Because you expressed an interest in it, I'd be pleased to let you know what I see and hear both in my LBS and from talking to other bike shop staff about the business. Just fYI, if I say "IBD" I'm meaning the same as LBS. IBD means independent bike shop, and is the term typically used inside the industry. And where many in the EBR forums refer to acoustic bikes, we in our shop usually refer to "muscle bikes" (this is the common term for a non-electric bike in Germany, meaning a bike with a muscle motor instead of an electric motor). And warning
@Feliz, verbosity alert!
The number one e-bike frustration for bike shops is someone buying something that the bike shop can't fully service, and the customer being reluctant to understand/accept this. The customer buys something online (whether a kit or a complete bike), and then wants the bike shop to put it together and make it all work. But like anything unfamiliar, it can take longer and customers often don't have a realistic expectation of the amount of labour (and therefore cost) involved. Also, since the bike shop hasn't sold any parts and it's a labour-only proposition, if the repair shop is busy (or has other priorities) then this can be unappealing to the shop.
Worse yet is that these online-only options often have proprietary parts, so the risk/reward formula is out of balance. The potential reward is charging the customer a relatively small amount of labour (as people going the online route are often doing so in the hopes of saving money, the customer is rarely willing to pay what the labour is really worth). The potential risk is something goes wrong and the customer demands you repair or replace their kit, or their complete bike, at your cost. And when you're working on something unfamiliar, the risk of something going wrong is significant. We once had a rear hub motor e-bike in our store that had some visible cables that clearly needed to be removed from the rear wheel, but it also had an additional cable that was very hard to see that also needed to be removed. Had we missed that additional cable and dropped the wheel out of the frame, we might have ruined the system at significant hassle/expense. That's one of many examples. With an OEM mid-drive system, there's very little the bike shop can do wrong, even if they've never seen the system before.
The final liability point is the "coincidental timing" risk. A customer drops off the e-bike and believes the electric system is working fine. The most common requests are flat repairs and tune-ups on the bike parts of the bike, with the customer usually fine with us ignoring the motor/battery/electronics. The customer later picks up the bike, tries to ride it, and something about the electric system doesn't work. We didn't touch the electric system, but how do we prove that? The customer's reaction might be "Well, you must have done something to it!" Maybe we did since it was an unfamiliar system and we didn't know what we didn't now, but maybe it's also just coincidental timing. Is the small amount we might charge for a flat repair or a tune-up worth the customer demanding we repair or replace their $2k-ish online brand e-bike? Many shops say no, and won't work on bikes like that. We are willing to work on them, but we struggle with it as there's so much potential liability for so little potential reward. The reason we do it is that, if we treat the customer right, when they wear out (or tire of) their current e-bike then we stand a good chance of selling them their next one. Especially if being expert on their maintenance lets us point to ways in which the bikes we offer might be a lower maintenance experience for them. And cheap online e-bikes tend to have shorter service life spans in our experience, so we tend to think they'll need a new bike in the near future if they're riding it a lot.
There are some IBDs that are slow to get with the times. They lean too heavily into the "if it aint broke, don't fix it" mantra. The problem with that is by the time you identify it's broken, it's often too late to switch course (or doing so is very disruptive). To that end, my bike shop started selling e-bikes in 2003. "Muscle bikes" weren't broken yet, but we could see the writing on the wall that e-bikes were going to be important. The thing that differentiates us from a lot of bike shops is our willingness to bring in brands that are either e-bike only, or e-bike focused. We've brought in Merida, Panasonic, Toba, Raleigh, iZip, Haibike, Felt, and others over the years either primarily or exclusively for their e-bikes. But that's not common. What's more common is for an IBD to only bring in the e-bikes of the brands they were already selling. So if they're a Trek dealer they sell Trek e-bikes, if they're a Kona dealer they sell Kona e-bikes, etc. This can lead to the perception that the store isn't very into e-bikes because they just don't have the same wealth of models to offer. That doesn't necessarily mean they aren't excited about e-bikes, they might be really into it and wishing their suppliers offered a bigger range of models.
Most bike shops prefer mid-drive e-bikes. From talking to other shops, most believe mid-drive is a better technical solution because they tend to be lighter weight overall, they tend to have less rotating mass in particular, they tend to have less wiring to deal with, and they believe warranty problems will be both less frequent and easier to deal with when it does happen. The lighter weight of mid-drive e-bikes is very appealing for bike shops as many/most bike shops also sell car racks, and the lighter weight the bike the more car racks can hold it. Most car racks can handle at least 35 lbs per bike. A fair number can handle as much as 45 lbs. Most brand name mid-drive e-bikes with the battery removed can be held by the 45 lbs racks, some even by the 35 lbs models. If a bike shop also caters to the inexpensive end of the e-bike market you now need to carry racks with 70 or even 80 lbs weight limits.
