Retail Chain Locator Tools

Today I decided to follow up on a previous topic and see how retail LBS implementations stack up to one-another. In my quest for a Blu Ray player, I decided to browse at the public websites of several large retail chains and see what each of their respective websites could offer to a consumer seeking a specific product. The sites that i selected were circuitcity.com, walmart.com, and target.com.

In addition to simply find my closest store, I wanted to see how these websites could provide me with additional levels of information such as product availability. For the most part all stores provided me with the ability to easily find my closest store.

• circuitcity.com - Their locator is built using legacy a MapQuest product. Although the tool works as it was intended, the mapping integration is very outdated, and not interactive at all. I also found the product inventory data to be wrong. Although the website claimed there were no products in stock at my local location, there were in fact, quite a few.
• walmart.com - Their product locator was quite frankly the most disappointing. Again this is build using legacy mapquest products that are quite old. Very limited interactivity, and the mapping interface is limited. Although the locator is noted as "Beta", it has major issues. I know of 4 walmarts within a 20 minute drive of my house, yet the locator failed to recognize any of them as my closest location, rather pointing me to a location nearly 30 miles away. I was not able to verity inventory accuracy for no other reason than i was not driving for 45 minutes to check :)
• target.com - Build on the Microsoft MapPoint platform. This locator was advertised as the "enhanced locator" on the home page. The actual map itself was nothing special, and controlling the map was very cumbersome. Ever pan & zoon required a complete page load, which was very slow. Target offers a product inventory level which seemed accurate.

There are a few other retail store locators I used including EBgames.com, Sears.com, and Kmart.com however I do not think it is fair for me to review functionality as I was directly responsible for implementation of their locators.

In this exercise I have come to the conclusion that many retail chains have had the same locator tool on their websites for quite a few years, based on the age of the legacy products they are still running. The LBS platforms available now are light years ahead of these legacy products. MapQuests Advantage API product line would be a DRAMATIC upgrade for these sites. With the implementation of such features as a tiled map interface, advanced routing algorithms, extremely accurate search capabilities, and advanced overlay capabilities, Advantage API leads the way in platform features.