Store Locator Opening Hours and Open-Now Badges

"Is it open right now?" is the question almost every store locator visitor is actually asking. A list of branches that makes them read a table of times and do the arithmetic themselves is doing half the job. Here's how to add opening hours that produce a live open/closed badge on each location.

What you get

Add a working-hours column to your location data and each entry in the sidebar gains a status badge — open or closed right now — plus the next change, like "Closes at 17:00". Visitors scan the list and immediately see which branches are worth traveling to.

Step 1: Format your hours column

Add one column to your spreadsheet holding the whole week's hours per location.

Get the two separators right — this is the part that catches people out:

• A semicolon (or a line break) separates days.
• A comma separates multiple time ranges within the same day.

They are not interchangeable. Commas between days will fail to parse, and the location will show no badge at all.

A standard week:

Mon-Fri 09:00-17:00; Sat 10:00-16:00; Sun Closed

12-hour and 24-hour clocks both work, with or without minutes:

Mon-Fri 9:00 AM-5:30 PM; Sat 10 AM-4 PM; Sun Closed

Day names can be short or long — Mon, Monday, Tue, Tues, Tuesday and so on all resolve. Day ranges (Mon-Fri) work; comma-separated day lists (Mon, Tue, Wed) do not, because the comma is read as a range separator.

Closed days can be written as Closed or Off, or simply left out — any day you don't mention is treated as closed.

All-day opening is 24h, 24 hours, or Open 24h:

Mon-Sat 09:00-17:00; Sun: 24h

Split shifts — a lunchtime closure is two ranges on one day, separated by a comma:

Mon-Fri 09:00-13:00, 14:00-18:00; Sat 09:00-13:00; Sun Closed

That last one is the case most locator tools get wrong, and it's very common for pharmacies, clinics, and independent shops.

If you give a bare time range with no days at all, it's applied Monday to Friday and the weekend is treated as closed:

09:00-17:00

Step 2: Map the column

Import your data as usual — upload a CSV or Excel file, or connect a Google Sheet so hours stay editable by whoever maintains them.

In the store locator settings, point the working-hours field at your column. Parsing can be set to text, structured JSON, or automatic detection; automatic is right unless you're generating the column from another system in a fixed shape. The store locator reference covers the rest of the settings.

Step 3: Check the parse

Look at the sidebar and confirm the badges match reality, especially for:

• Days with split shifts
• Days written as closed
• Anything using 12-hour times without minutes (9 AM rather than 9:00 AM)

If an entry doesn't parse, it falls back to a neutral grey badge showing your raw text, rather than guessing at an open/closed status. That's the safe failure — nobody is told a closed branch is open — but it's quiet, so scan the sidebar for grey badges among the green and red ones. A grey badge means that row's hours string didn't match, and it's almost always a separator problem.

The timezone caveat — read this one

The open/closed state is calculated using the visitor's device clock, not the store's local timezone.

For the overwhelmingly common case — a chain operating in one country, visited by people in that country — this is exactly right and needs no thought.

It is wrong if your locations span multiple timezones and visitors browse across them. Someone in London looking at your Tokyo branch will see a badge computed from London time.

If that's your situation, you have two honest options:

1. Split by region. One locator per country or timezone, which is usually better navigation anyway.
2. Don't rely on the badge. Display the hours as a plain text field so visitors read the times and apply their own judgment, rather than trusting a status that doesn't account for the difference.

Better to know this now than to field the support email later.

Step 4: Make the rest of the locator earn its keep

Hours are one field. A few others turn a list into something genuinely useful:

• Near Me. Sorts results by distance from the visitor's browser location. Combined with an open-now badge, "closest and open" is answerable at a glance — which is the actual job.
• Category filters. Dropdown, multi-select, or numeric-range filters on any column you brought along: services offered, parking, accessibility.
• Per-category marker icons. Different pin icons per filter option, so the map itself is readable before anyone opens the sidebar.
• Extra display fields. Up to five additional fields per location, typed as text, phone, email, or URL — so phone numbers dial on mobile and websites are clickable.

Keeping hours accurate

Opening hours are the fastest-rotting data in any locator. Christmas, bank holidays, a branch changing its Saturday closing time — all of it goes stale quietly, and a confidently wrong "Open now" badge is worse than no badge at all.

The maintenance answer is to connect a Google Sheet rather than uploading a file. Branch managers can edit their own row in a spreadsheet without a login to anything, and the map picks the change up within minutes. A file upload means every hours change is a job for whoever owns the map, which in practice means it doesn't happen.

Ready? Build a store locator — free to start.