What is the best API or resource to use if I want to search locally for stores but limit it to specific chains?
i.e. I want to search for local big box stores but only come up with results that include Target, Walmart and Best Buy.
You can use the Foursquare venue search API to search for venues in a nearby are with a certain name. Just provide the lat/long of the area you want to search in, and the name in the query parameter.
Related
I am new to Magento.
I want a text box where i can type the zip code and if the store available in that location then i need to show the products of that particular store otherwise we need to show that "the store is not available in particular location".
The following is the example site. i want it as it is.
this site prompts for users zip location .after it will display stores of that particular.
Click on this link to see the working example
how do i do this . Do i need to install a module ?
Follow Some Steps:
You need an entity 'store' that is bound to a geo location.
You need to create a multi select attribute which values are located (using a
source model) with these stores. This way, you can attach a single product to
multiple stores (one to many relation)
Then you need some sort of external API to convert a postcode entered by the
customer to a geo location. I assume the Google Maps API can do this. It would
be best to handle this server side.
Then you need the math to calculate the distance between 2 geo locations in
your database query (probably enough to find on that subject on Google) and
filter your product collection on that.
Once you have the collection you have the power.
The external API will probably have a request threshold so you might have to
pay for that (depending on the traffic).
You need to determine the radius of maximum distance between 2 geo locations.
In a small country like the Netherlands stores could be a couple of km's apart
from each other, whilst in the United States it's not uncommon to have stores
tens or hundreds of km's from each other.
**Best Of Luck For Your Project**
I would like to return specific places (stores like Target, Macy's, etc.) by location (latitude, longitude).
I have been using the google places api and entering the different stores in the name parameter. The results are inconsistent at best.
Is this the api I should be using to return specific stores by name and proximity? The google places api near by search has only a single name parameter. I would ideally like to search for several specific stores in a single request to the endpoint for performance reasons.
In conclusion
What api should I be using to return specific stores by name and proximity?
The Google Places API is the correct Google API to use; however, as you mentioned it does not support multiple name or keyword parameters. There is an active Places API - Feature Request for this here, please star it if you wish to see it resolved and to be notified of future changes.
Instead of using the name parameter, try using the keyword parameter. The keyword parameter is matched against all available fields, including but not limited to name, type, and address, as well as customer reviews and other third-party content. This can often yield more or better results.
It seems as if the foursquare api does let you search for multiple specific places.
Here is an example url that does the trick:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?ll=34.017717,-118.159335&query=Target Victoria's Secret Macy's &intent=browse&radius=16094&oauth_token=mytoken
g
So I'm abandoning Google Places and going with FourSquare.
I am currently evaluating several different APIs in order to get venue information. A key component of any provider is the ability to not just return all venues nearby but tailor the list based on previously entered user preferences.
Foursquare does not allow 'munging' their venue data with other data, like Google's places to create an aggregated service. But can I take Foursquare's venues for a given area, apply some filtering based on user preferences and recommendation engine techniques, and present a modified, personalized version of their information? Do they frown on only using their venue info as a jumping off point, even if attribution on the final results is given?
This customization would be above and beyond using retailer categories, something that can be included in the facebook request. Asking because other services require results presented exactly as returned from the API, including ads.
First, check out the policies at https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/community
We welcome you to use foursquare as your location database. You can associate additional content with our venue data in your system, but you may not combine our database with another database or export it on your own.
I think that they even encourage you to manipulate the data and create creative solutions with it, as long as you do not break their ground rule of not merging it with another database (see the full text at the link).
The API even lets you filter the results according to your needs with the categoryId and intent parameters. For example in our app, we filter out places that have less than 2 unique people checked in, because we assume its faked places.. we do other filtering on the result set as well, but we display only data from from foursquare venues database, and we attribute.
I understand that we can search for the venues using a search term and ll. I want to be able to cache all the venues. Is it possible?
There's no way to retrieve all of foursquare's venues -- they're only available via search API endpoints. Results that are retrieved via these endpoints may be cached for up to 30 days.
We would like to be able to pull out certain places from foursquare an categorize them on our website along with comments from foursquare users. I have the following questions:
1- Can we pull out places and categorize them the way we want on our website? e.g: restaurants/bar/lounge/club/landmarks/others.
2- can we pull out as well phone numbers (when available) and addresses (longitude-lattitude) of places ?
3- Does foursquare have any general descriptive summaries of each place?
Thanks for the help.
Chris
Foursquare has an API, more information can be found at this link
To answer your questions:
Yes, check out the Venues Platform in 4sq API, specifically, the search. When you query the API, as part of the result set for each venue, you get a category
If available, you will get them back under the 'contact' field, check out the response venue object from the search function
Yes, description field, you will need to make an API request to get the complete venue object.
Edit: one last thing, attribute and play nice :)
From my experience, you do not get a lot of venues with 'contact' and 'description' information. But foursquare is not very popular where I test my application, so it might be bad experience - experiment with it yourself.
FourSquare has a great category tree that you can use for categorizing restaurants
http://aboutfoursquare.com/foursquare-categories/
Actually, I'm using this tree in my website:
Dishes Map