Racing Bike 1998 · Cycling E-Commerce Store

Racing Bike 1998 is a cycling shop based in Bogotá, in business since 1998. It sells road, mountain (MTB), gravel, electric (e-bike) and kids' bikes, frames, components and accessories for the bike and the rider (helmets, clothing, shoes, heart-rate monitors). It works with brands such as Trek, Orbea, Shimano and Magene, as well as its own bikes and frames.

Its offer is not just product: every bike is delivered assembled and adjusted by its own workshop in Bogotá, its own frames carry a lifetime warranty, and the shop answers on WhatsApp when a customer needs advice before buying.

The online store had to bring that same experience to the whole country: nationwide shipping quoted by city, local payment methods and a technical catalog that can be browsed without knowing what each part is called.

Selling bikes and components online is harder than selling clothes or accessories. Five things had to be solved at once:

• A large, technical catalog: bikes with size and color, drivetrains, power meters, sensors, tires, clothing. Shoppers must find what they want by price, brand, size or discount without getting lost.
• Size, the main source of doubt: a frame that is too big or too small costs control and comfort, and buying without trying one on is intimidating.
• Paying for a large purchase: a bike costs millions of pesos, so financing and local payment methods (PSE, cards, Addi) have to be visible.
• Delivering a bike that leaves a Bogotá workshop assembled and adjusted anywhere in the country, with shipping cost and lead time made clear.
• Keeping the store alive: a store with real payments cannot break on a deploy or be left without a backup when something fails.

A WooCommerce store with a custom theme, designed and coded around the brand. What it contains:

• A home page with a campaign carousel, an announcement bar with the brand's promises (shipping across Colombia in 2 to 5 business days, lifetime frame warranty, bike delivered assembled and adjusted, safe financing and payments) and a benefits strip under the carousel.
• A menu organised by what the customer is shopping for: Bikes and Frames, For You, For Your Bike, For the Road and Outlet, with submenus per category (road, MTB, e-bike, kids, groupsets, power meters, brakes, saddles and more).
• A category explorer on the home page, featured selections and a sales section with discount percentages and low-stock notices.
• A catalog with filters for price (showing the price distribution of the catalog), discount, brand and size, configurable sorting and grid or list view.
• A product page with a gallery, size and color variants, price and monthly installment with Addi, a shipping notice and a sticky buy button that follows the visitor as they scroll.
• A «Find your size» guide: three steps, no sign-up, that recommends a size from the rider's height, linked from the menu and from every bike page.
• WhatsApp advice through a floating button and inside each product page, with size, availability and shipping answered by a person.
• A customer account, wish list and cart, and a newsletter sign-up with a launch discount.
• Cookie consent and the subscription window built as in-house plugins, with the Instagram and Facebook plugins for those channels.

The store is WordPress with WooCommerce and a custom theme built on Sage 11 (Blade templates with Acorn, Laravel's container for WordPress), with Tailwind CSS v4 for styling and Vite to build assets. In practice: products, orders and stock are managed in the WooCommerce admin the team already knows, while the design lives in versioned code rather than in a visual page builder.

What shapes the technical design:

• A Docker local environment: one command starts WordPress, the database and WP-CLI, and the theme is mounted from the developer's machine, so changes to templates, CSS and JavaScript show up instantly. A from-scratch install has seed scripts for the sample catalog, the menu and the home page.
• Store templates published as the project's own Blade views (listing, product, cart, account) instead of WooCommerce's generic ones.
• Cart and checkout built with WooCommerce shortcodes rather than blocks: blocks ignore the theme's templates.
• Currency in Colombian pesos (COP), with a dot as thousands separator and no decimals.
• The PHP version is pinned in the project (8.4.1) so dependencies installed outside the server do not break on a container running an older version; the data views need is passed through View Composers' with(), because Acorn wraps public methods and Blade would escape them as text.
• A server with LiteSpeed Cache and the WooCommerce, Facebook and Instagram plugins, plus the two in-house consent and subscription plugins.
• Documented operations: versioned deploy tooling, rollback, backups and restore, production data scripts that only simulate (dry-run) by default, an architecture document with the plugin inventory and known debt, and runbooks for a payment incident, a rollback, a restore and credential rotation.

This is SkyCode's process on any custom software project, including an online store like this one:

• An initial conversation to understand the store, the catalog and how it sells, with a clear plan and an honest budget.
• A contract with an agreed schedule, a 50 % deposit, and access and repositories in the client's name.
• Real progress every week in a private environment, so the store can be walked through like a shopper would before it opens to the public.
• Launch with the remaining 50 % only when everything is tested and working, plus a 90-day technical stability warranty.

On this project the theme, the store and the operations were documented so anyone on the team can deploy, roll back or restore without depending on the person who built it.

The published site shows what was delivered: racingbike.com.co with its catalog by category, filters, the size guide, product pages with financing and WhatsApp advice visible on every page.