vossman

I have a client with some products that are carried by around 40 different retail outlets. These outlets range from large retailers like WalMart all the way down to small mom and pop shops. What they would like to add to their website is a store location function so that a visitor could enter their zip code, and then they would be given a list of the retail stores carrying the product within their vicinity.



I have found some PHP/MySQL scripts that you can do this with, but the problem is that you have to manually insert all the store data. I don't know anyone who would want to compile a list of WalMart stores! But even if all the menial work like that was outsourced, there still involves the risk of the data going obsolete which would mean a high amount of maintenance.


I am looking for something that would allow me to plug-in the names of the retail outlets and then could filter results from google maps or a similar service based on the entered zip code or address information and only show locations based on the hard coded 40 retail entries.
Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Google Maps already or if there is a script out there that can accomplish these results?

Thanks for the tips and suggestions!

Vossman

mywebwork

Hi Vossman

Not sure how you'd get out of having to enter the store addresses manually with any solution?

I recently assisted another fine Warrior with a similar task for their website. We made use of Joomla, the free SOBI component and a SOBI extension called the 'Radius Search" which was a paid-for extension that went for 79 Euros (the company is German, that's about 118.37 USD at the time of writing).

Sigsiu.NET - Radius Distance Search Plugin

The extension came with access to postal and zip code databases from around the world, on our design we limited it to Canada and the US. It integrates with Yahoo maps.

Of course this solution is dependent upon using Joomla as a platform, not sure if that would work for you. I Googled another script that is straight PHP, no need for Joomla or any CMS.

Escape Radius - Products - SearchRadius Product Locator, Store Locator and Dealer Locator

I have no experience with this script so I can't speak for any of its features. It costs 225.00.

If you want to roll your own I came across a few articles about coding something like this. The were all ASP scripts, couldn't find a PHP one (although I didn't really search that deeply!). Maybe one of them would do the job.

Best of luck with your project

Bill

vossman

Bill,

Thanks a lot for the information. This is not going to be a CMS based website so the first option is out. Ill have a look at the second one. Appreciate your time!

Vossman