Scott P. Arroyo 
Blackcircles.com entrepreneur Mike Welch is launching Tirescanner in Florida to cover the lucrative US market.
The company is a ‘revamp’ of its highly successful Blackcircles.com which was sold to Michelin three years ago for £ 50million.
Mike Welch brings his online experience to the world’s largest tire retail market in the United States, where replacement tire sales reached £ 31 billion in 2017.
Welch, a pioneer in the retail sale of click-and-fit tires in Europe, finances Tirescanner.com with a initial $ 1 million of its own money, claiming it will be “North America’s premier online portal for brick and mortar tire retailers.”
Mike Welch said, “Our goal is very simple to provide drivers with the ultimate tire selection, availability, pricing and booking options at the best brick and mortar retail outlets across the country.” . It is understandable that Welch plans to launch Tirescanner with over 60,000 tire sizes, three million prices, 60 retailers and a handful of key manufacturing partners.
Welch adds: “When I started Blackcircles in the UK in the early 2000s, my goal was to build an outright online business that could compete with the big street retailers. What I bring to Tirescanner is what I learned about profitable customer acquisition, retention and retention and the best customer experience. You could say that I became a hunter who became a gamekeeper ”.
Blackcircles online conversion reached 8% at its peak, the company had a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of over 90 and annual growth of over 50% in the years leading up to the sale of the business at Michelin (2015).
Welch said, “Tirescanner is a platform that celebrates and showcases the best of brick and mortar retail stores the United States has to offer. We have several thousand tire outlets in the United States and unlike in Europe it is impossible for customers to check everything available to them. Tirescanner tackles this customer problem head-on. Our goal is to provide an easy to use market platform for customers and a low cost high performance solution for retailers to ensure that they protect and increase their market share in the face of online competition. increasing ”.
Welch’s claims are backed up by industry statistics that show pure online sales are growing rapidly year on year. And in 2018, we saw further market developments indicating the importance of the Internet as a channel, including Amazon’s continued expansion in the market and the purchase of a pure player by Dealer Tires. . Simpletire.com .
Welch expects a full launch early next year and says it already has commitments from a growing number of retailers and manufacturer commitments and will focus on those in 2019. Welch said : “At the start, my work is threefold; establish customer acquisition formulas for customers who would not otherwise have chosen to engage with my business partners, and do so at as low a cost as possible; to strategize partnering with a handful of key tire manufacturers; and to match Tirescanner users with top retailers in their area.
