In the next issue of Service Dealer magazine, we will be looking at the current cordless products market.

We'll be talking to a manufacturer about how they view the market for their company as well as considering some new developments to recently hit the shelves.

And most importantly, we want to hear from dealers on how your experiences with the machines have been this past year. A year when it seems every manufacturer has been making moves on the sector - with new products launched regularly throughout the season.

Also, it's been the year when one major manufacturer announced that they would begin to look at selling the entry level battery machines through non-traditional servicing dealers.

What did you think of STIHL's announcement? Is it the death knell for the sector or an inevitable fact of retailing life that won't particularly affect your dealership?

I thought a very interesting and thought-provoking take on the subject came from Ron Miller in his first column in the current edition of Service Dealer.

Ron's view was that STIHL's move would actually prove positive for the specialist dealer. He said, "Even though the product they are intending placing in garden centres and hardware stores may not be top end the main thing is the concept will get real exposure. The more times the customer sees the product the more curious they become.

"There is an old saying "What you see is what you buy"! Isn't it exposure that creates a market?"

He went on to compare what STIHL are doing to what Black & Decker did with electric strimmers and what Flymo did with electric leaf vacs back in the day. The exposure of those machines through the mass channels led to dealers taking a large slice of those markets with superior products.

What Ron said certainly seemed plausible and pragmatic to me. But do you agree?

In today's Weekly Update we are running a survey about what dealers think about the current state the cordless machinery market - and it'd be fantastic if you could take a couple of moments to fill it out for us.

Last year around this time we ran a similar survey which appeared to reveal to be a real split between advocates of the technology and those who held very real concerns that the spread of such machinery could spell trouble for traditional servicing dealers.

What did appear to be the case though is that everybody was stocking the products in one form another. Nobody at all responded saying they didn’t hold any cordless brands. Most respondents held two company’s machines (45%). Has this changed in the past year though? Are you stocking more now? Or fewer?

On the whole dealers said they were quite confident in the products they stocked (38%) and they would ‘sometimes’ recommend a cordless mower over a petrol one to a customer (43%).

There wasn’t an overwhelmingly positive result to the question of whether customers demand cordless products, with most respondents saying occasionally (44%) or hardly ever (38%).

Slightly more encouraging, but by no means earth shattering, was the news that 50% said that customers ‘some of the time’ make additional purchases after buying a cordless machine.

But as expected the biggest concern that the responding dealers had was that 56% said they got no service work at all off the back of a cordless sale.

So it'll be fascinating to compare last year's results to this year's to see if attitudes amongst dealers have shifted much during this past 12 months.

And as ever with the survey's we run, there is space at the end for you to leave any comments you'd like to share on the subject.

We'll publish the results and a selection of your thoughts in the next edition of Service Dealer magazine. Thanks in advance for your help.

TAKE THE SURVEY