The blur on two wheels was just the ticket for Reizer and business partner Baron Katrinski. The pair were looking to invest into a new business and through research, found electric bikes, or e-bikes, were hugely popular across Asia and Europe. Yet hardly any bike retailers were selling them in Australia. Electric bikes are common in China. Credit:ANDY WONG "We found that generally we'd go to a large, normal bike store and ask, 'Do you have electric bikes?' and inevitably, the guy would say, 'Yeah, we got one or two out the back gathering dust somewhere'. "By the time we got to the back they were old, clanky, uninteresting Chinese bikes. It was a good indication to us that there was a gap in the market." Five years ago they opened Melbourne Electric Bicycles, selling motor-powered bikes to everyone from the elderly needing extra oomph up hills to environmentally minded commuters.

Entry-level bikes cost $1000 and can range all the way up to luxury models at $16,000. Nathan Reizer at his Melbourne Electric Bicycles store. Reizer and Katrinski's business grew as consumers caught on to the advantages of bikes that do most of the grunt work. Just two years after opening in Melbourne, they launched the Perth Electric Bike Centre and are now set to expand in Sydney. Today their turnover is nudging $3 million. "It's growing year on year and you expand when things are going well," Reizer explains. Daniel Whiting is the director of manufacturer and wholesaler VelectriX.

"There are holes in other states, and substantial holes in electric bike quality, quality electric bike retailers and that's where we sort of position ourselves." An alternative fleet and cargo solution Demand for the low-cost, energy efficiency bikes has gone beyond individual consumers. Corporates are now looking to e-bikes as an alternative fleet and cargo solution. Queensland's Daniel Whiting, director of manufacturer and wholesaler VelectriX, began selling bikes to pizza chain Domino's three years ago. This year his business developed a specialised cargo bike to carry 75kg in addition to the weight of the Domino's delivery rider. In a deal worth $120,000, VelectriX sold 50 bikes to Domino's franchisees on the Gold Coast. "We've spent eight, nine months developing and trialling this bike, and because we do all the service work for the Domino's on the Gold Coast, and a lot of Brisbane, we can really closely monitor the performance of it, and being quite a small company, we can really make tweaks quite quickly," he says.

Company turnover was $500,000 last year and this year it's on track to reach $3 million. If the new E Cargo bike is up to scratch, Whiting says his business could be supplying bikes to Domino's franchisees around the nation. "There's 780 stores, and they are buying three to four bikes a store, so you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business," he says. "But, that's assuming that the bike's accepted and it does what it should do." China is the world's e-bike hotspot. There are more than 200 million on the streets there and 700 manufacturers are based there, according to cycling trade journal BIKE Europe.

Slow uptake Australia's comparatively slow uptake of e-bikes is partially to blame on local laws, says Peter Bourke, general manager of Bicycle Industries Australia. "250 watt e-bikes became legal to import into Australia in May 2012, but then it took until November 2015 for all the states and territories to allow them to be legally used on roads in Australia," he says. "Then we've had a couple of issues along the way. Last year, customs wouldn't let e-bike importers import anything with a light, anything with a wheel greater than 50mm or anything with a speedo – so basically they almost banned every bike coming into Australia." As road use and customs regulations adapted, Australia's e-bike market has started to take off. Bourke estimates between 10,000 and 15,000 were imported into Australia this year compared to half that number in 2016.

"In Australia, we're still in the infant stages and in terms of the overall bike market right now it's a very small part of it, but we expect it to grow rapidly," he says. Follow MySmallBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.