What a skate shop actually stocks
Boards are a minority of it. Across 488 shops and 2,146,190 listings, the largest named department is other clothing — 54.9% of everything we can classify, against 10.9% for decks and completes. A skate shop is mostly a clothing shop that also sells skateboards.
Every department, by size
| Department | Listings | Share of shelves | Out of stock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Other clothing | 500,257 | 54.9% | 55.9% |
| Parts | 138,300 | 15.2% | 41.3% |
| Shoes | 126,696 | 13.9% | 65.1% |
| Decks & completes | 99,683 | 10.9% | 39.9% |
| Helmets & pads | 45,753 | 5% | 46.1% |
| Everything else | 1,235,501 | not counted in the shares | 51.4% |
Nobody publishes this. A shop knows its own mix and has no view of anyone else's; a brand knows what it ships, not what sits on a shelf; the trade press runs on interviews. The only way to get this table is to read 488 catalogues twice a day and count, which is the one thing this site does.
What the mix says about the business
The instinct is that a skate shop sells skateboards, and the shelves say otherwise by a wide margin. That is not a criticism of anyone — it is the economics of the trade. A deck is a low-margin commodity with a handful of price points and a customer who replaces it a few times a year. A hoodie has a better margin, no wear cycle, and a customer who never steps on a board.
It also explains a pattern visible elsewhere on this site. The departments that dominate the shelves are the ones where sizing multiplies every model by nine or ten, which is why they also dominate the out-of-stock figures, and why a raw listing count flatters soft goods against hard goods. The last column above is the honest corrective: the biggest departments are also the most picked over.
Read alongside which brands can be price-compared, the picture is of a trade where the identity is hard goods and the inventory is soft goods.
The limits of this table
- A listing is not a unit of stock. One shoe in ten sizes is ten listings; one deck is one. The share column therefore overstates anything that comes in sizes, and the correction is not available to us — no shop publishes quantities.
- It counts shelves, not sales. We see what is offered. What actually leaves the shop is invisible to us and we will not model it.
- “Everything else” is a real department, not a failure. It holds what our classification refuses to force into a category. Shrinking it by guessing would make the table look tidier and mean less.
- Only shops that publish a readable catalogue are here. A shop that hides its inventory behind a search box is absent, and there is no way for us to know what it would have added.
Why "everything else" is so large, and why we keep it
One row on that table is a confession. “Everything else” holds every listing our classification refuses to force into a category — 1,235,501 of 2,146,190, which is 57.6% of the corpus. It is excluded from the share column above, because a share of shelves computed against a bucket would describe our own uncertainty rather than the trade.
We could shrink it in an afternoon. Loosening the rules until every listing lands somewhere would produce a tidier table, a better-looking pie chart, and a set of departments quietly padded with things that do not belong in them. The cost would be invisible to a reader and fatal to the page: a share of shelves is only worth reading if the categories mean what they say.
So the rule is the same as everywhere else on this site. A listing enters a department when the title or the shop's own category says it belongs there, and stays unclassified when they do not. The size of that group is a fact about how merchants describe their inventory — inconsistently, in eleven languages, with a vocabulary that differs from shop to shop — and hiding it would be hiding the main difficulty of the measurement.
It is shrinking, slowly, and for the right reason: we now record the category each merchant publishes about its own product, so improvements come from reading them better rather than from guessing harder.
Questions this raises
Do skate shops mostly sell skateboards?
No. Measured across 488 shops and 2,146,190 listings, the largest named department is other clothing, while decks and completes account for 10.9% of what we can classify. Hard goods are the identity of a skate shop; soft goods are the inventory.
Why does that matter to a shopper?
Because it tells you where a shop's attention goes. A retailer whose catalogue is four fifths clothing is competing on apparel breadth, not on deck selection, and the depth you find in each department will reflect that.
How do you classify a listing?
From the title and the category the shop publishes about its own product. It is imperfect at the margins — a department called “everything else” exists precisely because we refuse to force a guess — but it is the shop's own words, read twice a day, rather than our opinion about what a product is.
Is this every skate shop in the world?
No, it is 488 of them, the ones that publish a machine-readable catalogue and let us read it politely. It is the largest such measurement we know of, and it is still a sample.
Can I reuse these figures?
Yes — they are published under CC BY 4.0. Cite ElectricSkateboard.com and link back. That is the whole licence.