How to choose software for a bike shop

Before you look at any feature list, pull last year's numbers and split them into two piles: what came across the counter as product sales, and what came off the bench as labor and parts fitted to a customer's bike. That split decides more about the right software than any demo will. A shop that sells two hundred complete bikes a year and runs one mechanic has a different center of gravity from a shop that sells almost nothing but has four stands full from March to October.

Most bike shop software was built around one of those piles first. Retail point-of-sale systems grew up around the till, the stock room and the supplier catalog, and added a workshop screen later. Field-service apps grew up around plumbers and landscapers driving to a customer's house, and handle quotes, visits and invoices well but know nothing about a bike. Service-first software starts from the repair ticket and treats the till as one of several ways to get paid.

None of those is wrong. They are built for different shops. The honest question is not which one has the longest feature list but which one was designed around the part of your business that keeps you up at night in May, when the drop-off queue is out the door and the phone keeps ringing with riders asking if their bike is ready.

If most of your revenue is product sales, a mature retail point of sale is the right tool, and BIKE.co is not one. Systems like Lightspeed Retail and Ascend handle card-present payments on real terminals, barcode scanners and receipt printers, serialized bike inventory, supplier catalogs you can order from, and ecommerce tied to the same stock. They also have workshop screens, and plenty of busy service departments run on them.

BIKE.co does not sell a card terminal, does not load supplier catalogs and is not trying to run your showroom. If you are a retail store with a workshop, the realistic setup is to keep your POS for the floor and decide whether the workshop needs more than the POS gives it. Our retail and service shops page covers that split.

If you run a mobile repair van and the job is mostly driving to riders, a field-service app like Jobber or Housecall Pro is a strong option today. They are mature, they have native iPhone and Android apps, Tap to Pay, route planning, online booking, customer portals and automated texts, all shipping now. What they do not have is any idea what a bike is. You will store a Di2 firmware version or a fork serial in a free-text note.

BIKE.co's field app is a web app only: installed from the browser, with camera and signature, and it keeps working with no signal, which is new. Web push is planned. There is no App Store app, no Tap to Pay and no background GPS. Payment in the field is planned as a Stripe pay link, a QR code on the mechanic's screen or card entry; today payments are recorded by hand. If Tap to Pay matters to you, a field-service app is the better choice today.

BIKE.co is for shops where the bench is the business. It is the erp.io Service module set up for bike repair, and it sits in the same workspace as the other erp.io modules that are live today: Phony, an AI receptionist that answers the phone; Accounting for the books; CFO for forecasting the busy and quiet seasons; ATS for hiring mechanics; Courses for training them; Chat, Sign, CRM and more. One login, one bill, one set of permissions.

The core of Service is live: a request becomes a quote, the approved quote becomes a job with visits on the week schedule, a required checklist gates each visit, mechanics clock their time, and the finished job is billed in one click. The Service plan then goes further than general field-service apps in the places a bike shop needs it: bike records with serials and service history, and parts inventory with stock locations for the shop and each van, reorder points and purchase orders. Those are planned, not built, and the roadmap page says which phase each one is in.

If you want the whole business in one place and can live without bike records, parts, pay links and customer texts for now, BIKE.co is worth a trial. If you need a finished workshop system with all of those this season, one of the tools on these pages will serve you better right now, and we would rather tell you that than have you find out in May.