Location

INTRO Hello and welcome. In this lesson, we’ll be discussing locations. With Platfio, your app has all the features you need to grow your business. Often, businesses that start with Platfio have only one location and by default your app comes set up with your first store location. Let’s get started. EDITOR/EMULATOR When you go to the Platfio Editor and click on Locations, you’ll see your default store location. As your business grows, however, you may wish to add multiple store locations and your app has a variety of features built into it to help you manage these different store locations. To demonstrate these, let’s look at the three different locations that are currently set up in this business. Our first location is in Adelaide. If we click on this, we can see that we have the display name for this location, we can set it up as the default, we can then set a phone number prefix for this, and if all your store locations are in one country, this phone number prefix will always be the same. However, if your different locations are in different countries, you can set a different phone number prefix for those different countries here. Next, we can set a different time zone also for those different locations. If we have different locations inter-state, we can set up the time zone here to make sure that the bookings are all counted correctly. Then, the Hours tab allows us to set different opening hours for our location. The Location tab allows us to set up the physical address and choose a location on the map that we can display to users for our location. The Financial tab allows us to set different currencies and different tax rates for our different locations. And finally, the Multiple tab allows us to set how our app handles different locations with users. For example, will the app check the GPS coordinates of the user when they sign up and then assign them to the location that is most convenient for them, or will the app always ask the user to manually select which location they would like to interact with. Setting up the Locations feature has several major benefits. For example, it allows us to set up inventory trackers to hold inventory at different locations. It allows us to set up different bookables or subscribabales with different prices for different locations. It allows us to set up forms for different locations, virtually every feature in your app can be customized for the users at those different locations. You can have a different homepage for different locations, different tools, different automations, and many more. Making it extremely adaptable as you grow your business. However, different locations add extra complexity to your business. We would never recommend setting up multiple locations until your business is absolutely ready for that growth. For example, when you have multiple store locations, the app is designed such that you have admin teams in each of those different locations. For example, your admin team would then change the location that they’re operating in by going to the Editor, Locations, and then swapping the location. This means that your team is managing one location at a time, which is conventional for a business of a reasonable size where they have different administrators at different locations that just want to deal with the transactions from that location, adding extra complexity. Also, you can turn on notifications in multiple different locations or turn them off so that you only receive the staff notifications that are necessary for you. Say as an area manager, you might want to look at the Adelaide location today, then you want to look at the Mount Gambier location tomorrow, but you want to receive notifications for both of them to keep abreast of how the users are doing. So this extra power comes with some extra complexity and as a result, we recommend only setting up the locations that you absolutely need to deliver the services that you need. However, it’s extremely important and reassuring to many of our clients to know that their app can grow with them as they grow their business across multiple locations. OUTRO Thank you for watching this tutorial on Locations. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact our team for support.