FAQ: Building a Store Locator

Recently I built a store locator application for a client of mine. The goal of the store locator is to bring consumers to the stores closest to them. Every major retailor who has a website usually has a store locator.

Listed below are a few of the major purposes a store locator serves:

• Bring consumers into your businesses stores
• Brand the company name: pumping how many stores you have, etc.
• Boost e-commerce transactions & sales
• Create an overall awareness of services, products, specials, promotions, etc.
• Stay current & competitve in today's e-commerce economy

The topics covered are as follows:

1. Why build a store locator?
2. Considerations when designing a store locator
3. Various flavors of store locators
4. Where to get the data
5. Doing the competitive analysis
6. List of external resources & links
7. Stay tuned for Part II.

Why Build a Store Locator?

In the world of e-commerce, a store locator tells your customers you are thinking of them. Today, over 65% of customers do their research online before making a purchasing decision.

I know that I go online to look up store hours, store locations, and the addresses and phone numbers of the stores closest to me. To me, it simply more convenient to be able to get this information in my own time regardless of where I am.

Services such as consumer reports fasciliate in the research process also. For example, say I wanted to buy a refrigerator. I could do a lookup through Consumer Reports which has a web-based subscription now and find the best refrigerators on the market. Once I've found the best refrigerators on the market I then would do a price comparision online. I can go to places like Sears, JCPenny, and Lowe's, do a search and find my preferred refrigerator.

Let's say that Lowe's ended up having the best refrigerators at the best prices. I would then want to check for the closest Lowe's to my house. This is where a store locator application comes in.

If this isn't enough of an incentive to build a store locator, then I don't know what is.

Considerations When Designing a Store Locator

A store locator requires a database containing significant store information. This includes the store 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 store addresses 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 in her website. 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.

Various Flavors of Store Locators

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.

Where to Get the Data

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.

Doing the Competitive Analysis

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?
  

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.

Stay Tuned for Part II

In part two I will delve into the technical aspects of actually building a store locator. Presented will be sample code along with optimization techniques. Stay tuned!