Here’s a common question: I entered “Canada” in my store locator and none of my stores in Canada came up.
The answer lies in how Storemapper’s search radius works. When a user enters something into the search box, the app first tries to find ‘the center’ of that location. Then the app looks in a circle, with a defined radius around that center for any locations. The radius is determined either by the user (if the distance selector is turned on) or by you in Settings with a default search radius.
This works great when you enter a specific address, a city or a neighborhood. But if you have a small search radius (say 20 miles or kilometers) and you enter a larger geographic entity like a zipcode, province or country, it can get a little confusing. If you search Canada, Storemapper is first dropping a pin in the “center” of Canada, and looking in a circle around that. But Canada is huge and the center of it is in the middle of nowhere! So the store locator returns no stores.
The solution to this is very simple. Open up your Settings, set “Show distance selector” to No, and set “default search radius” to a very big number like 2000 or 5000. This will make sure that the app searches in a wide arc and will turn up locations no matter what.
As an aside, our insanely huge analytics dataset of store locators users tells us that they actually rarely do enter a whole country and instead are much more likely to enter a city or postcode.