About

VBSS is an acronym for Vancouver Bike and Ski Stuff.

VBSS is a free website which aggregates data from multiple local bike and ski stores in the Greater Vancouver area with search and filtering.

Use VBSS to find local stores that have a particular part in stock, the best price locally for a big purchase or which stores have sales for stuff you plan to replace.

Why VBSS?

I am a Vancouver local with two expensive hobbies, bikes and skiing.

I regularly shop online, but for expensive bike and ski stuff I prefer to try in person first and I try to support local stores whenever I can. Local stores are a life saver when you need a part just before a big event or trip, they provide excellent advice and service and shopping at them is the best way to help them survive.

I am also a nerd so I wrote some command line tools to check local stores websites for stock and sales. Talking with other people; I realized others would also use these tools so I made this website version.

Colophon

This website scrapes online stores powered by Shopify using Scrapy. This website is built in Python using SQLite, Flask and Bootstrap. The original command line tools were hand written and I used tools like Datasette to search the data. As an experiment this website was vibe coded with heavy use of Claude code and some other LLM models and tools. I cancelled my personal claude subscription a few months ago and I am now slowly re-building parts of the site which had become challenging to work on. Unless I do a complete rewrite there is still likely GenAI generated code powering this site.

Other VBSS sites

This site has nothing to do with "Visit, board, search, and seizure", use your favourite search engine to find other options.

Data, residency, privacy etc

This site uses a Cookie to track basic session state (search options) and web logs are kept for one week. Currently it is hosted on a VPS from Vultr (affiliate link) located in the Seattle area. For analytics the site use services from Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. Additionally it uses Cloudflare as a CDN / WAF (and also some analytics). While this site makes no effort to track or profile users; by using services from Bing, Cloudflare and Google we enable them to track whatever data you and your browser share with this website.

Moving to a Canadian hosting provider, removing cookies and removing third party tracking services will all happen at some stage in the future but, this work does not currently have a concrete plan.