This was my first website created specifically for a business, designed to sell products and showcase our services. In 2016, I joined Bespoke Cycles, a cycling shop that offered bike fitting services for road cycling and triathlon bikes. The business evolved into a retail store, selling various cycling components like handlebars, stems, pedals, and other accessories for both regular and triathlon bikes.
I started as a manager and was thrilled to accept an opportunity to become a director, partner, and joint owner. This gave me more creative freedom to shape the business’s direction. However, running a bike shop proved challenging—money was tight, and success typically requires carrying five major brands to attract customers. We couldn’t afford premium brands like Specialized, so we stocked excellent but less popular alternatives. Despite our best efforts, the business eventually had to close due to insolvency. Still, we learned invaluable lessons throughout the journey.
The website
During my time at Bespoke Cycles, I developed a Magento website for our shop. I chose Magento because of my previous experience with it and its excellent capabilities for product management. One key feature was its ability to easily sync products with Amazon and eBay, you could list items once on the website, and they would automatically publish to these marketplaces.
Looking back at the website now through the Wayback Machine (an internet archive that preserves old websites), I’m genuinely impressed by the design. It holds up well even today, years later. The homepage featured a rotating banner showcasing our latest products, followed by logos of our stocked brands including Ridley, Orbea, Genesis, Argon 18 and Nevi. We promoted ourselves as “Derby’s only cycle and tri store” and included information about our 0% interest finance options.
The website proved successful for our business—it was always exciting to come into work in the morning and find we’d sold a £1,000 bike overnight.
While we sold through eBay with smaller margins and occasionally on Amazon (despite its highly competitive pricing), the website opened up a valuable new revenue stream.
Is Magento still a good platform?
While many websites still run on Magento, mainly due to the significant effort required to migrate away from such a deeply integrated platform, newer solutions like Shopify have revolutionised e-commerce. Magento’s main drawback is its hosting requirements—as traffic increases, you need increasingly robust and expensive hosting infrastructure. Unlike Shopify, which automatically handles scaling, a Magento site needs careful server management to handle traffic spikes. A sudden visitor surge (say, 10,000 overnight from a viral product) could crash the site without proper infrastructure.
As of January 2025, there are approximately 129,774 live stores running on Magento. This represents a decrease of 11% year-over-year.
I recently learned that Magento has been acquired by Adobe and is now called Adobe Commerce—though I can’t speak to its current quality.
What I learned
Though not my first website, this was my first experience developing for a real business that generated actual revenue. While Magento served us well at the time, I wouldn’t choose it today. It lacks the design flexibility we needed—for example, our banner featuring the new Shimano S-Phyre shoe was an image, which isn’t ideal for SEO since Google can’t read image text. Creating similar designs using the website’s text editor would have been challenging.
What E-commerce platform would I recommend?
For current e-commerce projects, I highly recommend Shopify if you want a straightforward platform for managing and selling products. Alternatively, WooCommerce, built on WordPress, is another excellent system. I’ve implemented both solutions with great results.
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