A friend of mine bought a bike off eBay. She got a great deal on it. It was even a Bianchi and a very nice hybrid. So what's the problem? Well, she liked it well enough as a hybrid but...

• It didn't fit her. The frame was too large and her seatpost, saddle and stem (adjustable) were at some rather extreme settings.
• It wasn't what she really wanted. She only had the bike for 4 months before the craving for a roadbike caught up to her and she started shopping for a roadbike.

The only saving grace in this whole story is that the bike is big enough for her mom who she says shows some interest in getting started riding and the bike gave her a sense of what she really wanted out of a bike. So off we went bike shopping. I took her to some LBSes and she test rode every bike each had that fit her criteria. Each shop sized her up and tried to fit her properly. The employees at each shop paid attention to her comments, made adjustments and generally worked with her to make sure she was accurately getting the right impressions from each bike. They even asked me if I wanted to ride some of them so I could discuss with her my impressions too. She didn't buy a bike that day but did come back with a wealth of information and a week later went back to the shop that most impressed her that also carried the exact bikes she was most interested in. Although several shops carried the same bike, she did the smart thing and picked the shop that offerred the best service. The one thing that really grabbed her attention was that they offerred free tuneups for the life of the bike. They also gave her a 20% discount on accessories. And the price on the bike she got was not that much more than what she could have gotten through online retaillers. If you were to add up everything in terms of service and weighed in the savings on all the things she purchased that day against what you could find online, you'd end up clearly with the LBS on the winning side.

The price of the bike is not everything and this is more so the case for newbies. I dare anyone to find an online retailler who can match the support of an LBS. My FBS which is actually not the same shop my friend bought her bike from (although she did agree they had great prices... they just didn't carry the bike she wanted) has given me more in terms of freebies and pricebreaks on subsequent things than I ever could have saved by shopping online for the bikes in the first place. I am talking hundreds of dollars a year.