Why trust us

There are many articles written here, and some of them are clearly made to funnel traffic to an affiliate partner and earn a commission. So why exactly should you trust anything that’s been published on this website?

That’s a good question and a healthy attitude towards anything written online. For starters, personally, I basically start out with a healthy distrust towards online content and product reviews, especially if affiliate marketing comes into play.

It’s part of the reason why I started this website in the first place. Among others it became a place where I started to post my own product research and reviews.

I have a penchant for older bikes in general and vintage mountain bikes in particular, and for obvious commercial reasons none of todays product reviews cover components and parts you need to repair and restore those bikes. So some of the earliest topics of product reviews included:

as well as digging through complete catalogs of vintage mountain bikes to learn what original parts were used I needed for my latest restoration project

I already reviewed a number of newer products and when I started dabbling in affiliate marketing I create a number of popular articles like

How product research is done at restoration.bike

There’s no denying product research done for the purpose of affiliate marketing is skewed and biased. Almost all big sites are either being paid for product reviews, and/or are offered free products to be reviewed.

If you don’t at least provide a neutral review or counterbalance negative points with positive, you’ll lose that privileged position of being paid or offered products. So it’s a sort of I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

I recently spoke to the senior sales executive of Schwalbe Europe on a cycling convention, where I asked him if an affiliate partnership is possible. The basic answer is “no”, and my guess is I’m just not interesting enough and don’t have the right connections, or both.

That means that all content created for this website was payed for out of my own pocket, since I obviously don’t get paid for my reviews. Not yet at least.

It means that product research at restoration.bike is done differently from other websites.

I decide which product brands I want to consider within a certain product category
I create a database of all products of all selected brands within a certain product category, which holds relevant information related to that product category.
I establish benchmark parameters about product data and cross-reference them with personal experience (I own 10 bicycles from various cycling disciplines), existing reviews, and online research (think crash tests for bicycle helmets)
I select a number of products to match the demand from a target audience and create the product list review. All data that was taken into consideration is added to the article for quick reference.

For all categories I have product data for thousands of individual items, and there’s simply no one who tackles the product reviews as can be seen on restoration.bike.

Review quality

If you take that much product data in account, you begin to see patterns you’d otherwise miss. You begin to see the forest for the trees so to speak. In term that means that you won’t see me calling a certain product “lightweight” when it’s not, or “puncture resistant” when there’s no tech to support such notion.

And that kind of non-sensical analysis is something I definitely do see in a lot of other articles.

Concluding remarks

Whether I feel the content published here is good or not doesn’t really matter. It’s what you think. And I feel that by only providing the best I have to offer in terms of research and analysis will I keep engaging people with relevant content.