Removing duplicates

Locations → More actions → Remove duplicates.

Imports run twice, a spreadsheet arrives with the same stockist on two rows, a store gets added by two people on the same afternoon. This finds those and offers to clear them out.

How it decides

Two locations are the same place if any one of these is true:

The same address. Street, city, postcode and country, compared loosely enough to be useful: case, accents and punctuation are ignored, and the words an address is written both ways round are settled on one spelling — so 1 Main St. and 1 Main Street match, as do Ave/Avenue, Rd/Road, N/North and the rest.

The same coordinates, to about a meter. Two pins that land on top of each other are one place, whatever the addresses say. Rows sitting at 0, 0 — where a failed geocode leaves them — are ignored, since they are not a real place.

The same name in the same town. This catches the same shop imported twice with the address typed differently in a way no normalization can bridge.

Matches carry across a group. If A shares an address with B, and B shares coordinates with C, all three are treated as one place.

What it shows you

One group per place. The oldest location is kept — it is the one with the history behind it — and the rest are listed as duplicates, with the reasons they matched.

Check the reasons before you remove anything. Two genuinely different suites in one building can share coordinates, and two franchises can share a name in a big city.

Removing them

• Remove on a row deletes that one location.
• Remove all deletes every duplicate in every group at once.
• Cancel closes without touching anything.

Removal is a delete, and deletes are permanent. If you are not certain, close the modal and open the location itself — then unpublish it instead, and it stops appearing on the storefront without leaving your records.

Avoiding them in the first place

• Before re-importing a file you have already imported, either use Delete all existing locations before importing or import only the new rows.
• Put coordinates in your spreadsheet where you have them. Rows with coordinates are not geocoded, so the same store imported twice lands in exactly the same spot and is easy to spot.