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How-to

StoreFront Locations

Overview​

StoreFront Locations is the built-in Store Locator feature that shows shoppers where to find you in person. If your theme supports store locations, you can list every physical address you sell or serve from, and shoppers can search that list to find the one closest to them. For any merchant who sells both online and in person, it closes the gap between the two: a shopper who lands on your StoreFront can still find a real place to visit.

The Store Locator lives on its own tab in the StoreFronts admin, separate from your product catalog and pages. You manage locations there, and the Store Locator element on your StoreFront renders them for visitors.

Who uses StoreFront Locations​

  • Retail chains. List every store in the chain so a shopper searching from any city finds the nearest one, with its address and hours.
  • Franchise and dealer networks. Independently owned locations sell under your brand, and the locator is how a shopper finds the nearest authorized franchisee or dealer.
  • Distributors and service businesses. Showrooms, pickup counters, and service centers benefit from the same searchable list, even without a traditional retail storefront.
  • Seasonal and pop-up sellers. Add a location when a pop-up opens and delete it when it closes, without touching the rest of your StoreFront.

What's included​

  • A New Location wizard that looks up latitude and longitude automatically as you enter an address, so you never calculate coordinates by hand.
  • Editing and deleting existing locations from the same Store Locator list.
  • Google Maps integration, so locations render as pins on an interactive map instead of a plain list. This step is optional, but it's the difference between a list of addresses and a map shoppers can actually navigate from.
  • Mass import for merchants with a large set of locations already in a spreadsheet, handled by UltraCart support rather than one-by-one entry.
tip

Set up Google Maps before you add your first location. The New Location wizard still works without it, but locations don't render on a map until a Google Maps API key is configured.

Open the Store Locator​

UltraCart StoreFronts have a built-in store locator service that may be easily configured if your theme supports store locations. From the StoreFront menu, click on the Store Locator tab.

The Store Locator tab in the StoreFronts admin menu

If no locations have been configured yet, the screen displays a New Location button and a Settings button. Settings opens the wizard for adding Google Maps support.

The empty Store Locator screen showing the New Location and Settings buttons

Add a location​

Click the New Location button to begin adding stores to your store locator. Fill in the text boxes and click save when finished.

The New Store Location form with address fields

After clicking New Location, a pop-up displays the address fields along the left side of the wizard. When you have entered enough information, the wizard looks up the latitude and longitude of your store automatically.

The New Location wizard with address fields on the left and the looked-up coordinates

When finished, click the save button to add the store to your store locator collection. Your new store location appears in the list with edit and delete buttons for managing it as needed.

The Store Locator list showing a saved store with edit and delete buttons

Connect Google Maps​

Integrating the store locator with Google Maps gives your customers an easy way to locate and navigate to your store locations. To do it, you provide a Google Maps API key.

  1. Navigate to the StoreFronts menu and click the Store Locator tab.

    The Store Locator tab in the StoreFronts menu

  2. Click the settings button, which presents the configuration field for your Google Maps API Key. If you do not already have one, click the Signup link, which takes you to the Google Maps JavaScript API documentation.

    The Store Locator settings wizard with the Google Maps API Key field and Signup link

  3. Generate a key on Google's side, then configure the name and StoreFront host or hosts it applies to.

    note

    It may take up to 5 minutes for a newly created key's settings to take effect.

  4. Copy the key, return to the Settings button in the Store Locator configuration page, paste your Google Maps API key into the configuration field, and save the changes.

    The Google Maps API key pasted into the Store Locator settings field in UltraCart

You are now ready to begin adding store locations to the store locator.

Configure HTTP referrers​

For the Google Maps API to properly handle StoreFront URLs that may have parameters appended to them, use the wildcard character when entering your referral URLs.

Customize map markers​

The Google Maps API can apply custom markers, or "icons", to the map. See Google's markers introduction and its custom markers tutorial.

Mass import locations​

If you have a large set of stores to configure in the store locator, email a spreadsheet containing the store locator records to support@ultracart.com, specifying your UltraCart Merchant ID along with a request to import the records into your account. Allow 1 to 2 business days to complete the update once the spreadsheet has been emailed to support.

  • StoreFront Menus covers adding a link to your Store Locator page from your StoreFront's navigation.
  • StoreFront Search covers the search box shoppers use to find products, which is separate from the location search on the Store Locator.
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