GOLETA, CA (BRAIN)—The universal catalog for the bicycle industry Bike-alog has moved from compact discs to an online platform.
This means dealers will be able to get product info much quicker than with the CD that was shipped each month.
The online move “expands our availability to our dealers,” said Bike-alog developer Adam Durazo. Bike-alog’s CDs ran off a Windows platform, making it only available to PC users.
The online platform will feature a more revised interface with “different means to find a product” than before,” Durazo said.
One new feature that will hopefully be available by Interbike is live daily availability from distributors for dealers, according to Durazo.
Currently, Bike-alog has about 400 members.
“We’re definitely hoping that there’s growth,” Durazo said. The feedback has been very good from dealers thus far, according to Durazo, with many asking why it took them so long to move to an online version.
“We finally have a good product that we’re ready to roll out,” Durazo said.
Bike-alog started in 1988, when Bike-alog founder Jeff Palley realized there had to be a better way to keep track of all the items in the bike industry. The epiphany came when he visited a record store and saw the salesperson look up a record using Phonolog—the recording industry's universal catalog. Realizing that a standard database of the industry would make purchasing items for his five bike shops easier, he started Bike-alog as an in-house inventory database. Word got out about the database, though, and Bike-alog became a separate company whose sole mission was to provide the only comprehensive "Universal Catalog" of bicycle industry bikes, parts, accessories and clothing available to bicycle stores in the United States.
Today, Bike-alog has information on almost 200,000 separate items, as well as complete bicycle specs for over 15,000 bicycles dating back to 1993.
—Jason Norman
