Nearmio
A where-to-buy page checklist for wholesale brands
October 2026
If you sell through independent shops, your "where to buy" page is the only place a shopper can learn which of them carry you. Most of these pages fail in the same few ways: no way to search by location, a list that is out of date, a list that only exists after a script runs, and no link to it from the places shoppers actually are.
This is a checklist. Go through it against your own page; each item is a yes or no. It is deliberately short on theory and does not repeat the ten-minute audit in How to keep your stockist list up to date.
1. What a shopper needs on the page
A shopper arrives with one question: where is the nearest shop that has this? Check that the page answers it without effort.
- ☐ A "near me" button. One tap asks for the shopper's location, sorts the list by distance and recentres the map. If the shopper says no, the page should fall back to the search box, not show an error.
- ☐ Search by postcode or city. Plenty of shoppers will not share their location, and others are planning a trip somewhere else. Search must work without location access.
- ☐ A list sorted by distance, next to the map. On a phone the list goes below the map. Tapping a pin should highlight its entry in the list, and the reverse.
- ☐ Directions in one tap. A "Get directions" link that opens turn-by-turn directions to the shop (Nearmio opens Google Maps) and beats an address they have to copy.
- ☐ A link to the shop's Google listing. The shop's own listing is where the shopper confirms what you cannot: whether it is open now. Link to it where you have it. Nearmio shows a "View on Google" link on a card when a Google listing URL is set for that location.
- ☐ Hours and phone, where you have them, are on the card. Nearmio shows a location's phone and hours, as you typed them, on its card in the list and in its map popup. Keep them current, or leave them blank.
- ☐ It works on a phone. Open the page on your phone, find the nearest shop, and time yourself.
Nearmio's map block covers the near me, search, distance list, directions and Google listing items above; the shopper-side behaviour is described in the Nearmio help. Whatever tool you use, the checklist is the same.
2. Where the list comes from
The list is only as good as its source. Check where yours comes from and how far that is from your orders.
- ☐ The list is derived from something you already keep, such as your wholesale orders, not retyped from memory.
- ☐ A spreadsheet, if that is the source, is a file you can re-upload, with one row per shop and a stable ID per row, so a second upload updates shops instead of duplicating them.
- ☐ Shops that order by email or through a rep are included. They are not in any platform export.
- ☐ Each address is a shop floor. Shipping addresses can be stockrooms, offices or homes.
- ☐ Addresses that cannot be placed on the map are flagged to you, not dropped in the wrong town and not silently hidden.
If you sell on Faire, your order history is already a stockist list; see Turn your Faire retailer list into a "where to buy" map.
3. Freshness
- ☐ Someone owns the page, with a name and a date. A page nobody owns drifts.
- ☐ New first-time retailers are added when they order, not at the next redesign.
- ☐ Shops that stop carrying you can be hidden without being deleted, because seasonal stockists come back.
- ☐ You refresh before your busiest selling weeks. Retailers place holiday orders in early autumn, so the list that matters most is the one you check in September.
- ☐ You can say when the list was last reviewed.
The full audit (check the newest retailers, spot-check a random five, time yourself on a phone) is in How to keep your stockist list up to date. Do that once; this item is the reminder to schedule it.
4. The view-source test
A map is drawn by script. That is fine, but it means a list can look complete in your browser and not exist as page content. One minute tells you which you have.
- ☐ Open your where-to-buy page.
- ☐ View the page source (not the rendered page, and not "inspect element"). In most desktop browsers: right-click, "View page source".
- ☐ Search the source for the name of one of your stockists.
- ☐ Found it: the list exists as markup on the page. Not found: the list is only drawn by script after the page loads, and a crawler that does not run JavaScript sees an empty space where your stockists should be. Some crawlers may not run JavaScript.
The reasoning, and what to do about it, is in Why your stockist list should be readable by AI assistants. The test is the same whichever locator you use.
5. Where to link it
A page nobody finds is as good as no page.
- ☐ The main menu or the footer carries a plain-text link, "Where to buy" or "Find a store", on every page.
- ☐ Product pages link to it, near the add-to-cart button, for shoppers who would rather see the product first.
- ☐ The cart links to it for shoppers who hesitate over shipping cost or time.
- ☐ Your wholesale and retailer-facing pages link to it too. Prospective stockists can see that you send customers to the shops that carry you.
- ☐ Cutoff banners point to it. When the "order by" date passes, swap the banner for one that links to the page. See After your holiday shipping cutoff, send shoppers to your stockists.
- ☐ Your last-call email and social bios use the same link.
- ☐ The link text says what is on the other side. "Where to buy" beats "Retailers" or "Trade".
6. What to leave out
Removing things is half the work.
- ☐ No PDF stockist list. It cannot be searched by distance, is hard to read on a phone, and goes stale the day it is exported.
- ☐ No "email us to find a stockist" as the only option. The shopper will not.
- ☐ No online-only shops. A shopper cannot walk into one.
- ☐ No home or warehouse addresses, unless it really is a place the public can visit.
- ☐ No lapsed stockists. Sending a shopper to a shop that no longer carries you is worse than sending them nowhere.
- ☐ No hours you cannot keep current. Opening hours are the shop's to maintain; if you add them to a location, they show as typed, so link to the shop's own listing when you are unsure.
- ☐ No sign-in wall and no sign-up form before the map.
Scoring yourself
Count the unchecked boxes. Fix sections 4 and 3 first: they decide whether the page is true. Then 1 and 5: they decide whether people use it.
Try it
Nearmio is a Shopify app that covers the shopper-facing parts of section 1 with no Google API key to set up. It is free for up to 5 locations; Pro is $9.99 a month for unlimited locations, with a 7-day free trial.