Selling your products online is a great way to increase sales, gain new customers and make it easier for your customers to buy from you. But there are times when customers would prefer to visit a physical location to purchase your products. That is why we built a dealer map, which can be found under the tab on the web portal. The dealer map is a tool on your web portal that will allow your customers to search for locations where they can buy your products. The tool is quite flexible and powerful. It utilizes the Google Maps API for the mapping and can operate for a variety of use cases. We use the term "dealer" as a universal description for the contacts on the map, but the tool can be used to display dealers, distributors, retail locations or any other locations that your customers may find helpful.
Currently, the Google Maps API key requires a credit card. However, users get a $200 per month free credit which covers an estimated 25,000 API calls per day. An API call is when our system requests information from Google Maps. In this case, the web portal is requesting the location (longitude and latitude) of a physical address. xTupleCommerce requires up to 10 calls per address. However, after the system has received an address from Google, the information is saved to the web portal database for fast and easy retrieval in the future. This means that each address only needs to be called once in order to be viewed by many users. It is our estimate that customers will be able to index 2,500 addresses per day for free. If, however, you have 7,000 dealer map locations, it will take Google Maps about three days to index those addresses. To index faster you will have to pay a fee. Customers should do their own research on this, but we believe the $200 per month free credit will be sufficient in most cases.
