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 the website was written with heavy use of Claude

Other VBSS sites

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