How to Develop Locators
One of the main uses for our products is in a store / dealer locator.
There are two main ways you can create a locator:
- Search by ZIP Code only.
- Search by either a ZIP Code or City.
Searching by ZIP Code Only:
If you are searching by ZIP Code, you normally just need our Pro-Zipcode Base product with the Latitude & Longitude add-on. This has one record per ZIP Code with its corresponding latitude and longitude information. The latitude / longitude info is what is used to calculate the distance from one ZIP Code to another.
This works for applications where people will always know their ZIP Code, but if someone may be traveling, we recommend giving them the option to search by either ZIP Code or city.
Click on the 'Searching by ZIP Code or City' panel for more information about this type of locator.
Locator Software:
Bullseye is a product developed by ElectricVine.com which uses our Pro-Zipcode data. [Click here to go to our Bullseye Page for more info]
100% money back guarantee—you can't go wrong!
Searching by ZIP Code or City:
When you allow users to enter a city name for a search, you run into a lot of additional challenges:
- They may have a smaller town that's not in the Pro-Zipcode file.
- They may spell the city incorrectly.
- They may abbreviate the city and it won't match up with our standard spellings.
- You need a center point for each city or town.
We have worked hard to address these issues and have come up with the following products which can make this a reality:
- Pro-Zipcode Deluxe Base Product with Latitude & Longitude add-on (PZDL). The Deluxe base product has more city and town names. If a ZIP Code crosses more than one town, the Deluxe version contains these towns.
- Multi-City Spellings (MCS). This has multiple ways a city could be misspelled or abbreviated and the corresponding standard name as used in the Deluxe file.
- City Centerpoints (CCP). This is a new product which should be released around July/August 2003 and will have city names which tie in to the Deluxe city names and a corresponding latitude and longitude center point for that city (as opposed to a lat./long. for a ZIP Code). This will enable you to get a more reasonable distance calculation.
How this works:
Initially, you would code your location records (stores, dealers, etc.) with the lat./long. info from our Deluxe product (PZDL). With the Deluxe version, you can match up the records by both their ZIP Code and City within that ZIP Code, which is more precise than just matching by ZIP Code.
If a prospect on your web site keys in 'St. Pete' for the city
and 'FL' for the state, your program would look for a match in the
CCP file and since the name is abbreviated, it wouldn't find
it. Your program would then look in the MCS file and find the standard
name, 'Saint Petersburg' and would look for a match
with 'Saint Petersburg' in the CCP file. You would now have a center
point for the city. Next, you would look up and find the nearest
locations to that center point.