Location Directions for Store Locator

The list of locations has a link for directions from your user’s location to each of the stores shown on the map.    At some point in the recent past this feature stopped working.    Our November update to My Store Locator Plus® addresses this issue, restoring proper direction links to your locations.    Self-managed WordPress plugin users will need to upgrade to the Store Locator Plus plugin version 4.9.22 for this patch.

Map Directions
Map Directions

 

Hyperlink Phone Dialer

The dial by phone feature stopped working in a recent update to Store Locator Plus®.   This impacted both the self-managed WordPress plugins as well as our fully managed My Store Locator Plus® service users.

The patch is available in the Experience add on version 4.9.22 for WordPress users; WordPress plugin users will need to download and install the latest release.   MySLP users already have the updated software and will have the dialing feature back online by the time they read this.

Dial By Phone is a feature that wraps the phone number links in the location lists in a link with a de-facto standard tel: prefix.    For users visiting your site from a mobile phone the on-phone browser will automatically dial the number when a user clicks the link.

Google Maps API Prices Increase 9,000%

How much did the Google Maps API prices increase?  The  true cost is hidden for many users of the ubiquitous Google Maps API as Google is weaning you onto a potential 9,000% price increase by giving everyone a $200 per-month credit towards API billing through September 2018.   For many API users the true sticker shock will come when that $200 credit expires.

Google Maps API Prices Increase by 9,500% for our account in September.

Our fully managed locator service has already seen the impact.   When the $200 credit expires our expenses will increase 9,570%

Up until July 2018 most users were able to get by with no official Google API key at all.   Those that started a site in the past year needed an API key but likely fell under the “free usage limits” and never saw a bill; even if they enabled the older “Pay-As-You-Go” system under Google.