Getting started
Introduction
What the app does, and the three pieces it is made of.
Store Finder puts every place you want shoppers to find — your own stores, your stockists, your service centers — on a map on your storefront, with search, opening hours, filters and directions.
It is a Shopify app plus a theme app block. You manage locations in Shopify admin; the block renders the locator wherever you drop it in the theme editor. Nothing is hosted elsewhere and nothing is embedded in an iframe.
Three pieces
Knowing which piece owns what saves a lot of hunting for a setting.
1. Your locations
Everything about a place lives on the location: address, coordinates, contact details, hours, photos, products, filters and any custom fields you have added.
Locations are stored in your own shop as Shopify metaobjects, so your data never sits on someone else's server. You can see it in Shopify's own metaobject admin under Content → Metaobjects.
It is kept private to Store Finder: no other app you install can read your locations, and none can change them. Shopify shows them to you read-only, which is why edits go through the app rather than the metaobject admin. Because the data belongs to the app, uninstalling Store Finder takes your locations with it — export them first if you want to keep a copy.
2. The app's settings
The app holds the pieces that are shared between locations, so you set each one once and reuse it:
| Setting | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Map provider | The Google Maps or Mapbox key the storefront map uses |
| Customize | How each locator looks and behaves, with a live preview |
| Filters | Labels shoppers narrow by, grouped into categories |
| Custom fields | Extra details every location can fill in |
| Hours & markers | Weekly schedules and pin images, reused across locations |
| Language | Every word the locator shows a shopper |
3. The theme blocks
Two blocks put a locator on a page: Store Locator anywhere, and Product finder on a product page, which shows only the stores carrying the product being viewed. Each has one setting: which profile to render.
A profile is one locator's worth of settings — layout, map style, whether there is a search box, which filter categories show, what appears when a location is selected, and the colors — built in the app under Customize, with a live preview beside it.
Because a profile is a named thing a block points at, one shop can run several different locators — a full-width store finder on one page, a compact "where to buy" beside a product on another — from the same list of locations.
What a shopper does
- Lands on your page and sees the map framed on every location.
- Types an address, or taps Use my location, and picks a radius.
- Narrows the list by filter, or by product, if you have offered either.
- Selects a location and sees its details, in a popup on the map or in the panel beside it.
- Taps Get directions and leaves for Google or Apple Maps.
Every one of those steps is optional. A locator with no search, no filters and no radius is a perfectly good map of your shops.
What you need
- A map provider key. Google Maps or Mapbox — see Map provider. The storefront map cannot render without one.
- A theme that supports app blocks, which means any Online Store 2.0 theme.
- Somewhere to put it. Usually a page, though the block can go in any section that takes app blocks.
You do not need a provider key to add locations or to import a spreadsheet. Address lookup and geocoding inside the app run on our own service, so you can load your locations before you decide on a provider.
Where to go next
- Quick start — from installing to a working locator.
- Managing locations — the list, and everything you can do from it.
- Adding the block — putting a locator on a page.