This article will tell you how to make bulk updates to your existing list of locations in Power Store Locator. This allows you to avoid having to manually edit or delete locations through the admin console and instead make changes in a spreadsheet and upload them directly to our system. You can use this process to quickly make a changes to all of your locations, or perhaps add some new locations or delete some locations.

The first step is to download your existing store list by clicking on the Bulk Export button from your locations page and open it up in your favorite spreadsheet editor.

Adding new locations to your store list

Take the store list you downloaded and paste the details for these new locations into the spreadsheet, making sure that the columns are in the right place. Remember, you should either put the complete address in the AddressComplete field or use the individual address components shown here.

When you're ready to do the import you’ll see two switches:

The first one is labelled Delete old location list before importing. If this switch is set to On, your existing list of locations will be deleted before your new list is imported. You should set this to on if you are replacing your entire existing list of locations with a freshly uploaded list. For example, you deleted a bunch of locations or made bulk changes to a bunch of locations and you want to refresh the whole list. In this case, we'll leave this button off because we are adding three new locations so you want to have the existing store list remain as is.

The second switch is labelled Ignore duplicate locations in import file. If this switch is set to On the importer will try to identify any duplicate locations in your import file by comparing the addresses with those locations that are already in your store list. Any duplicate addresses will be excluded from the import process. This switch is used if you have just added an extra few locations to your store list and are re-importing your list of locations. So, this is exactly what you should be doing in this case.

A good question at this point is when do I use each switch? Here’s the guideline:

• If you are just uploading new store entries are you aren’t worried about duplicate locations, leave both switches Off.
 
• Otherwise, if you are uploading new store entries but there could be duplicates already in your list of locations, set the Duplicate detection switch to On.
 
• If you are making changes to lots of existing locations or have deleted locations from the list, set Delete on Import to On to replace your list.

As usual, the Import Preview page is a good opportunity for you to check that the store list is complete and all the addresses are importing correctly. Things to watch out for are if the Store Name or Address information isn’t present or complete in this area. If you are happy with the preview, click on the Import button to go ahead with the import and complete the process, otherwise you can go back by clicking Cancel and amending your import file.

Making bulk updates to locations or deleting locations

If you are making a change to a number of locations such as setting store opening times across your store list or deleting locations, in this case you should make the changes in the exported spreadsheet as before.

In this case, you shouldn’t select ‘Detect Duplicates’ for two reasons. Firstly, it wouldn’t delete from the database the locations that we had deleted from our store list. Secondly, the duplicate detection works off the Store Address, so it will ignore any locations where the address is the same where in fact we want to update the store opening times. So, you should set it to Delete on Import which will replace the store list completely with the new upload file.

Now if things go horribly wrong somewhere and you’re starting to panic, you do have the option to click on the Restore button at this point. This will immediately take your store list back to how it was at 1 o’clock this morning EST. This is a great recovery option to get your locator back to how it was.