new Niner EMD with hydroformed tubing

Last night I was working away on the Bike29 site, taking photos of new products, editing photos, uploading new items, trying to do the SEO thing, and realized that there’s a big anniversary coming up. One year ago, tomorrow, I took this latest iteration of the site live.

Schwalbe's making lightweight studded 29er tires for your pleasure

There wasn’t really anything wrong with the older version of the site, running on Oscommerce. It had been highly customized and we took advantage of a lot of features that other shopping carts didn’t offer. It just didn’t look awesome anymore. So I spent about 7 months researching options. I looked at everything from Shopify to Magento, installed multiple demo systems, and ultimately selected the open source OpenCart. Mostly because of the way it handled attributes and shipping fit best with our business needs.

Newly available Niner carbon fork with taper

After a month of late nights (all the web work gets done after 7pm) getting the site configured and all the content uploaded by hand, the site finally went live. And a few hours later I put myself on a plane to Tahoe to put on a conference for my real job. It was sink or swim for that site and I’m proud to say it has worked well from that very first day. Sure there are some things that I wish it did differently, and I’m sure all of those things are customizable – if only I had a little more bandwidth.

Niner EMD in flat black

I never really feel like I’m winning this race, not compared to other bigger, better, fancier shops out there. But I’m still kinda proud of what has been accomplished with scarce resources. To celebrate I will probably pour a few hours into the email newsletter, update a few items, basically just pour some more energy into the giant black hole. If a bunch of people buy some things in the near future we get to do new Bike29 beer coozies.