Creating a Mapbox key
Stockist gives you a choice of two map providers to power the map imagery in your store locator: Google Maps and Mapbox.
While Google Maps is well-known, setting up a license key to use Google Maps on your own site is a relatively involved process and is prone to breaking later on.
As an alternative, Stockist supports powering your store locator’s map using Mapbox. Mapbox is another map company that focuses on providing maps to be used on your website. Their maps are similar to Google’s and offer a similar level of free monthly usage, but are much easier to set up.
To create a Mapbox license key (also known as an "access token") to use with your store locator, you can follow the steps below:
Creating your key
Follow these steps to set up your key:
- Sign up for an account with Mapbox on their website: https://account.mapbox.com/
auth/signup/
You'll need to choose a username (a good choice is your business name without spaces, e.g. "examplesitename") and also enter your email address and select a password.
You may want to write down your account details in a secure place in case you need to access your account to make changes later on.
On the next screen, you'll be asked to enter billing details for your key. Mapbox has a generous free tier that covers about 10,000 visits to your store locator map per month, so for most small and medium sites there's no extra cost. However, Mapbox does ask for billing details in case your map exceeds this amount of traffic. - On the Account screen, find the long series of letters and numbers labeled Default public token, as shown below:
- Copy the key by clicking the clipboard icon next to the text:
- Add the token to your Stockist account on the Map provider page of the app dashboard:
You may want to write down your account details in a secure place in case you need to access your account to make changes later on.
Troubleshooting
If the map on your website starts showing up in grey (without the roads/imagery behind the pins) after setting up a Mapbox key, this indicates an issue with your key. In this case, please check:
- That your key was copied correctly and fully into the Stockist dashboard
- If you created a separate key in Mapbox and set URL restrictions, please ensure you add just your domain to the allowed list (e.g. example.com, not example.com/pages/store-locator). We have more details in this article, towards the bottom.