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Advance search result


roberthpchao

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Hi,

 

I try to create a retailer locator by duplicating and modifying "advance search". I need only 3 or 4 drop down selections, like products, manufacturers, city and state. I don't need keyword field and mandatory field. I removed those if and error scripts in the file "advance search result". But it now returns all the products from the database. Where and what did I do wrong. Modified file is attached. Please help. Thank you.

 

P.S. I will create another table with all retailers information instead of using existing customer table. I am rather upload and refresh manually as my retailer are not the same as online customers.

 
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"Advanced Search", as shipped, would of course search through all the products. It sounds like your Retail Locator is still searching the product tables, rather than your retailers table(s). Do you not yet have the retailer table(s)? With no keywords, and still looking at product information, I wouldn't be surprised if Advanced Search matched everything. I think you need to do a little more thinking about the subject, and get some more code and data in place, before you ask for help.

 

Most stores which offer a "Find your nearest store" locator function carry the same goods in all stores. Do your stores carry different goods? I suppose that it is possible that your site is an umbrella for a number of  related, but not identical, brick and mortar physical stores. A visitor would want to find the nearest store which carries the particular goods they're looking for. The first thing would be to geolocate your potential customer, either through their IP address, or asking for a Postal Code (ZIP Code in US). Depending on how geographically dispersed your stores are, you might use something like Google Maps' geolocation to get a latitude/longitude, and from there, calculate the shortest "as the crow flies" distance from the customer to a suitable store. For stores in the same city, you might want to get a more precise customer location, and calculate street routes for shortest distance. Keep in mind that a potential customer might be reluctant to give their street address, so don't push the issue. Don't forget to actually show a map, rather than just showing an address, and show several nearest matching stores, not just the one you think is closest. A customer might find it more convenient to visit a more distant store that is close to their workplace, for example.

 

Assuming your stores carry different goods, you could use products, manufacturers, etc. to narrow down the list of stores, and then find the closest store(s). Are the stores different enough to make this effort worthwhile? What do you intend to do if the potential customer wants some goods found only in one store, and other goods found only in another store? Can stores ship goods to each other so the customer only has to pick up in one place? They would appreciate that service.

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Hi Phil,

 

Thanks for your reply. First of all, "advanced search" is finding the "products" table. When item has been shipped or delivered, that products_id will appear in the table "orders_products". Version 2.3.4 come with 28 products and I can "get" 28 with my trimmed "advanced search result" file.

 

I have duplicate “reviews” and “reviews_description” tables and changed them into “retailers”. I can get result from there. (find all 4 products in that table) Then I add another product into the table. Search again. It returns 5 products. It just ignores the product_id I choose from the search drop down list. The result is always including every product.

 

We are a wholesaler. We don’t sell anything to our customer, retailers through the website. Although it might be an option in the future, but because wholesale has monthly special, combinations, BOGO and all kinds of marketing and sales strategies. It is just not possible for the moment.

Because I will not have sales history online and some retailer doesn’t want to be listed. So I must create another table, retailer table to serve this purpose. (some group purchase has multiple stores, but only one central purchase. sales history in ERP cannot even list out all the stores automatically.)

 

I want to display all retailers in the search result. It does advertising for my customers, retailers and benefit ourselves too. I had Google map in my mind, but I put it into second schedule development. Since OSC has advanced search module, I was hoping to modify it quickly. But as you mentioned  about Google map. I realized advanced search result will list alphabetically instead of nearest point. That is bad for some retailer name starting with letter y or z. I should probably change my direction. But I still like to crack the code if possible.

 

Thanks for you input.

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