Black Friday and Cyber Monday of 2016 are in the books. Many of you scored some really good deals. We’ve seen discounts as high as 35% on some of the top smart trainers.
Wahoo has dominated the smart trainer market for years. Now, other companies are starting to close that gap. Consumers now have more options to choose from. This year, Cycleops and Elite entered the market with their Elite DRIVO and CycleOps Magnus.
The Wahoo KICKR is still dominating the market, especially in the U.S. Tacx is closing the gap with their Tacx NEO and recently the Tacx Flux. These two products are posing the biggest threat to the KICKR as more customers are looking for different options.
Note that I am not looking at other companies in some of the charts below because at this point they aren’t even close. Wahoo and Tacx are currently leading the smart trainer market by a significant margin. I expect to see more movers in the coming years since CycleOps and Elite entered the market late this year.
Also, I concentrated this research on Wahoo KICKR, KICKR Snap, Tacx NEO, and Tacx Flux. The reason I only researched those models, is because the KICKR and KICKR Snap are the two flagship products by Wahoo Fitness. And the NEO and Flux are the two most popular and trending products from Tacx, even though the Flux didn’t start shipping until early December.
WHO IS TRENDING
As you see in the following chart from Google, Wahoo comfortably dominated the world market for the past year. Starting this summer, Tacx quickly began to close that gap, and even surpassing Wahoo in October of 2016.
However, when looking at the U.S. market, Wahoo is still leading by a really big margin against Tacx.
Digging deeper into each state, Tacx didn’t win a single U.S. state as presented by this chart
TOP BRAND
When looking at brand names only, CycleOps, Tacx, and Wahoo are very close, with CycleOps leading all with the highest number of searches as you see in the following chart.
Looking at the U.S. market, CycleOps has a comfortable lead, Wahoo coming second, Kurt in third, and Tacx coming in fourth.
PRICES
Black Friday is the best time to get a smart bike trainer. We have seen the biggest discounts ranging from 10% to 35% on some trainers. We tracked the old Wahoo KICKR for as low as $800, the New KICKR came down to as low as $960, and the Tacx NEO came down to $1,200. We’ve seen the Tacx NEO go down to $1,000 at one merchant, but they had a very limited supply so we didn’t track them.
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It will be interesting to see the impact of some of the new smart trainers introduced later this year such as the Tacx Flux, and CycleOps Magnus and Hammer. Will we see a different leader next year or will Wahoo continue to lead the smart bike trainer market?
