IJO Jeweler Search

Hey everyone! I'm going to be starting a series of dev dives today, talking about the cool work that our clients have been doing with us and hopefully sparking new ideas for everyone about ways that they can best utilize their Punchmark site! To that end, I want to showcase pieces of custom development that you all have implemented on your websites. Today, we're going to be talking about IJO (the Independent Jewelers Organization, in case anyone here doesn't know - though I'm pretty sure most of you do). IJO recently launched a new website, entirely redesigned by our team and built on our Version 6 platform with a lot of exciting dev work (check it out at www.ijo.com).

One of the most important requirements that IJO had for their website was the ability to highlight their members. To do that, we worked with them to create a member lookup by zip code. In their navigation, there's a search bar where you can enter in any US or Canadian zip code and find the three nearest IJO jewelers, shown on a map. For instance, if you search around Punchmark's office, you'll get results for Morrison Smith Jewelers just south of uptown Charlotte, Falls Jewelers in Concord, NC, and Sessoms & Sons Jewelers in Fort Mill, SC.

In order to make this work, we had to implement a few pieces of custom development. The first step was to create a new database table to hold the information for all IJO members. Then we can connect to an API to populate the table with their member data, and when we insert a new member or update an existing member, we can pass the address to the Google Maps API and get back exact latitude and longitude values for the location. When someone searches for a zip code, we call that same API to get the latitude and longitude for the searched zip code, and then all we have to do is calculate the distance between the search zip code and different store locations to find the closest ones.

IJO's website was a huge project with a lot of custom dev work, but I thought it was especially cool that they put such a large priority on making sure to highlight their members directly on their website. Go check it out, and let us know what you think!