What is Bike Index?
Bike Index is the most widely used and successful bicycle registration service in the world with over 159,000 cataloged bikes, 4,500 successfully recovered stolen bikes, 500 community partners and tens of thousands of daily searches.
Does Bike Index cost money?
No. Bike Index is free to bicycle owners, bike shops, and the police.
How does Bike Index pay for its costs?
Bike Index is a nonprofit organization run by volunteers, so it has low overhead. It’s funding comes from individual donations and partnerships with cities and college campuses.
How does Bike Index work?
1. Register your bike
It’s simple. Submit your name, bike manufacturer, serial number, and component information to enter your bike into the most widely used bike registry on the planet.
2. Alert the community
If your bike goes missing, mark it as lost or stolen to notify the entire Bike Index community and its partners. There are thousands of people in Seattle active in Facebook groups, Twitter conversations, and Reddit threads looking out for stolen bikes on Craigslist, OfferUp, eBay, and other online and IRL sites.
3. The community responds
A user or partner encounters your bike, uses Bike Index to identify it, and contacts you.
4. You get your bike back
With the help of the Bike Index community and its partners, you have the information necessary to recover your lost or stolen bike at no cost to you. It’s what we do.
How burdensome will this be for my bike shop?
It’s easy-peasy. Registration can take either zero time with the Lightspeed integration, a tiny fraction of time by sending a spreadsheet of all sold bikes to Bike Index to do a batch registration, or 60 seconds per bike to register them individually.
Why is the point-of-sale the best time to register bikes?
Theft can happen at any time, so bikes need to be registered as soon as possible. Bike owners are in the best state of mind for learning about what they need to do to protect their bike and to take care of basic paperwork right when they buy it. The farther they get from the date of purchase, the more likely they are to continue to procrastinate.
Why not leave registration up to the bike owner?
Even though your shop will be registering the bike into Bike Index, it is still up to the bike owner to “claim” the bike. This means, it is still the owner’s choice as to whether they have an account with Bike Index and claim ownership to the bike registration.
However, Bicycle Security Advisors conducted a poll and found that 87% of respondents would like their bike to come “pre-registered” on Bike Index, while another 10% did not know what Bike Index was. Clearly, nearly every bike buyer would like bike shops to register their bikes for them.
Can I get help with implementation?
Yes! Brock Howell of Bicycle Security Advisors will train any bike shop staff for free within the Seattle-region. In addition, Bryan Hance of Bike Index is very responsive for more technical questions.
If you have additional questions . . .
Send additional questions to brock@bicyclesecurityadvocates.org and we’ll both answer them and add the questions to our list on this webpage.
