Store Locator Software

Need a searchable store locator

[threespires]

My client wants a Store Locator on their site.

They have approx 900 outlets in the UK (mainly small independant retailers)

The requirement for the locator is that the user should be able to search by either: County / Postcode / PostTown

Problem is that I have no idea how to accomplish this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Steve

[fwordboy]

could you somehow utilise a program such as streetmap.co.uk and iframe it or link to it in some way?

[danieljean]

There are some ready, out of the box software that can do this too (google store locator software, bullseye seems to be the most established). There are also hosted services that cost less.

If you are using M$ technology, MapPoint can help. (Does someone here know how much they charge?)

ESRI has a webservice that lets you implement most of the low-level functionality, it is USD$1,250 minimum per year.

I developed it the cheap way, buying a list of postal codes with latitude and longitude. With lat/long for all the stores in the database, a simple SQL query can return stores in order of distance from a lat/long for any given postal code.

There are also list for cities that give lat/long, so you could take either input. The more precise and up-to-date these lists, the more expensive.