Building Custom Magento 2 Multi-Store Store Locator Extension

With online commerce having now outpacing conventional shopping in terms of sales, revenue, finding new ways to retrieve customers back into the brick-and-mortar locations has become more important than ever before.

A visitor who is visiting your website is already fascinated with your brand. Without running amok, focus on turning those online prospects into offline customers.

But how?

Well, implementing store-locators to your marketing mix can be an absolute solution.

While store locators are a not-so-secret arsenal to combat the online store dominance – but if you consider your e-commerce business locators as revenue generators.

On this occasion, the expert Magento 2 developers at The Brihaspati Infotech developed a custom Magento 2 multi-store store locator extension for one of the clients to optimize the store locator for the customers.

Before getting into depth, let’s first understand:

What are the benefits of a store locator?

An online store locator is a page on a website built for businesses with multiple locations that allow the visitors to find locations of the business within the proximity of a location, postal code. or within a selected region.

Online store locators are used by brands which include hotels, restaurants, chain retailers, and other businesses. Brands like Adidas are using store locators with map locators to direct the potential buyers to their nearest location.

Source: Store Locator used in Adidas

If you ask why a business needs a store locator, here are a few cases below.

1) When a business involves products, like shoes, phones, etc, Store locators can help people ‘find their nearest location’ to directly visit a store and touch or try the product.

2) Talking about electronic goods like smartphones and televisions, where it is essential for the merchant to offer ‘after-sales service’ such as a mobile repair/troubleshoot centers, setting up the store locators becomes crucial.

3) Store locators also assist the consumers to find ‘authorized product centers’ where they can expect the best of the service or original products to purchase.

Source: Hubspot

Let’s talk about some of the benefits of putting store locators in e-commerce businesses:

1. Brings traffic to your e-commerce website

It is an easy way to provide your customers with the significant information they need to find their nearest physical store. This increases the probability of customers visiting your store and making a purchase. Store locators accelerate the research process for customers and eliminate the chances of their getting disappointed.

2. Build a strong local search presence and brand visibility

With customer’s clicking on the dedicated page for each of your store location, the chances of ranking higher for ‘direct’ searches and ‘discovery’ searches increases. When each store location page is ranked well, this will enhance the rankings for your entire website and the online listings.

3. Generate Leads by moving customers along their journey

As an e-commerce retailer, you can leverage your store locator to generate leads via quote requests, contact forms, driving customers to make bookings, displaying user ratings and reviews for the specific store location in the post-purchase phase, and more.

4. Save time and money

By displaying general information like the opening and closing time of your business, the customer support to direct buyers to their nearest sale point, etc. a store locator saves a great deal of time and money.

5. Respond to Inquiries 24×7

An important benefit of implementing Store Finder for your multi-location business is to be able to answer the client inquiries anytime even on holidays, irrespective of your staff being present at the office or not.

For instance, the server loads of StoreFinder during a 24 hour day reports the heaviest use from 8 Am to 11 Pm. So, this justifies that people actually come looking for store even during your business off-hours.

Source: StoreFinder

6. Collect valuable data

After integrating a store locator into your e-commerce website, use website analytics tools like Google Analytics or SemRush to monitor the demographics of people searching your products, how often they search, and more. Use this data to constantly to optimize your store locator, and understand your customers better.

Thus, integrating store locators on your e-commerce website give you the power to outstand your competitors when it comes to customer acquisition.

Our Magento 2 Multi-Store Locator Extension Development

Recently our expert Magento 2 development team got an opportunity to develop a multi-store locator extension for a Magento 2 retailer.

While there are a plethora of third-party extensions that are available in the market for easy integration of a store locator on our e-commerce website. However, using these extensions have many repercussions that can lead to complications in your original website code.

Moreover, there is a high likelihood that the features you need for your business might not be inclusive of what the extension offers in their package as a whole.

So, our developers opted for the custom development approach to build a Magento 2 multi-store store locator extension for a client’s e-commerce business.

Objective

The main goal was to design a complete, dedicated, and interactive store locator modules for each store in a Magento multi-store environment where the access to manage all stores lays with Super-admin while admins can update and manage the information for their own specific store.

How we built it?

We started creating our store-locator extension with the custom development approach. We devised a simple way that used the default features of Magento 2’s CMS only.

Using Magento 2 library and Magento 2 standards, we configured the multi-store Magento 2 store locator, a brand merchant can configure his Magento 2 store locator by entering:

• Google map API
• Store hours
• Social links
• Yelp reviews
• Social feed
• Store name
• Adding photo gallery
• Assigning user roles
• Contact emails

While configuring the store addresses, Google API may be required. The social media profile links like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter are added in the social links section. Other information like store hours, Yelp reviews, Social feed, Photo gallery, and User roles are also added.

By customizing this default configuration, our developers soon built a multi-store store-locator extension.

