carry-over ones just need faster ordering. HERMES covers both well.
The first step is a conversation between us to draw the scope of the pilot together: which brands, which categories, over what horizon, under which territorial and commercial rules. From there we build the operating terms jointly.
Technically, from your side we need a price-list feed for the selected catalogue, a territorial mapping of admitted retailers, and confirmation of MOQ standards and commercial terms. From ours we handle channel configuration, technical onboarding, activation of data governance, and the accounting and fiscal setup of the flow.
A typical pilot runs between 30 and 90 days, with a checkpoint halfway through. To set up the first call, write to info@eurekabike.com.
The questions Sales Managers at component brands ask us — components, accessories, apparel.
We work on commercial product data: unique codes, descriptions, technical attributes, category, images where they exist, price list. We do not ask for production data — BOMs, engineering sheets and industrial costs stay exactly where they are today, in your internal PLM systems.
The format is your call: Excel, CSV, JSON, API. The system ingests and normalises regardless of how the file arrives. A significant part of our work is precisely absorbing heterogeneous formats and returning standardised output.
The exact scope of the first dataset is agreed during onboarding, and we usually start from a contained subset — 300-500 SKUs from one line, say, or all the products of the current year — so there are tangible results quickly, before widening.
That is the norm, not the exception. Most bike brands have several systems accumulated over the years — a long-standing ERP, a PIM dedicated to one line, an ecommerce platform managing its own attributes on its own terms.
EurekaBike does not ask you to consolidate them internally before talking to us. We absorb data from different sources, including heterogeneous formats and uneven quality. We do the normalising — it is the core of what the system knows how to do.
The only thing we ask of your product manager is help with the mapping: which subset of data is available, which system it lives in, what format it comes out in. From there on it is on us.
The choice stays in your hands. During a pilot we usually start with three families of data:
We neither ask for nor share sensitive data such as distributors’ purchase prices, specific brand-to-distributor commercial terms, or industrial data. The governance logic stays straightforward: whoever contributes decides what goes out and what does not.
Only in aggregated, anonymised form, inside market trends — never with brand-by-brand identifying data. The granularity at which you take part in the comparative dataset is set during onboarding and stays your lever.
Aggregated sell-out, category trends and geographic distribution are indeed the comparative value that makes the insight useful to the whole trade. Your product specifications, on the other hand, stay under your governance — they do not enter the comparative pool unless you decide they should.
It is the most distinctive strategic value HERMES offers a brand. Today a brand sells to distributors on pre-order and then loses track of what happens downstream: which retailer bought what, in which geography, how fast, at what final price.
By orchestrating the B2B transactions, HERMES collects sell-out data at retailer level. Anonymised and aggregated, that data can be returned to the brand as market intelligence — closing the loop between line decisions in production, pre-orders to distributors, and actual sales in the shop.
It is a level of visibility no other player in the sector offers today. For a brand it means making product decisions by looking at concrete market signals, rather than the category manager’s intuition alone.
The questions shops ask us when weighing up whether to join the marketplace.
Your usual distributors stay exactly where they are. HERMES is an additional channel giving you convenience, catalogue breadth and leaner ordering:
On price, alignment with the traditional channel is structural, so there is no financial advantage in going through HERMES. The advantage is entirely on the buying-experience side.
They can vary. On HERMES each distributor controls its own pricing, so you may see promotions, seasonal lists or competitive aggression that differ from what you find on the traditional channel. What you cannot do is connect a specific offer to a specific distributor: the supplier’s identity stays opaque until the order is closed, paid and ready to ship, so you cannot "discover" that it is your usual distributor and ask them for the same price on the direct channel.
Brand MAP/RRP limits remain in force — the price you see does not fall below the levels the brand allows the channel to charge. And the bespoke discounts you have built in the bilateral relationship with your long-standing distributor stay in that relationship: on HERMES you see the price lists distributors put into the system, and special terms keep running through your usual commercial contact.
No — not until the order is closed, paid and ready to ship. On HERMES the identity of the distributor supplying the product is opaque on the retailer side throughout browsing and ordering. You learn it only when fulfilment is about to start.
It is a design choice, not an operational limitation. On one side it protects distributors — the marketplace does not become a channel for price shopping that sets distributors directly against each other. On the other it simplifies your flow: on HERMES you have one invoicing supplier, HERMES itself, whichever distributor physically fulfils the order.
The invoice you receive is from HERMES. The goods come from the distributor who, behind the scenes, has them in stock and complies with the territorial and commercial rules of the system.
HERMES is still in pilot. Opening to retailers will happen progressively, as partner distributors become fully operational on the platform.
If you are a retailer who wants to be among the first in when the marketplace opens, write to info@eurekabike.com: we will add you to the early-access list and contact you as soon as the right window opens.
The questions of principle that come up once you look at the model closely.
It is the most important question we get, and it deserves an answer that lives in the model rather than in rhetoric. The three structural choices described in the Commercial model exist precisely to defuse that conflict:
For a marketplace’s impartiality to hold over years, it has to stop being a statement and become a property of the system.
Honestly, for a concrete reason: in the early build phase neither a distributor nor a retailer would agree to pay a fixed fee to access a marketplace that has not yet delivered sales. That is an observation drawn from sixteen years in the sector, before it is a choice of model.
Commission is the model that lets us start and build the infrastructure without asking partners for risk capital. The long-term product is aggregated market data, sellable to the whole trade in phase two — the full sequence is described in the Commercial model.
We would rather say it plainly: commission is what gets us started, and the data product is where the model settles over time.
No, and we have made that a structural choice of the model — it is described in detail under Scope. EurekaBike is a layer of data and fiscal intermediation. We do not do logistics, we do not run warehouses, we do not build territorial credit capacity, and we do not play the distributor’s operational role. These are not things we are keeping for "later" — they are trades that take years of specific accumulation, and neither our revenue model nor our organisation could build them.
HERMES being the invoicing party towards the retailer concerns only the fiscal intermediation of the marketplace flow; it does not replace the operational distributor-retailer relationship. The distributor carries on being the distributor: the only change is that, within the marketplace, fiscal administration is consolidated onto HERMES instead of fragmented across dozens of bilateral relationships.
What we know how to do — aggregate and normalise trade data, and run a marketplace at scale — is complementary to the distributor’s work, not in competition with it. They are trades that produce value in different ways, on different layers of the system.
It is one of the hardest problems in our sector and it is the core of what we do. We tackle it with three ideas, set out in detail on the Technology page:
After six years of iteration, complexity is something the system has already learned to handle: new technologies introduced by new brands enter as a comparable dimension inside the model, not as a free-text field alongside it.
For partners who would rather see how it works than read about it, we run dedicated technical demos. Request a demo →
The pilot is deliberately narrow: it covers the products of one brand distributed by one distributor. No other brands from that distributor’s portfolio, no other distributors of that brand, no direct sale to consumers. It is a deliberate choice, to keep the experiment focused.
The aim is to validate the technical infrastructure and the data governance on real transactions, in a controlled setting. It runs roughly 30-90 days, with a checkpoint halfway through to line the results up against the next decisions.
We expect three outputs: governance validated in the field, a demonstrable comparative dataset, and an extension framework that makes opening to other brands straightforward when the time is right.
We answer within a few days. The questions that reach us and look useful to others end up on this page, one at a time, as they come.
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