Want To Create A Great Locator?

17 June 2010
Posted in Ecommerce

Development of online shop, dealer, retail, store, and office locaters are essential for any retail business that relies on consumers shopping at their locations. Gas stations, C-stores, restaurants, grocery stores, coffee shops, clothing stores, banks, insurance companies, and other businesses rely on online locators to help their customers find their businesses and get their in their vehicles.

Proper use of a good online locator can be a great brand management tool. Web-based locators are highly conspicuous on a web site, and say a lot about a company depending on how well the locator works, and is often the first experience a consumer has with a company.

However, there are many more poorly designed web locators than good ones. A bad locator can be worse than having no locator at all. Some of the best locators have elements that are both common and often expensive to carry out. Poor locators are easy to find.  Great ones, are few and far between.

Use the adjacent tests to see if your locator is up to speed with the best:

• Accuracy - are your locations accurate? If you are relying on online geocoding tools you are probably 30 - over 60% inaccurate.  Use Google street view or Satellite view to verify your location. You may be surprised. For example, to ensure customers can always get the latest information when the look for the nearest Exxon or Mobil station, they update their locator data on a daily basis.

• Useability - If your customers can't easily figure out how to use the locator application or locator they will quickly give up and be left with a bad impression of your company.

• Useability - customers don't just want to find where they are, they want to find the nearest location, locations along the way, locations with certain features such as diesel fuel at a gas station, hours of operation, printer friendly driving directions, single line address input that intelligently figures out a location with less than perfect address information. GPS downloads are now available on one of the best locators on the net, the ExxonMobil station locator.

• Kept up to date - is your information updated daily?

• Access - do you have multi-language capability?

There are many more features and functions that seperate average locators from great locators. Find out who builds the best locators and get them to help you. A locator is necessary if you have multiple retail locations. Make sure your locator is an asset for your company.