Earlier this year I had the opportunity to develop a website which used the Store Finder offering from Postcode Anywhere. It does just what its name implies – returns stores or locations within the area searched upon either by postcode or town or even the full address. 

It’s accessed via Postcode Anywhere's Store Finder API and stores a limited amount of information about the location you want to include in your Store Finder list. My client had locations being added, updated and removed all the time so I was able to use the API to deal with this.

The searching was to be carried out using Postcode or Town. It dealt with the Postcode no problem but didn’t like it so much when just typing in the Town so I decided to geocode the location being searched (using Google's API) and utilise the additional search process that Store Finder allows for – searching by co-ordinate. This gives a pretty accurate position of the location being search and performs well.

The Store Finder has worked great for the client in certain areas of the country such as the South East but for others it had its difficulties. There was a requirement to try to minimise a return of zero results to the user plus we wanted to show them as many results as was available in their area. This meant we were searching an area of 100km on the Store Finder API and then filtering the results when they reached the website to display in 25km increments, stopping the filter as soon as results were available. The filtering wasn’t the issue; the issue was that we were searching such a wide area. We also wanted to results to be as realistic as possible so we used the driving distance returned rather than the straight line distance. 

For this reason it made searching some areas a bit more of a challenge. The guys at Postcode Anywhere were consistently helpful in assisting us to obtain a solution for the speed of the search. For our requirement of the Store Finder we pushed the API to the max, I do however think it’s a great product that for the right project I would definitely use again.