Store Locator: develop it in-house or hire a service provider?

Have you decided to implement your Store Locator project? Congratulations, an optimised Store Locator will improve the referencing of your points of sale and your conversion rate. It is also an important source of traffic for your website: on average, 20% of a website’s visits come from its Store Locator.

Now the question concerns the launch of the project. What should you do? Should you organise your development internally or use a specialist service provider? To help you make the best decision, here are our tips for weighing up the pros and cons of these two alternatives.

Develop your Store Locator in-house

How can this be done in-house and what can be expected? What are the advantages and disadvantages of insourcing?

Advantages

• No external costs are involved. Your developers manage the project from A to Z
• You are free to customise your Store Locator as you wish
• This allows you to have a Store Locator that reflects your brand more quickly, without any additional brief

Disadvantages

• It is a major project in a technical/product roadmap that is often already full
• In-house development is often more time-consuming than working with a more experienced specialist provider. An example: you want to add a search bar to your map? You’ll have to design it via the Google Maps API, which is not easy
• Design: you need to use internal design teams to create the mock-ups or hire an external agency
• Project management and coordination between the different teams take a lot of time
• It is more difficult to keep up with the times and keep your Store Locator moving in the right direction: adding new features, implementing the latest SEO optimisations… This requires development time, which is rarely the priority for technical teams
• It takes time to manually enter data for your stores, whereas a centralised system allows for updates in bulk
• Are your servers robust enough? Will your technical team be available to fix bugs quickly if there are any problems? If you are not sure, it is best to check before launching the project internally. This will prevent you from having a Store Locator out of order for some time, for example.

Develop your Store Locator with an external provider

Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of using an external partner to manage your Store Locator project.

Advantages

• Benefit from real expertise in SEO and local SEO. A specialised service provider knows all the best practices and optimisations that need to be carried out to make a Store Locator a success (structure, meta and micro data, dynamic URLs, etc.)
• Faster development time than in-house, as service providers are experienced and specialised
• UX: being able to rely on a team of experts to simplify the user experience as much as possible. The objective is for users to reach the information they are looking for in a few clicks, without friction. Some examples of optimisations: adding auto-completion in the search bar, integrating “pins” on the map, adding filters…
• A dedicated referent to coordinate all project management and help your internal teams
• The guarantee of quality servers and support: updates and optimisations of your Store Locator when necessary. With Partoo, it’s free. We don’t charge for updates.

Disadvantages

• External costs to be expected
• Need to build a relationship of trust with the provider to launch this large-scale project

Develop your Store Locator with Partoo

Vinci Immobilier, BNP Paribas Banque Privée, Déméco, SUP Interim… Many companies have already trusted us with their Store Locator project.

Our team of specialists has built Store Locators that meet market standards in every respect:

• SEO and UX optimisation
• Technical updates
• Centralisation and harmonisation of data
• Development of a mobile version or of a Store Locator for every country
• Update with the latest relevant news

Results:

• +28% of traffic on the Store Locator in 5 months and 41% after 1 year at SUP Interim
• 25% of sessions lead to a contact request
• 12 Store Locators configured in 3 months for Unilabs, more than 13 000 sessions the first month
• 10 000 sessions per day on average on Foir’Fouille’s Store Locator with more than 235 location pages filled with dedicated content

If you also need a service provider to create or update your store locator, don’t hesitate to contact us!