Why you should buy a store locator as a service and don't do a one off project.
Store locators are extremely important to drive clients into physical stores and help to get noticed from search engines. However building and maintenance of store locators is seldom a highly ranked priority by management. Store locators should look great, are easy to use and represent the brand. To achieve this organisations with many locations kick off a project. Normally done by an external agency. Lot of time, money and energy is spent to define look & feel and special functionality. Everyone involved is normally involved in building a store locator for the 1st time and everything is discussed from scratch.
Building an ok looking store locator does not require a lot of development skills and companies like Google encourage you with tutorials and documentation to build store locators on your own.
If your company built the store locator themself or hired an agency you likely fall for the “Building Fallacy”. Shreyas Doshi described the Bias-for-Building Fallacy as follows: "We don’t take the time to thoroughly understand the problem, domain, competitors & other determinants of product success because we feel compelled to be in constant motion. We tell ourselves we must begin building & just iterate based on feedback." https://mobile.twitter.com/shreyas/status/1282169207350648832?lang=de
There are 3 ways to do "build" a locator:
In most cases the buy a product option is neglected.
The start building approach has some severe disadvantages:
So before you decide on programming a store locator think about existing software as a service products.
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