I have spent a few years working on and off in the cycle trade in the UK, as mechanic, in sales and at the distributor/importer level. I have had just the one bicycle stolen however I have helped plenty of customers that have lost their steed(s).

The cycle trade is seasonal - May to September. There used to be a Christmas season but nowadays big box retailers have that business. During the season it is hard work making the sales.

Even though customers are highly available, converting them to sales and then getting the upsells (helmets), bike for the wife, big D-lock etc. is hard work. There is no time to hang about and a lot to get right (the bike has to be road safe with lights and other accessories, adjusted to them with not a scratch on the paintwork or even a greasy thumbprint). Typically customers haggle for discounts so it is not a simple checkout operation. By the time that the customer hands over the credit/debit card all concerned have had enough. They want to go home and the shop wants to move onto the customer behind them that has been waiting patiently for service.

At this stage the bike has typically been registered on the EPOS system complete with frame number. This frame number can be looked up for the purposes of an insurance claim, such an insurance claim guarantees repeat business for the shop so there is incentive for it to be recorded.

I don't see how realistic it is at this busy Saturday stage of a bike sale for sales staff to present your service to customers. It may be in some bike shops but it is not realistic for the pressured sales environments I have known, particularly if sales targets are being made from £300 bikes (where profit is not a lot when you have to pay a mechanic to assemble it and staff to provide personal sales service including things like a test ride).

You need to catch the customer when they get home. With the bike there is invariably a manual, one that is probably quite dated and poorly printed. In this there will be a manufacturer guarantee form to complete and send off. I have seen what happens to these - they end up in a box at the distributor with some vague plans for the details to be entered into some system some day for marketing purposes. 'What if they get their bike stolen?' is not even thought about. Similarly, with the Police, if they find a bike (which always has a serial number) then they do not think to call the distributor to 'just check who this belongs to'.

Hence, for your scheme to work, you need to ignore the shops and the importer/distributors. You need to have a quality bit of documentation in that manual that comes with the bike. When the customer gets home and does what they do with their new toy, that is the time to get them to register it, not in the shop.

There is significant lead time on bikes being designed, prototyped, tweaked, accepted, sent to manufacturing, sent back in a big container box, put in a warehouse by the docks, put in the retailers warehouse and finally making it to the customer via the shop. Bike designers are working on the 2016 range as we speak - that is the lead time.

You can try to convince 1000's of shops that your scheme is something they want to go with to find that in reality it isn't that simple. Or you can convince the small handful of bike designers to amend their manuals to include details of your scheme.

Right now there is no clear information from the top of the bike food chain about who the customers are and whether they are that happy with the product. I am sure that some brands are onto this but the one I know are a bit behind the times. They certainly don't contact the customers via email as far as I know. All of them would do well to look after the customers they have got rather than be forever looking for new ones - simple marketing sense. With your scheme and some enhanced manuals you could do this for them and help them build up a useful customer database.

Every bike workshop has a cardboard box in it full of manuals that should have been attached to bikes but somehow got lost behind. If those manuals had some customer friendly, no work for the shop needed wording to cover the theft angle then it would make it more likely that those manuals would go out the shop door with their respective steeds. Manufacturers want the manuals to go with the bikes, not end up in a box in some workshop. So you could help solve this problem for them.

Finally, the URL. It is not very good, is it? 'mybikehasbeenstolen.com' took me as long to think up as to write and I am sure that with a few more thought iterations I could come up with something that conveys they same sentiment more concisely. You need to put some more work into the URL, because at the moment it describes your code and not the predicament the customer gets into when the bike is stolen.

You also need to do a lot of work on the UI. Look at how second hand car sites work and how you can search by make and model with a few easy and intuitive steps. I don't think an omni search box is the way to go. From the off it is wrong - you need three calls to action, 'my bike has been stolen', 'I want to register my bike in case it does get stolen' and 'I want to check if this bike is stolen'. You haven't got that clear, it is far too 'Don't make me think!'.

If one of my bikes was stolen right now then I would not know the serial number, but I do know my email address. So I definitely see the value of what you are trying to do.

In the bike industry everyone knows everyone and it is a small world. There are trade associations, events, trade magazines and much else that you need to tap into. If you can get the trade body (I am from the UK so I don't know what it is in the USA) to back your scheme then you will be onto a winner. You wouldn't even need to go to Kickstarter for some miserly funds - with the right scheme they will give you more than chicken feed (but a lot less than what Lance Armstrong was paid to essentially sell bikes). Theft puts customers off buying big ticket bikes and everyone in the industry knows that is a problem that needs to be sorted out. If you get this right and approach the right people and get the right introductions at the trade body level you will push at an open door. They all just need to have a mention of the scheme in their respective manuals, the manuals that go out with all bikes.