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
The HERMES commercial model rests on three structural choices — public, verifiable, and not renegotiable partner by partner. Impartiality only works once it stops being a statement and becomes a property of the system. Underneath those choices sits a long-term revenue logic we would rather state in advance, and an architecture of fiscal intermediation by design that is worth explaining carefully.
Every distributor on the marketplace pays the same commission percentage on what passes through it. Every brand pays the same. No special treatment tied to volume, to how long the relationship has run, or to channel exclusivity.
The fee structure is published on this site, readable by anyone before they ever speak to us. It is not negotiated at contract stage and not revised case by case. What separates one partner from another is what they generate on the marketplace — range, data quality, territorial presence — not what they manage to extract in a negotiation.
The order in which products appear to a retailer does not depend on who pays most. It depends on published, objective criteria: relevance to the query, completeness of the product data, the retailer's geography, stock availability, brand validation.
The algorithm is documented and versioned; significant changes are announced beforehand. A partner can work out in advance what to do to earn more visibility, and every lever available is on the product side: improve the data, widen the range, strengthen territorial presence. Paying for a boost is not one of those levers, because it does not exist as a feature of the system.
HERMES commercial policies are documented publicly. Changes to the governance of the marketplace — rules, fees, algorithm — are tracked and announced.
Once the marketplace reaches meaningful scale, we take the explicit commitment to set up an advisory board with representatives from the trade — distributors, brands, retailers — to observe the policies and discuss how they evolve alongside the EurekaBike team. Today it is a statement of method; when it makes operational sense it becomes a real governance body.
On pricing, transparency does not come from a parity clause imposed from above, but from a structural property of the system. HERMES is today the only layer in the bike trade able to trace every offer back to the canonical price list of the product underneath it — a single master ID tying brands, distributors and channels together. That makes real average selling prices, actual average sell-out prices and precise price intelligence possible for the first time; today they simply do not exist in the trade.
Pricing on the marketplace is a lever in the distributor's hands, inside the MAP/RRP limits each brand sets in its own space. A distributor who wants to be more aggressive on promotion can be; one who prefers to hold list price can do that. What changes compared with today is that no offer stays opaque: the system measures it, reconstructs it, returns the data to the partner who set the price, and feeds it into aggregated market benchmarks. Who is charging a specific price stays governed by the same data-ownership policies described on the Technology page.
On HERMES, the invoice issued to the retailer carries the HERMES letterhead. The distributor invoices HERMES for what was sold. This is fiscal intermediation by design — not an option to switch on, but the way the marketplace is built to work.
This architectural choice takes no relationship away from the distributor: it simplifies one. The distributor consolidates cash flow onto a single invoicing counterpart instead of managing dozens, sheds credit risk fragmented across retailers, and is freed from a share of administration that today weighs without generating margin. Logistics, warehousing and the commercial relationship stay exactly where they are today: with the distributor.
The same design enables two properties a traditional marketplace could not guarantee from the outside: channel anti-bypass — the retailer does not know which distributor is serving it until the order is closed, paid and ready to ship — and orchestration of territorial rules, which every distributor and brand configures in its own space and which the system always enforces.
We say it openly because we would rather it were out in the open: commission on transactions is the model that lets us build the infrastructure in the early phase, while we cannot yet ask for a subscription from anyone who is not seeing volume. But the product that gives the whole EurekaBike project its point is the market data HERMES starts generating now, and that becomes sellable to the entire trade in phase two.
HERMES is in pilot. A commission percentage on transactions is the model funding the build of the infrastructure at this stage. No distributor would accept a fixed subscription for a marketplace that does not yet have consolidated volume, and we acknowledge that without dressing it up — it is precisely why we start with a commission.
As the volume of real transactions grows, normalised cross-brand data accumulates — the kind no player in the bike industry has managed to aggregate so far: sell-out by geography, average prices, category trends, signals of channel bypass. This is the point at which the marketplace starts producing structured market information.
At that point the data becomes a sellable product for the whole trade — brands, distributors, retailers, and financial institutions with an interest in the sector. Revenue shifts progressively onto data subscription while the marketplace commission moves into the background. That is the horizon we are building towards.
You have seen the scope and the commercial model. The question left standing: how do we actually manage cross-brand data consistency?
Technology and scale →