Another consideration is loading and unloading the bike. It's more appealing to load a 45 lbs bike into a repair stand than one that's 75 lbs, and that presumes the bike shop's even confident that their repair stands were even engineered for very heavy bikes. Many shops help customers load and unload bikes from cars and trucks too, and again a 45 pound bike is far more appealing than something in the 55-75 pound range.
Since most bike shops are selling bikes made available to them by suppliers with a bike shop focus, the majority of bikes they're selling are street legal bikes that neatly fall into the 3 class system. They're typically selling bikes with a maximum of 500w in Canada and a maximum of 750w in the U.S. The kinds of hub motor bikes that bike shops are typically offered are very low priced ones, to hit price points that mid-drives OEMs don't go down to. Most companies supplying bikes to bike shops are going to make all their high-end bikes mid-drive. This creates and perpetuates the idea that mid-drive is high-end and hub drive is low-end.
I think the prevailing wisdom within the bike industry, rightly or wrongly, is that if you're making a bike with a 500w maximum then you want it to be light weight and you want it to be a geared motor. You want to keep the wiring to a minimum to keep the bike attractive. You want to keep the maintenance and warranty to a minimum. The prevailing belief is that going with a supplier like Shimano, Bosch, Brose, or Yamaha does all of the above. Many small and medium-sized suppliers go with Shimano STePS as they're already dealing with Shimano for gears and/or brakes, so going with them for motors is simply the path of least resistance (I'm thinking of companies like Devinci, Opus, Felt, Kona, and many others). Others may have gone with Bosch because they were "the brand name" before Shimano really stepped up their game with the release of STePS 6100 (which was a gigantic improvement over what had gone before).
As a bike shop, if I'm offered a bike with a Shimano motor then I know what to do and who to talk to if I have a warranty question. If a shop has already have been dealing with Di2, then as a bonus they already have all the software and hardware that they need to do diagnostics and software updates for STePS. If a shop is considering bringing in bikes with Bosch and Yamaha for the first time, there may be a steeper learning curve than with Shimano, but those are names with a good pedigree that offer a high degree of confidence that they'll stand behind what they sell. If I'm offered a bike with Bafang, or Promovec, or something else "no name" then I don't know what it means if I have a problem. And I'm less confident that I won't have problems. And problems cost money in a bike shop. Bikes are low margin, and any warranty service eats into that already low margin so I need to avoid that whenever possible.
Interestingly, there is an exception to all of the above. Some bike shops target the low end in their muscle bikes, selling brands like Raleigh, Miele, or Garneau. They will often target the low end with their e-bikes too, and will then almost always offer mostly or exclusively cheap hub motor bikes from companies like iGo, Evo, Garneau, etc. This further reinforces the idea within IBDs that hub motors are for "cheap" bikes and mid-drives are for "good" bikes. When you look at iGo's line-up, most of their models are hub motor but their highest-end model is mid-drive. Ditto what Garneau and Evo are doing, the cheaper bikes are all hub motor and the highest-end models for 2020 are mid-drive (no info online for these new mid-drive models last I checked, so this is a spoiler for 2020!). This fits into and reinforces the LBS world view.
The final nail in the coffin are the people coming in which cheap online e-bikes with weird problems. This is self-reinforcing as the bike shop sees both the good and bad of the bike shop brands, but only sees the bad of the online brands (as the people having success with their online brands are out riding rather than taking it into the shop). We see a front hub bike with a fork that's failing, we don't see the hundreds that are doing just fine. We see the rear hub bike with the broken spoke, we don't see the ones without the broken spokes because they had no reason to bring it in.
Most of my staff ride e-bikes, and we all ride mid-drive e-bikes. Would some of us be more open to hub motor bikes if in the past we'd sold, say, Stromer instead of bikes with BionX motors? Maybe yes, maybe no. It's an interesting question, actually. With FSA having decided to go hub motor, that has provided a jolt of legitimacy to the idea of hub motors into the IBD parlance. Up until now the narrative has been "All the good companies [Shimano, Bosch, Yamaha, Brose] went mid-drive, and most of the companies known for hub motors [Bafang, etc.] are working on adding mid-drives to their line-up, therefore mid-drive is the future." FSA is the first really respected company in the traditional bike industry to go with a hub motor option, so it'll be interesting to see how FSA's options compete with Fazua and Bafang's road bike mid-drive options. Having looked at the three, I've ordered a Fazua system for myself, and continue to evaluate iGo's road bike with a Bafang M800. But I've had a few customers ask about Orbea's road e-bike options (which use an Ebikemotion hub motor). But the people asking about Orbea's bikes typically do so citing their low cost, not because they've carefully evaluated hub motor vs. mid-drive and concluded the hub motor is better for their needs. So, there again, the Orbea option feels like it's the "cheap" hub motor option vs. the "good" mid-drive options from Look, etc. So everywhere you turn, that idea of mid-drive being desirable and hub motor being for people who can't afford mid-drive keeps cropping up when you're looking at it from the LBS perspective.
That's more than enough for now. I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts, and answer anyone's questions about all this.
