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Sprocket - Serial Number Verification — Increased verification for bike sales.
Seamlessly connect your Bike Index or 529 Garage data to verify serial numbers for bike sales. ✅ Show your bike's physical serial number and authenticate it as not stolen with a trusted registry. Reduce theft and prove ownership when selling your bike! 🚴♂️🌟
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Steve P. Young
Hunter
📌
Hello, Product Hunt! Sprocket is back at it with another bicycle-selling security feature powered by Bike Index and 529 Garage.
Proving what’s real on the internet is becoming harder than ever and this is especially true on used item marketplaces. Sprocket has figured out how to solve this for used bicycles by leveraging publicly available data about their frame serial numbers!
I have my and my family's bicycles registered on bikeindex.org which helps me increase the chances of getting them back if they ever get stolen. If I were to sell any of them on Sprocket, with this feature - I would enter the same registered serial number and get a verification badge on my listing.
I don’t know about you but I haven't heard of another marketplace for selling bicycles that treats theft this seriously. Not even eBay, Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. And this is on top of the fact that they shipped ride history verification by integrating with the Strava ride data API earlier this year!
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Maker
@stevepyoung Thanks for posting Steve!
Serial number verification is one of our most powerful features on Sprocket! It allows buyers to see which bicycles on our peer-to-peer marketplace are verified by our integrated partners bikeindex.org and project529.com and it rewards sellers by allowing them to sell faster at higher prices. While not a guarantee that a bike is not stolen its a pretty cool system for tracking physical frames across the internet. Combined with other stackable verification methods we have launched such as your Strava ride history it can give a pretty strong signal that you're authenticated as the real owner of the bike!
This verification is pretty easy to add - just copy+paste your serial number from one of the serial registries you have it registered with. When you meet with the buyer and they examine the frame, they can verify that your not-stolen serial verified in Sprocket matches the number engraved (usually engraved) in the frame. If someone steals your bike and you mark that serial stolen in the serial registry it will then be unavailable to add to the bike listing by the thief on our platform, until you get your bike recovered!
Also if you're using a serial number registry we haven't integrated with yet ( let us know if theres more with APIs available ) or you just want to be one of the 'good guys' and share your # - you can still add your serial number and receive a lesser "Serial number provided" badge. It's not as good as actual verification but can still show some proof you're not a thief because you're sharing your serial which can be looked up by others.
Here to answer any questions and love hearing feedback ( as this innovative feature came from discussions with the San Jose Bike Party community ) ✌️
If you're signing up for Sprocket for the first time here's my referral link which will give you +1 Free listing on top of the 1 Free listing you already get by default https://www.sprocket.bike/seller...