Old 08-23-19, 08:48 PM
  #4  
WizardOfBoz
Generally bewildered
 
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Also, if you sell the thing as a bike, some of the choices you made will not be the same choices a prospective buyer would want on their bike. So there's a discount for that.

Real bike retailers do this in volume, and they order parts at wholesale and have a cadre of purchasing agents, salespeople, technicians, and the like to get parts cheaply and efficiently, assemble parts properly and safely, and sell quickly and for reasonable money.

To put this in perspective, there's a used 2019 Ogre on eBay right now, starting at 800 bucks, with a buy-it-now of $1056. Would your offering be worth double that? Not to be snotty, but by the way, those online bike retailers also have marketing folks who could tell you what the value would be.

The critical thing is that to build one bike, you are buying stuff at retail. So I suspect that there's no margin (that is, negative margin) on this. Further, the bike parts companies like Shimano are closing down their Mom and Pop channels in favor of chains buying a lot of parts. So even getting an account with, for example, Shimano, is very difficult/impossible as I understand it. But if you like building bikes, and you want to do so and then see what you can get on eBay or CL and you can afford to lose about half your investment and chalk it up to experience and learning, have at it.
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