A store locator is one of the highest-converting features you can add to a retail or franchise website — customers who find your nearest location are customers who show up. You don't need a developer to build one, and you don't need to keep the data anywhere more complicated than a spreadsheet. Here's the whole process.
What makes a good store locator
The best locators do three things well:
- Find — visitors search across your locations, or tap Near Me to see the closest ones first.
- Filter — they narrow by category or service.
- Detail — each result shows the address, contact info, and a link.
Most bad locators fail on the second and third. A map of unlabeled dots is not a finder; it's a decoration. The work below is mostly about making the sidebar list genuinely useful, because finding is a list task at least as much as it's a map task.
Step 1: Put your locations in a spreadsheet
Create a Google Sheet with one row per location. You need latitude and longitude columns — Mapji plots coordinates and doesn't convert street addresses for you, so geocode your list first if you only have addresses. Keep the address as its own column too: it's useful in result panels, and the search matches against it.
Then add a column for every attribute you might want to filter or display:
- Category — the thing people narrow by. Store type, service offered, brand, region.
- Phone, email, website — these get special treatment later, so give each its own column rather than mashing them into one "contact" field.
- Opening hours — one column holding the whole week.
- Anything else worth showing: parking, accessibility, store manager.
It's much cheaper to include a column now than to re-import later, so bring everything along even if you're unsure.
Step 2: Create the store locator
In Mapji, start a new site and choose the Store Locator map type. Connect your Google Sheet as the data source. Mapji auto-detects the coordinate columns, and from then on the sheet is the source of truth — the connection is read-only, so nothing Mapji does can alter your spreadsheet.
The sheet is re-checked every few minutes, so adding a store is a matter of adding a row. There's also a Sync Now button when you don't want to wait.
Step 3: Configure search and filters
This is the step that separates a useful locator from a map of dots, and it takes about five minutes.
- Searchable fields. Choose which columns a visitor's typed query matches against. Include the address column — people search by street or suburb name even though the map itself never geocodes anything.
- Filters. Each column can become a dropdown, a multi-select, or a numeric range. Dropdowns suit one-of-many attributes like store type; multi-select suits "services offered", where a location can have several.
- Near Me. Sorts results by distance from the visitor's browser location. This is the single feature most people expect and most locators skip.
- Per-category marker icons. Give each filter option its own pin icon and the map becomes readable before anyone touches the sidebar — you can see at a glance that the clinics are here and the pharmacies are there.
Step 4: Set up the result panels
Each location can show up to five extra display fields beyond the title and description, and each one is typed: text, phone, email, or URL. The typing matters more than it sounds — a phone field dials when tapped on mobile, an email field opens a mail client, and a URL becomes a real link. That's the difference between a visitor calling you from the map and a visitor copying a number by hand.
Pick fewer fields than you're tempted to. Address, phone, and one differentiator is usually the right amount for a list you're scanning.
Step 5: Add opening hours
Add a working-hours column and each entry gains a live open/closed badge, plus the next change — "Closes at 17:00". For a locator, this answers the question visitors are actually asking, which is rarely "where are your stores" and almost always "which one can I go to right now".
The format has a couple of separator rules that catch people out, and there's a timezone caveat worth understanding before you rely on it. Opening hours and open-now badges covers both.
Step 6: Embed it on your site
Publish to a custom domain or embed the locator on your existing website with a single iframe snippet. It stays connected to your sheet, so updates never require touching the website again.
One embed setting matters especially here: if the locator sits partway down a long page, turn off scroll zoom so visitors scrolling past don't get trapped zooming the map. Embedding an interactive map covers the rest, including the height problem every iframe has.
Keep it maintainable
Because the data lives in a spreadsheet, anyone on your team can add or edit locations without code, a CMS, or a Mapji login — they only need edit access to the sheet. That's the whole point: set it up once, then manage it like any other sheet.
It matters most for opening hours, which rot faster than anything else in a locator. Bank holidays and a branch quietly changing its Saturday close are what make an "Open now" badge wrong, and a confidently wrong badge is worse than no badge. If a branch manager can fix their own row, it gets fixed.