Store/Vendor Locator

How to add a dealer locator to your website

If you are a company with multiple locations or distributors you have probably considered adding a locator tool to your website to connect customers with your products. If you’ve never done anything like this before you might not know where to start. Well, there’s good news! Adding a store or vendor locator to your website really isn’t as hard as many people expect.

The store locators found on most websites on the Internet use a geocoded database to determine which stores are closest to the customer. A geocoded database assigned latitude and longitude coordinates to a postal code. When the user enters their postal code and the radius they would like to search, the query will calculate the distances between that central postal code and the other postal codes in the United States and return those that fall within the parameters.

ZIP Code Download has developed tools that make adding this functionality to your website simple. If you would like to build a dealer locator tool using US or Canadian addresses, you can use the following editions of our databases.

Once you have the database, you will need to calculate the distances between the zip codes. There are free distance calculators available on the internet, but they tend to be simplified and inaccurate. In order to accurately calculate the distance between two locations you need to take the shape of the earth into account. ZIP Code Download has developed Distance and Radius Programming APIs which use spherical geometry to calculate the distances.

With these tools and the example locator code available on ZIP Code Download, you should be able to add this search functionality to your website fairly quickly. For more ZIP Code data products visit www.ZIPCodeDownload.com.