FAQ: Building a Store Locator (Part II)

Okay, here's part two of developing your store locator. As I said, this will delve into the technical side of things. Please review part I of designing a store locator if needed.

Please Note: The webhost I was using for this particular client has rather simplifyed ASP capabilities. That's too bad honestly because they lost my business due to their unwillingness to upgrade their technology.

The topics covered are as follows:

A little overview of ASP
Designing your database
Creating your database connection string
Getting the data into the database
Programming SQL scripts
Putting it all together
Lessons learned

A Little Overview of ASP

ASP is quite a powerful technology. Combined with ADO, the ability to build scalable and secure websites comes to light. For simplicity, I will show you the basic ASP in order to make this store locator work.

First and foremost every programming language has it's own delimiting tag. A tag delimitor is a set of characters that tell the code processor to expect code from a certain language, eg: ASP to follow it.

Please Note: Every language has a beginning and ending delimitor tag.

In ASP the tag delimitors are:

<%

some ASP code here

%>

The <% is our opening ASP tag. This tells the processor, oh we've got some ASP coming here.

The %> is our closing delimitor tag. This tells the processor, we've reached the end of the ASP code. Do no more here!

The web language for ASP is called VB Script. For VB Script tutorials, see the W3C School.

Designing Your Database

A store locator requires a database containing significant store information. This includes the store's address, phone number, url (if applicable), and maps.

The major point here is the volumn of stores and/or territories your business covers. Because the web is global, having significate store coverage is the key. If you only have one or two stores then you may as well just post the storeaddresses for those on your website and not bother with a store locator.

Leading into my third point, is where you are in your business. For example, my client is at a point now where it makes sense for her to have a store locator. She has competitors out there who are doing the same thing to reach their customers. She has to stay current and also have a database with her store information at her disposal.

Creating your Database Connection String

Store locators are like ice cream. They can be designed with different tastes and flavors in mind.

For instance, let's say you had a large coverage of stores in the US and/or outside of the US. You may consider designing your store locator so that it is searchable by city and state. You may also want to look into MapQuest's mapping software for graphically displaying your store locations as points on the map.

If on the other hand, you don't want your competitors to know how many stores you have, you may consider designing a zipcode based store locator. This would be one in which the user would enter his/her zipcode. Search results based on which stores are near that zipcode would be returned.

Some considerations here would be handling results where there isn't a zipcode match. Let's say you don't have any stores within 30 miles of your user. What message or alternate will you offer them? This would be based on your business model and creativity. Maybe you are so big that you don't offer alternatives or you are a business in which the customer must be physically at the store in order to receive services or goods.

Getting the Data into the Database

The one universal thread in store locators is that they all require zipcode data. The US Census Bureau has a zipcode database product they put together in November 1999. This data includes 42,000+ zipcodes along with their corresponding latitudes and longitudes. Download this file here.

As a heads up, your store locator will need to do trigonomic functions on the zipcodes latitude and longitude in order to return an accurate resultset to your user.

You will also need to put together a database of your stores. This can be in MicroSoft Access, MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, or any other database system that can be accessed via a web server.

Programming SQL Scripts

To better understand what you will expect from your store locator, it does well to look at other store locators.

The areas to pay attention to are:

Functionality: What drives your store locator? Is it the city/state query or is it zipcode based? Can a user enter his/her address and obtain the stores closest to that address?
Design: What elements come first, second, third? What is the flow of operations for the user?
Ease of Use: Is it clear to your user what information is need in order to obtain results?

Putting It All Together

Lessons Learned

External Links

The USPS has web tools that can help with calculating postage rates and other things for a small to medium sized retailer or distributor.

Information and definitions regarding zip codes.

Trig functions for calculating the distance between two points.

Melissa Data provides several web tools online for testing results.

Zip Code Downloads is a paying service that provides zip code updates and developer tools.