I work for a medium-sized business in an out-of-touch (technologically speaking) industry.
You would not believe the shit we pay for.
Were our company in need of a way to cross the street, we would almost certainly look for a vendor supported crosswalk, plus consultants to guide us through crossing the street the first few times, and training for our designated crosswalk guard.
And I'm not even convinced they're doing it wrong. People are expensive. Most the time Build vs Buy is a no-brainer for everything but your absolute core business, and even then you should wonder if custom software really will differentiate you from the rest of the market.
Honestly? I wish I had seen Storemapper a few months ago. We were in the middle of a website redesign and the board president decided he didn't like the map. He got the CEO involved who told the CIO who told... you get the idea. Storemapper would've been pure win that day.
If it saves more time than it costs, it's a good deal for everyone involved.
At $19/mo, even if it only took me day as a developer to create my own, I'd rather just buy the service for a year. I'll get a more polished version, I don't have to maintain it, and I can go do something more productive instead since I'm not actually in the business of creating store maps, I just needed the one. If you don't have in-house developers, like a retail operation might not have, the value proposition becomes even clearer.
Couldn't agree more with you. Many developers tend to think of their own time as free and often don't estimate the cost past initial building (like maintenance/upgrades/compatibility).
I am a former developer myself so certainly been there done that mistake myself.
I know right. Big thanks to patio11 for convincing me (via blog posts and tweets) that, yes, many businesses will pay quite a bit more than you think for things like a store locator
Is it just me, or is patio11 the most widely helpful and valuable person on the entire internet? Can hardly make it through a long HN thread without finding some reference to "patio11 wrote a great post on this topic that helped me immensely"
Thanks! That made my day. (I would have liked it regardless of the context but particularly nice to hear in the context of helping a business to a materially successful outcome.)
Hire a developer with a salary, benefits, and tax to build this module plus project mgmt time for requirements building, testing, training, documentation, sustain, etc.
Pay $60/month and 1/10th of an FTE to plug it into existing assets and sustain it.
What would be the alternative if you can't implement it yourself? Pay a developer a hefty one time sum? And then probably all few years another developer again to update it? Thereby getting a product which isn't as feature rich as the Saas version? And probably increase the required administration effort for your website hosting. Doesn't sound like a good alternative, especially if you are an startup which might be not around next year anymore.
They have to. The functionality is table-stakes for any business selling a physical products in stores, and no site or store platform has the functionality built-in.
I implemented Storemapper for a few clients (indie sellers and major brands), and they absolutely loved it b/c it solved their exact problem and cost next to nothing.
This is something that any business with multiple locations needs. Why reinvent the wheel if someone has already solved the problem? At $60/mo it's not even a blip on the budget, and almost surely far cheaper than having a developer build and maintain a one-off version.
I think many of the questions stem from "Why not just use Google Maps and its API directly"? You can embed it, place your own pins, and style it with your own CSS. The only features on the landing page apart from that are some kind of analytics and data import.
However, the analytics piece alone could be worth $60/mo if it provides something that Google maps doesn't, especially with regards to finding out when/where searches happen for your stores (conceivably getting the user's coordinates, and you already know the context for their search because they're on your site's store map). A large amount of searches in a particular location might mean it's a good store expansion location.
