Breaking Ground | Bike Shop Hub

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This section of our blog focuses on what we are up to here at the shop. Along with announcements of new products and sales, we talk about the daily grind... errr I mean the 24 hour party here at Bike Shop Hub. We discuss various aspects of being involved in the bicycle industry and talk about the cycling community here in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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Breaking Ground

Written on September 13, 2007 by Josh Lipton in Shop Life

This week at Wandertec:
1. Watched the new shop construction begin.
2. Shopped for a multi website platform.
3. Listed Ortlieb Pannier Accessories on the Bike Trailer Shop.

After months of making arrangements and waiting around, the Wandertec shop expansion is finally underway. I’m hoping to have it closed in and the heating system operational before the snows begin to swirl.

Sales have begin dropping off as expected this time of year as fall and winter cycling approach. Now that I’m not packing boxes and answer calls and emails all day there will be some time to forge ahead on some new projects. I began looking into a variety of shopping cart systems. For the BikeTrailerShop.com I’ve been using the free Oscommerce. This has worked well for getting started in Ecommerce however as I look to ad other niche bicycling sites, its capabilities are becoming somewhat limiting.

My interest is to find a shopping cart system that supports multiple websites and that is well integrated into my accounting program, Quickbooks. I came across the website Zoovy and spoke to their sales department. It appears to be a very well rounded system that supports everything that I’m interested in. They charge around $3500 to get you setup and then 1.5-2% of your sales.

So far I’ve read some mixed reviews on them but apparently they’ve recently had some major revamping which may have lead to improvements. Before diving in, I will be looking for some more opinions from tech based web review sites and really grilling them on what shopping cart features they offer and how they support it.

avolve

October 21, 2007 | 4:14 am

You might want to look at drupal(.org) as a full package (store, blog, business site, etc). The options for eCommerce with drupal are an eCommerce extension or the Ubercart(.org) project.

Drupal and the extensions are very good and open source. There are many developers who work on the projects as well as many big name orgs and companies that now use (or aree switching to) drupal.

[it is my preferred CMS, after having worked with a number of the last few years]