Today’s Zinger, running through the next week (thru Saturday November 7th), is the Ortlieb Office Bag Large Classic. We’ve marked it down from $119 to $109 while we feature it over the next week.

I just sold the Vaude Wright Tarp Commuter Pannier that I was testing through our Demo Page and decided to pull this interesting pannier off of the shelf. Two things struck me right away, 1. this is a big pannier and 2. where do I put my laptop? It didn’t take me long to figure out that I could adjust the one of the two inner dividers so that I could fit my MacBook Pro in my Chrome Laptop Sleeve behind it. It took me a few minutes to get the foam bottom and side piece into place and snapped in. This continuous foam piece does a great job of giving the bag it’s defined shape, but can be easily removed if the bag needs to be folded flat.

One of the dividers seemed like a little bit much with more organization for pens and small papers than I would really use. The other set of dividers were more my speed with two main pockets. I used the other divider for sliding my 2 locks behind. I carry two locks as I use one for locking up our Extrawheel Advert Trailer down the street from our business.

The slight angled back mounting of the Ortlieb Office seemed quite good, allowing for such a large bag to be well seated on almost any bike rack. The handles were nice though, with the top handle, I doubt I’ll even bother with the shoulder strap. I am sure I will appreciate having a waterproof bag with the winter months ahead. I also liked the bold look of the classic white. The classic large version of the Ortlieb Office Bag is is also available in silver and black.

All in all, this is a great bag and I look forward to its convenience, reliability and water protection for my office stuff in the months ahead.

The Zinger of the day is the RackTime AddIt Rear Rack!!! We’ve marked them down from$59 to $49 for the next week (thru November 1st).

The RackTime AddIt Rear Rack is a great rack designed with multi-purpose use in mind. RackTime is a new brand, developed by Tubus. Tubus wanted to offer up more economically priced racks and bags for bike commuters and weekend bike tourists. They’ve put together a really great lineup of racks and bags all at very affordable prices.

Tubus’s expertise in racks truly shines through in their much more affordable RackTime line. Many similar parts and designs have been integrated into the designs of their racks.

The RackTime AddIt features a somewhat unique profile with its upper rail that swoops back around as a lower rail. This offers up 2 both upper and lower mounting positions for bike panniers. The AddIt has the SnapIt mounting system integrated in for receiving all of the RackTime bags that utilize this system. The AddIt offers up a comfortably wide upper platform and unlike many other “economy” racks which use flexible expanded metal for upper mounting, utilizes Tubus’s very solid Round Stay and Round Stay Clamp Set. Additionally, the AddIt offers up an integrated rear light mounting point, perfect for adding on a light like the Busch & Muller 4D Toplight.

The AddIt like the Tubus rack line up offers up a graceful, stylish design. Designed for both bike commuting and weekend tours, the AddIt might be just the perfect fit for your bike.

The Zinger of the day is the Ortlieb Bike Shopper Panniers!!! We’ve marked them down from$85 to $75 for the next week (thru October 27th).

The Bike Shopper is a classic Ortlieb pannier. The bike shopper is setup to keep a bag of groceries dry and secure. Sold as a single pannier, the Bike Shopper is ideal for not only groceries, but also as a second pannier for any type of use. The Bike Shopper pannier is a great second pannier to be coupled with one of Ortlieb’s bike commuter specific panniers. My personal setup recently has been an Ortlieb Downtown for my laptop, notebooks, clothes and food etc. On the other side of my rack, the Bike Shopper is where I store my rain gear and bungee straps in case in need to strap something to my bike rack. The Bike Shopper also serves as my spot for extra capacity, whether it’s picking up groceries, bringing in some cake to work or bringing home products to review.

Form: The Bike Shopper comes in 4 colors, silver, yellow, creme and black (shown above). The black has an interesting pleather look and texture. I’d have to say the silver is my favorite both for its shiny look and it’s reflective aspects, repelling sun-rays from your groceries. The bag is not the height of style, but rather has that rugged, durable, functional Ortlieb look that says this product gets the job done.

Function: The simplicity of the Bike Shopper’s design is its strength but is definitely a weakness if this is not what you are looking for. One large compartment is perfect for transporting all sorts of things. The Quick Seal Closure does the job of closing and opening the pannier quickly and easily. The QSC offers both a reliable waterproof closure and by sticking up on the top of the pannier effectively offers some extra capacity. The two adjustable handles allow for the pannier to be transported easily by hand or over the shoulder. One thing that seems to be missing is a neat way to secure the handle when on the bike. While it’s configuration makes it so that it won’t drag on the ground or into the wheel, it does flop around a little bit.

A few other features to mention are the internal pocket that can hold a few small personals like a wallet, phone or tools. The Shopper utilizes the Ortlieb’s great QL-2 upper and lower mounting system to secure the pannier to your bike rack and finally the bag has front and rear reflective spots for added viability.

To sum it up, this is a great pannier for someone looking for a great all around use in a single pannier.

Fall is definitely in the air here at the Bike Shop Hub. We’re enjoying some nice fall mountain biking. Our friend Cass Gilbert is in town for the next month visiting with his family who decided to fly out after not seeing Cass for over a year while he has been bike touring the Americas. We’ve had a chance to do a few mountain bike rides with Cass and we are going to be doing some interviews with him about his travels and his interesting mountain bike touring setup.