The extension is divided into two sections:

• Super-Admin – He reserves the right to add, edit, and manage multiple Magento 2 stores.
• Admin – An admin is allowed to manage a specific store and is not permitted to view other store’s information. For any changes in his store, say the address, admin sends a request for approval from the Super-Admin.

On adding the extension to your e-commerce website, a Super-Admin can add any number of stores as he wants.

Add store address.

He can add email addresses who can access the information of a particular store.

Apart from adding new stores, a Super-admin can also manage his existing outlets from Magento backend by clicking Manage stores.

The super-admin can view, edit, delete or manage any store as shown in the Magento 2 backend.

However, admin is not allowed to see all the stores’ information. He has access to see and edit his individual store’s information.

Moreover, our Magento 2 multi-store store locator provides a flexible backend functionality to the merchants where we offer easy ‘user management’. We incorporated the multiple-user access and permissions in our multi-store store locator extension page which empowers the store-level employees to manage a specific location’s content.

Different roles can be assigned to the people managing the stores like administrators, marketing, FFS stores, customer support, and operations.

You can provide the right access to the right people while maintaining control. Each permission level comes with a customized user interface, which makes sure that your assigned users have access to the right tools to successfully complete their tasks.

How can our multi-store Magento 2 store locator help your business?

Our multi-store store locator extension in Magento 2 offers a full-fledged solution for presenting your store locations on your Magento website.

Here are the key features of our Magento 2 extension:

1. Simple location searching

When implemented with the retailer’s e-commerce website, the visitors can either manually search for a store by entering the full information or geolocate the store location. A Geo map is displayed with a bar to enter a zip code, city, and state. On filling the information, the user can see all the physical store locations of the brand within the vicinity of the entered zip code. For each location, users can see the complete address, phone number, hours of working. Our extension ensures to include and display accurate store information.

Moreover, the user can choose from ‘Get Directions’ and ‘View Details’.

On clicking ‘Get Directions’ button, the user is taken to the integrated Google Maps which lets him route planning for reaching your store location. The ‘view details’ button lets you easily create dedicated store information pages which are listed in an easily searchable store locations overview page.

2. An optimized, feature rich page for each store

The extension provides the merchants with a dedicated page having an appealing design.

• It allows you to display the ‘About Us’ section where you get the opportunity to describe some details of your store and improve branding.
• A ‘Contact Us’ form allows you to generate leads for your business.

• The scrolling banner with multiple images making it more exquisite for the users which entices them to bid a visit at the store.

If you want to include more features to make your store more attractive, our custom Magento 2 development team can customize your store locator’s design to perfectly align with your business’s branding while ensuring a positive customer experience.

• The clickable section of about ‘The Brand’, ‘Our Catalog’ and ‘What’s New’ makes the store locator page more attractive.

Writing the content with location-specific, product-specific, services-specific keywords for SEO will help to ensure higher search rankings on search engines which leads to improving your brand visibility and trust.

• Moreover, providing users with the ease to navigate around the page, adds positivity to their user experience and hence, increases the goodwill towards your brand.

3. Social Media Integration

We also displayed the Instagram feed in the multi-store store locator page for each store. This enables the users to know how socially active is your brand.

4. Yelp Reviews Integration

Yelp has reviews and ratings on local businesses from existing users. 92% of consumers make a purchase as soon as they visiting Yelp at least sometimes, frequently or almost always.

Embedding Yelp reviews on individual store locator pages improve SEO performance and boost the conversion rates. It not only helps to build the trust of your audience but also shows how authentic your business is. Incorporating Yelp reviews show the level of service or what you can expect from the store in teams of customer experience.

5. Responsive design

Our Magento 2 multi-store store locator is fully responsive, which means it automatically reacts and adjusts to the user’s behavior and environment based on their screen size, platform, and orientation. This ensures that the platform delivers an optimal service across all customer devices: desktop, mobile, and tablet.

6. Subscription Form

A subscription form is also integrated to let the users get exclusive offers and updates.

7. Centralized platform

By centralizing all your stores’ data into a single platform, you streamline the process of managing your outlet network. With centralization, you can eliminate the data duplication, which allows you to easily adjust your web marketing.

What’s unique about our Magento 2 multi-store store locator extension?

Our Magento 2 multi-store app extension is compatible with both Magento 2x Community Edition and Magento 2x Enterprise Edition.

Final Thought On Multi-Store Store Locator Extension In Magento 2

If you own a brand with multiple outlets, our multi-store store locator extension in Magento 2 can be an ultimate solution for you

It not only provides the optimum user experience & performance but also embeds technical SEO so that it always goes in accordance with Google’s guidelines. We have taken special measures to tackle the slow page loading times and have laid emphasis on what specific information can a merchant show to their customers.

You can further customize this extension by including features like making your location map interactive in order to drive more conversions. Get in touch with us to hire dedicated Magento 2 developers for Magento 2 extension development.