Re: FN-FORUM: Postcode distance matching

date posted 1st February 2005 15:42

At 10:25 on Tuesday, 01 Feb 2005, Gareth Griffiths wrote:

>
> Hi Dan,
> On the 01 February 2005 10:02, you wrote:
>
>> What's the most common way? Anyone got any ideas? I'm thinking we'll
>> have a table of stores, with addresses including postcodes, and some
>> sort of crazy matching thing that sorts them by distance using a
>> lookup table of some kind... any pointers much appreciated.

multimap have a storefinder service that might work out as economical as a
DIY solution, depending on client/budget/usage etc..

http://www.multimap.com/static/business2.htm

but ask yourself / your client, what exactly do the users want?

most times I don't want my nearest store, just an organised list of stores
- I might be visiting a friend, or away on business and combining business
with domesticity...

a lot of the time I want to know which are the biggest stores with best
chance of having what I want....

often my nearest store is not the most convenient to get to, living on one
side of a city, it's sometimes easier to go south to another town and
travel a greater distance in a shorter time, than to head across town to
the big retail park...

etc.

I sometimes think that just because we *can* do a geospatial lookup based
on users postcode doesn't mean it's the best solution to the issue at hand.

besides I use upmystreet.com for that - more choice.


Give me a clickable map with a list of stores in a given zone and I'm much
happier - hey I might even visit them all!

I like the way this works:
http://www.virginmegastores.co.uk/pws/StoreFinderHome.vms?origin=pwstopnav.jsp&event=link(pwsstorefind)

best of both worlds (it uses multimap...)

;o)