What Is the ZIV Market Data Service and How Does It Work?
If you sell into the German bicycle market, you’ve probably heard about the ZIV Marktdatenservice (ZIV Market Data Service) — a new platform from the German bicycle industry association that promises retailers and manufacturers a much sharper picture of what’s actually selling. We get asked fairly often whether this is a competitor to NOCA. It isn’t — but the two do sit close enough to each other in the industry’s data landscape that the confusion makes sense. Here’s what the service actually is, how it works, and where we see it connecting to the work NOCA does.
What Is the ZIV Market Data Service?
The ZIV Marktdatenservice is a market intelligence platform built by ZIV (Zweirad-Industrie-Verband), the German bicycle industry association, to give the industry a real, granular view of retail sales — something that’s historically been pieced together from estimates and surveys rather than actual point-of-sale data.
The project is coordinated by Christian Wenzl and developed in close cooperation with the UK’s Bicycle Association (BA), which brought years of experience running a comparable data service for the British market. Development is supported by EIT Urban Mobility, an EU initiative supporting a more competitive and sustainable European bicycle industry.
In short: it’s an industry-association-run project to collect, aggregate, and share sales data, so neither a product data solution, nor a software provider.
What Problem Is The ZIV Market Data Service Solving?
Before this service, current numbers on what was actually selling at the shop level — by brand, by model, by region – was not readily available for companies to create sound forecasts and make data-driven decisions. Manufacturers were planning production and allocation partly on guesswork. Retailers had no easy way to see how their own sales stacked up against the market. ZIV is building the Marktdatenservice to close that gap with real point-of-sale data rather than periodic surveys.
How does the ZIV Marktdatenservice Work?
- Retailers connect their systems. Participating bike shops link their inventory management (Warenwirtschaft) or ERP systems to the service. As of early 2026, over 400 sales locations had enrolled, with more onboarding continuously. The connection uses the Veloconnect 1.6 B2X interface.
- Data is aggregated and anonymized. Sales, inventory, and trend data flow into ZIV’s platform, where it’s aggregated and processed so no individual retailer’s figures are exposed to competitors or manufacturers.
- Retailers get a free dashboard. Connected shops can compare their own sales performance against the aggregate market — by product category, price range, region, and brand. This feature went live on July 20, 2026, as the service’s first public milestone.
- Manufacturers subscribe for deeper access. ZIV member companies can purchase tiered subscriptions to see aggregated data down to brand, model, and article level, the detail needed for demand-oriented production and sales planning. An “Industry-Pro Dashboard” for ZIV members with expanded functionality is the next planned milestone.
How does The ZIV Marktservice Fit Into The Landscape of Digital Solutions in The Cycling Industry?
The ZIV Market Data Service is not a product data standard, a catalogue, or an order/inventory distribution platform. It doesn’t tell a retailer what a product’s specifications are, and it doesn’t move product data from a brand to a shop’s webshop. It tells the industry how many units of what sold, where.
That puts it in a different part of the data stack than the standards we’ve covered before:
What it moves | Primary users | Where NOCA fits | |
|---|---|---|---|
BIDEX | Standardised product catalogue data (specs, images, pricing) | Brands & retailers | You can feed clean, structured product data into BIDEX exports via your NOCA portal |
DST | Standardised product catalogue data (specs, images, pricing) | Brands & retailers | You can feed clean, structured product data into DST exports via your NOCA portal |
Bike Matrix | Compatibility data (which parts fit which bikes) | Retailers, shoppers | You can feed clean, structured product data into Bike Matrix exports via your NOCA portal |
ZIV Market Data Service | Aggregated retail sales & inventory figures | German retailers & ZIV member manufacturers | No direct link |
Frequently Asked Questions About ZIV Marktdatenservice
Is the ZIV Market Data Service a competitor to NOCA? No. It’s an industry-association market intelligence service reporting aggregated retail sales data. NOCA is a product data management software. They operate on different data and processes entirely.
Do I need NOCA to use the ZIV Market Data Service? No — retailers connect via their existing inventory management system through the Veloconnect 1.6 B2X interface, and manufacturers subscribe directly through ZIV. NOCA isn’t a prerequisite.
Is participation mandatory for ZIV members? No, participation is voluntary for both retailers and manufacturers, though ZIV member companies are the ones eligible for the paid, detailed subscription tiers.
What does it cost? Free for retailers who contribute their (anonymised) sales data. Manufacturers pay a tiered, cost-covering subscription fee, scaled to the level of detail they want.
Does the service replace product catalogue standards like BIDEX or DST? No. Those standards move product catalogue data from brands to retailers. The ZIV Market Data Service moves aggregated sales data in the other direction, from retailers back to the industry. They’re complementary layers of the same broader data infrastructure, not substitutes for each other.
How Do ZIV Marktdatenservice Overlap With NOCA?
Short answer: no direct overlap in what each does, but a real connection in how well each one works.
No overlap in function. NOCA is a PLM and PIM software— it’s where a brand builds and maintains its product master data (specifications, attributes, images, classifications) and manages where that data goes. The ZIV Market Data Service doesn’t touch product master data directly; it aggregates sales transactions that happen downstream, after a product has already been sold. One is about describing products, the other is about counting what moved. A manufacturer needs both, but they solve completely different problems, and neither replaces the other.
But a clear connection around data quality. ZIV’s dashboards report sales down to brand, model, and article level. That level of granularity only works if the same product is described and named consistently everywhere it’s sold — which is exactly the kind of consistency problem PLM and PIM systems like NOCA exist to solve. Messy or inconsistent product data upstream tends to show up as noisy, hard-to-reconcile market data downstream.
This means: a manufacturer with clean, well-structured product data and EAN number management in NOCA is better positioned to get accurate, comparable results out of a service like the ZIV Market Data Service — consistent article identifiers and naming reduce the matching problems that would otherwise fragment a brand’s own sales numbers across the dashboard.
It’s the same relationship NOCA already has with BIDEX, DST, and Bike Matrix: those platforms and services are what a brand’s product data flows into; NOCA is where that data is built and kept accurate in the first place.
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