Prioritizing certain locations in Stockist

The Priority field in Stockist provides a way to customize the ordering of the results on your store locator. You can move preferred stores/dealers to the top of the list, set up tiers of stores (e.g. gold/silver/bronze), or de-prioritize some stores and move them to the bottom of the list.

How it works

When visitors view your store map, the results in the list are normally shown in a predetermined ordering:
  • If your map is set to initially display all locations, the list will be sorted alphabetically by name
  • If your map is set to use automatic geolocation, the list will be sorted based on the distance to the visitor’s estimated location 
  • Once a visitor types a search like “Seattle” or “Germany”, the list will be sorted by distance from the center of the searched area
The priority field allows you to customize the sorting of the results. Giving a location a higher priority number (e.g. 100) will move it to the top of the list.
When using the priority field, the results will be ordered based on the priority number. The store with the largest priority number will appear first in the list, and the store with the smallest number will appear last. Any stores where the priority field is empty will be treated as if they have a priority of 0 and will appear after the prioritized stores. If two or more stores have identical priority numbers, the tie will be broken by ordering those stores with the original behavior (alphabetical or distance-based, depending on the scenario in the list above).

The priority only controls the sorting of the search results, and won't cause a store to be included in search results when it otherwise wouldn't. For example, a search for "Los Angeles" won't ever include a result from New York City, even if the location in New York has a higher priority. You can think of the priority as taking effect after the list of nearby results has been determined.

The priority feature is available on all Stockist plans.

Creating store tiers

You can create "tiers" of stores by assigning the stores in each tier an identical priority number.

For example, if you have three preferred tiers of retail partners, you could assign all "Gold Partners" a priority of 100, all "Silver Partners" priority 50, and all "Bronze Partners" priority 25. This would show all nearby Gold Partners first (ordered by distance), followed by all nearby Silver Partners (also ordered by distance), and then all Bronze Partners (again ordered by distance). Any other stores (with a blank or "0" priority) would show at the end of the list.

Other considerations

It’s also possible to assign locations a negative priority number to push that location towards the bottom of the list. This works the same way as positive priority numbers, but inverse: a store with a large negative priority (e.g. -100) will be pushed below a store with a smaller negative priority (e.g. -50).
Stockist supports priority numbers between 32,000 and -32,000. The priority must be a whole number (fractions or decimals are not accepted).

The priority numbers are not visible to customers on the map.

Setting a location's priority in the dashboard

To set the priority of any location through the dashboard, click on the store to open the Edit location screen. Then, under Organization, type the desired number into the Priority field:

Finally, click Save location to update the store.

Setting priority as part of a bulk import

To assign priority numbers when uploading a spreadsheet, add a new column to your spreadsheet named Priority, with the appropriate number in this column for each location:

Then, when importing your spreadsheet, be sure that the "Priority" column in your spreadsheet is set to import to the "Priority" field in Stockist: