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Build a store locator that turns an online search into a store visit

A store locator shows visitors the stores, agencies or pick-up points closest to them, and takes them to the right one.

Without an answer, the visit ends on the screen

People look for your network the way they look for anything else: on a phone, halfway through something else, with very little patience. If the page they land on cannot tell them which point of sale is closest, open now and easy to reach, the visit stays online and ends there. A store locator is the piece that closes it: it puts the nearest physical locations in front of the visitor and takes them there.

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An enterprise-grade and ready-to-use Store Locator to convert customers from search to stores

The four moments of a store search

Four moments, and none of them should ask the visitor to work.

  1. The map can open where they are.

    The Woosmap Geolocation API uses IP-based location to open the map around the visitor at the right zoom level, with the closest points already in view. From there, they search with what they know.

  2. Search accepts what they know.

    Autocomplete covers cities, towns, places, postcodes and addresses worldwide, and it also matches the names of your own points of sale.

  3. Opening hours decide the visit.

    Hours are displayed live, the list can be filtered on the points that are open, and results are sorted by distance.

  4. Directions start on your site.

    With the Distance API, the visitor works out the route to the point they chose without leaving your site, on foot, by car or by bike.

Search that matches your network, not a generic map

Two stores are rarely interchangeable: one serves a catchment area, the other holds the stock, a third opens on Sunday. The search has to know that before the visitor does.

Catchment areas.

A catchment area can be attached to each point of sale, so traffic goes to the store that should serve it.

Along a route.

Points of interest can be searched and displayed by proximity to a route, for the customer who buys on the way.

Your own attributes.

Filters are built on your own store data, the services available in store for example, with the categories you choose, the display format you choose, and an "open now" option.

Dense networks stay readable: all points of sale are broadcast at every zoom level, on web and on mobile, without making the visitor click to break a cluster open, and clustering stays available where it helps.

The full capability inventory of the API behind this page lives on the Stores API product page.

Three ways to build a store locator, one decision to make

The question is not whether it is possible, it is how much of the rendering you want to own.

Store Locator Widget.

A ready-made locator that takes very little coding to configure. The fastest route to a working page.

Map JS API.

You build the locator brick by brick and control the rendering, at the cost of writing the front end yourself.

Stores API, called directly.

Everything is driven server side, which suits an existing front end or a native application.

The developer documentation covers request formats, authentication and configuration for each integration path.

Whichever path you take, the base map, the colors and the point of interest icons follow your brand identity, and the widget is natively responsive on mobile web. The locator can also run without a map at all, as a list of points of sale with their address, contact details, status, logo and photos, which is useful in a checkout step or an embedded view where a map has no room.

The full decision matrix, including the point where each path stops paying off, is laid out in the store locator API guide on the Woosmap blog.

Read the developer guide

Keeping the store data current

A locator is only as good as the repository behind it, and that repository changes every week: a new opening, a temporary closure, a phone number nobody updated.

Bulk updates by API.

A REST API updates points of sale in bulk, which is what an overnight sync from your own systems needs.

Editing in the Console.

A point of sale can be edited directly in the Woosmap Console by the users who have access to it.

Presence management connectors.

The repository can also be synchronized from a presence management connector: Localistico, Partoo and Yext.

Some Woosmap customers hold up to 80,000 establishments in that repository, without maintaining one database per country.

The same repository serves every market you operate in. Display units and time format are settings rather than forks, and the Store Locator Widget ships its interface in fifteen languages. Build on the Map JS API instead and the interface is yours, so you localize it the way you localize the rest of your site. Either way, opening a second country does not mean running a second locator.

Start free, and see what it costs before you commit

Start on the free tier.

Woosmap publishes three plans, Free, Pro and Enterprise. The Free tier lets you evaluate without commitment, while Pro and Enterprise are paid plans. See the pricing page for current details.

Watch what you consume.

API usage is visible project by project in the Woosmap Console, overall and per API.

Try it, then build on it.

Woosmap publishes a hosted demo of a store locator and the complete starter project behind it, built with the Map JS API.

Try the official demoSee pricing

Try a working store locator before you build one

The official Woosmap sample below loads on its own as you reach it. Search a city, choose a result, then open a point of sale to read its address, its opening hours and its distance. It runs on a sample dataset of coffee shops, not on your own network.

Questions we are asked

The widget exposes usage events to your application: a store selected, a click on a phone number, a distance computed, a click through to the site. These usage events are anonymized. The widget documentation explains how to listen to them.

Yes. The terms depend on your setup, and they are agreed with Woosmap directly: contact us and we will tell you what applies to your case.

Woosmap publishes a Store Locator cartridge for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, compatible with the Storefront Reference Architecture and configurable from the Business Manager.

The locator is there to help a visitor find the right store. If you also need a page of its own for each store or each area, Store Pages publishes those pages from the same store data.

Your next step

If you are scoping the project, tell us how many points of sale you run, in which countries, and on which front end. With those three, we can point you at the integration path that fits your team and your platform. If you are the one who will integrate it, start with the developer guide and the starter project: they are the fastest way to a locator running on your own data.

Talk to our teamRead the developer guide