BICYCLES QUILICOT
How Montreal's oldest bike shop — 7 locations, 350+ brands, 10,000+ products — got an honest eCommerce audit and a clear Magento-to-Shopify Plus migration roadmap.
Visit website →Montreal's oldest bike shop needed a digital strategy that matched its ambition
Founded in 1915, Bicycles Quilicot is the oldest bicycle shop still operating in Montreal. What started as a single storefront has grown into a chain of seven locations across Quebec — from Rosemont to Mont-Tremblant — with over 350 brands and 10,000+ products serving cyclists of every discipline. Their Laval flagship, designed with DKA Architectes, won a Gold certification at the Grands Prix du Design.
But the online experience did not reflect the business Quilicot had become. The site was running on Magento — a platform that had served them for a time, but was increasingly difficult to maintain, expensive to develop on, and poorly suited for a retailer that needed to move fast, manage a deep catalog, and unify its online and in-store operations.
Quilicot was not just a single bike shop with a website. They were a multi-location specialty retailer with a complex product catalog — bicycles with endless configurations of frame sizes, wheel sizes, colours, and components — competing against both big-box retailers and pure-play online shops.
The Magento site had become a liability. Performance was sluggish, design updates required expensive custom development, and the platform was not keeping pace with how customers expected to shop. Previous agency collaborations had resulted in accumulated technical debt and an extensive bug list rather than a clean, stable foundation.
An operator's audit — not a vendor pitch
We conducted a comprehensive eCommerce and PIM audit covering the full digital operation: platform performance, catalog architecture, product data quality, site experience, SEO health, and operational workflows.
We evaluated Quilicot's Magento environment against their actual business requirements — not theoretical feature checklists, but the real workflows their team runs every day. Product updates, inventory sync across seven locations, promotional campaigns, bilingual content management. Where was the platform helping? Where was it actively slowing them down?
With 10,000+ products spanning bikes, components, accessories, and apparel — many with deep variant structures — we mapped the current data architecture and identified gaps in product information that were hurting both the customer experience and search visibility.
Based on the audit findings, we recommended migrating to Shopify Plus — with a detailed rationale covering total cost of ownership, catalog management capabilities, multi-location support, and the operational autonomy the team needed. The recommendation included a phased migration plan, data mapping requirements, and integration priorities.
Not every project starts with building. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do for a client is give them an honest, informed assessment of where they are and a clear plan for where they need to go — before they spend six figures on the wrong implementation.
"We have run eCommerce operations at this scale ourselves. We know what it feels like when the platform is the bottleneck. That experience shapes how we audit — we are diagnosing from the perspective of someone who has lived it."
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