02/2012
The frustration of store locators
Back in 2008, some of our clients looked into adding store locators to their sites. We quickly got frustrated with the existing solutions, though, that seemed extremely inefficient and kept asking users for information their browser already knew, resulting in long drop-down menus and complex forms.
It was all so terribly old-fashioned, that we set out to develop a unique technology, pulling every modern string, from mapping APIs to geolocation, to smooth and simplify the process. Our technology would have to be fast, flexible and self-sufficient, so that it could be leveraged by any website.
The modern web makes it all possible given sufficient time, engineering effort, and focus on design — the very skills we hone for our own web applications. After a few weeks, we had a working prototype, which we have been refining ever since.
A global success
Today, our technology manages thousands of locations for prestigious clients in all industries, like Luxury Fashion brand or Trodat.
Our approach is to keep the process intuitive and to predict the user’s wishes at every step, by using technology to filter out irrelevant options. Because our store locator is a centrally hosted solution, every customer benefits from our ongoing improvements. This enables us to offer features that would be difficult for a lone company to develop, test and deploy on its own. Chief amongst them are touch optimisations for mobile users, transparent conversion between American and metric units, and full support for up to eight languages.
Introducing Trodat
Enter Trodat, whom you must know if you have an office or use stamps. The Trodat group is headquartered in Wels, Austria, and employs over 1100 workers worldwide, manufacturing business essentials from the humble self-inking rubber stamp to laser engraving machines.
The Trodat website is the latest in line to include a Wollzelle-driven store locator. From the moment the page loads, it has located you and presents a list of your nearby online stores. Indeed, even if it does business online, a nearby store will speak your language and understand your culture.
If you would prefer to visit your friendly Trodat dealer, a switch shows you a list of physical locations, still laid out by distance, and neatly arranged on an interactive map. That map is totally customised to blend into the site, from type to colours, and graphically optimised to present data that is relevant to you — the centre, scale, display type, etc. have been preconfigured automatically.
Of course, you may be looking up dealers while traveling abroad, or on an older machine that does not support geolocation. When all else fails, we still offer intuitive controls to manually filter locations by type, country or specialty.
In a nutshell, that’s how we got Trodat’s stamp of approval. Next time you feel the urge to buy a stamp, you can surf safe in the knowledge we have your back — all around the web.