In other shop news, we got the truck decaled up last week. Scroll to the bottom of the post to see our friend Gary Thompson’s handy work.

I thought I would mention our switch to Macs. After growing the company on PCs, with much thought and deliberation we’ve finally decided to make the move over to MACs. We had several reasons for doing this. One of the main reasons was that we feel that Macs offer a more stable system that require a lot less maintenance. Our programmer, Frank, is a strong advocate of open source Linux based systems and uses Kabuntu for his office computer. While this is a great platform for a developer, being even more stable and configurable than a Mac, it doesn’t offer the user-friendly side that everyone else in the office does much better with. With Macs being Unix based at its core, Frank was in a comfortable zone with it and relieved to be moving away from having to support Windows boxes. Our other motivation for moving to Macs is that many of our employees doing the more creative side of the business our quite comfortable in this environment. We have not completely left Windows behind and we have a few reasons to continue to use it to some degree including having our accounting system in QuickBooks, but we have made a major leap into shaking free.

While we’ve made forward progress into the Mac environment, we’ve taken a backwards step of sorts with our phone management. For about 6 months now, we’ve been experimenting with using Ring Central as our primary phone service. Our goal was to be able to have our entire phone system through our internet connection and no longer be reliant on Qwest land lines. We’d been using Ring Central for several years for our 800 number and decided to try their full VOIP system. To get it going, we had to configure their soft phones on all of our computers and get underway. Getting started was quite simple. We just had to set our answering rules and before we knew it, all of our computers were ringing. The problems came quickly though. We had trouble with dropping calls and transferring calls. We spent quite a bit of time working on tuning the Ring Central soft phones, configuring our computers and configuring our network. We were able to eliminate some of the issues, but we couldn’t get fully stable. And on occasion, the problems would flare up. Finally, we decided that we were spending to much time trouble shooting. We requested that Ring Central offered us dedicated support. They simply bounced our request through their awkward customer service, not seemingly getting the point. If they had dedicated support, even if we had to pay twice as much for it, we probably would have stuck it out, but with the lack of support, we decided to go back to good old fashion land lines. We bought an AT&T 4 lines phone, got 4 lines hooked up and moved away from VOIP phone management.

Coming at you like a Herd of Buffaloes, Our Bike Touring, Commuting & Family Cycling Gear Selection:

1. Adding to our lineup of messenger bags at BikeBagShop.com and balance bikes, and trailer-cycles at BikeKidShop.com.
2. Introducing video to our product listings. We’re starting out by uploading available videos from our manufacturers and will be adding in some of our own videos as well.
3. Building a photo booth to do our own product photography as well as photography for our expert article “bike setups” pages.

Like a Rattlesnake Strike, Our Smooth & Fast Web Platform Implementation:

1. Fine-tuning all of our content editing tools including the link massaging tool, the product and category editors, the blurbs (for sale and other messages), the expert pages and other content pages.
2. Working in tools into our shopping cart flow to direct customers towards the web store review sites that we are participating in
3. Integrating a more dynamic flow through our product’s options and accessories page “Choose Your Options” page.
4. Continue setting up a new Drupal website to update the BikeShopHub.com. This site will include a new forum, our blog, a feed from all of our blogs, and pages that feature products that we represent in the USA such as Extrawheel products.

Smooth and Strong as a Galloping Horse, Our Innovative Product Development:

1. Continue developing ideas for the BONGO rail system. Stuart’s back this week from 2 weeks in Hawaii and we’re excited to get started.
2. Begin designing our 2nd bike cargo trailer with integrated rail system, lower center of gravity and lower overall weight.
3. Continue brainstorming ideas for integrated front fork/rack/lockable box/stow-away panniers/fender & rear rack/lockable box/stow-away panniers/fender systems.

Gliding Gracefully as a Hawk, Our Shipping & Customer Service:

1. Settling in our organization of our inventory.
2. Integrating all of our inventory management and shipping management into one role.

Clever as the Fox, Our Internet Marketing and SEO Strategies:

1. Developing a good set of reporting tools to establish a baseline for our internet marketing success and progress.
2. Continuing to fine tune and further develop or shopping network feeds. Currently we our using GoDataFeed.com to feed out to Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, TheFind, Price Grabber, NexTag and Shopzilla.
3. Maintaining our current channels (currently Adwords, Twitter & Facebook).
4. Looking ahead towards joining the affiliate network Share-A-Sale and possibly setting up our own in-house affiliate network.

The Super-Duper Deals:

• Free BikeShopHub.com T-Shirts with bike cargo trailers and select Ortlieb Panniers.
• Free Strider Balance Bikes w/$500+ Chariot Carriers & Burley Child Trailers.
• Free Bell Child’s Helmets w/under $500 Chariot Carriers Burley Child Trailers & Croozer Child Trailers.
• Closeout of 2009 Burley Solo ST – Only $319! (Originally $549)

The Bike Shop Hub’s Blogosphere:

• Utility Cycling – ‘People Focused Streets
• Utility Cycling – Capital Bikeshare Launch
• Utility Cycling – Interbike 2010 Reflections
• Bike Shop Hub – Chrome Citizen Bag Review
• Utility Cycling – Garbage & Recycling Collection by Bike
• Bike Trailer Blog – 2010 Interbike: New Bike Trailers!
• Utility Cycling – A Car Free Street in Queens