Dealer List Categories

Adding categories to stores on your dealer list allows you to highlight certain stores, programs, or features, and customize the behavior of your tool. 

To activate any of the following, you will need to tag dealers on your Dealer List. If you haven't yet done so, head to our instructions on using our Dealer List Manager and jump to the section titled "Editing Store Categories." 

1. Store Locator: Banners

You can spotlight any category by activating Banners, which is a colored bar under the store name. You can customize your banner by color, text, and you can add a svg icon. Locally supports multiple banners if you have a lot to spotlight! 

Click here to see how Shimano Cycling uses banners to highlight dealers who are "Shimano Service Centers."

Shout out to YETI who uses banners to promote stores stocking their new seasonal color line:

2. Store Locator: Biasing

You can set any category to be "biased" which will make those stores pop to the top of results above non-biased stores within the map view of the user. 

You can create multiple levels of bias. You can also choose to make it visible via a banner or you can have an "invisible" bias. We recommend to keep the biasing fairly simple so that your team understands the setup and so that shoppers aren't confused. 

For more information on biasing, check out this article.

Click here to see how Brooks Running biases their "Local Running Stores" to the top of results. 

3. Store Locator: Filters

When you have multiple categories, shopper can filter for those categories via a category tab and dropdown filter. See how Lib Tech allows shoppers filter by product type.

Locally also offers an "Advanced Store Filter" (additional fee may apply). With this, you can segment dealers with multiple levels of categories, category types, and support multi-category selection and filtering. Sonos is a great example.

4. Store Locator: Custom Pins

You can design a special pin to any category tag. Click here to see how Arc'teryx uses larger pins for their brand stores (go to a city like New York or Vancouver, BC). 

5. Store Locator: Pre-filtered maps by category

Using any category tag, you can create a pre-filtered map that displays only those stores. This is great for special product launches, highlighting types of stores, and other similar campaigns.

Set this up in one of two ways.

To quickly launch a Store Locator pre-filtered to show just one category of store results: take your regular Store Locator page URL and at the end of the url, add #lcly:categorytag.

For example, see how Crocs uses this to generate a map showing only their Brand Store locations: https://www.crocs.com/crocs-store-locator/stores.html#lcly:brandstore

To embed a pre-filtered Store Locator onto any page of your site, install the Store Locator using your normal embed code, with this additional parameter added:

"category": "category-tag",

You can filter for multiple categories by using the OR operator like this: 

"category": "category1 OR category2",

6. Store Locator: Choose Product Line First

If your product lines tend to be segmented without much overlap, you can force the shopper to choose a product line first. 

Thule allows shoppers to filter their results for the product line they're looking for. You can add custom svg icons as well.

7. Store Locator: Country or region-specific categories 

Categories can be configured to display to shoppers in a specific country, multiple countries, or a "region" (ex: Europe, North America, etc.). If enabled, the category will only display in the filter results in the specified location and will be hidden in other areas. 

You can configure this yourself in your Locally dashboard by following these steps:

1. Head to the Store Categories panel in the Locally dashboard and select the category you wish to edit
2. Click the "International" tab
3. Check the "Only display in following countries or groups of countries?" box to enable this feature and configure it using one of the following options:
   1. Load it at a continent level (for ex: Europe), by selecting the option from the "Country Group" level
   2. Load it for a single country or multiple countries by using the "Countries" field
4. Hit save for the changes to take effect

For help configuring this, work with your Client Success Manager or reach out to [email protected].

8. Product Locator: Show only tagged dealers for particular PDP

Categories can also be used for Product Locators. This feature is most often used for products that are exclusive to one chain. For example, if REI carries an exclusive product, you can tag all your authorized REI shops with "REI" and then add this additional parameter 

"category": "REI",

to that particular PDP Product Locator code. Shoppers will only see those shops for that product page.