In today's competitive retail landscape, location solutions help to drive growth and enhance customer experiences. From precise store locators to advanced delivery tracking, Mapbox helps retailers and e-commerce companies optimize operations, engage customers, and streamline logistics. Read on to see how Mapbox solutions are making a difference for retail leaders worldwide.

High performance and quality data 

Fast, reliable, and accurate location services are critical for driving retail customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Mapbox provides enterprise-grade location solutions, from rapid map rendering to precise geocoding and custom navigation, to ensure that customers always receive a superior experience when interacting with location features.

A polished store locator is crucial for retailers, offering faster load times that enhance the customer experience and keep visitors engaged. With the customization options in Mapbox, you can ensure that your store locations stand out by tailoring map appearance to highlight your brand and remove competing locations or distracting labels.

dm: A highly custom store locator

With over 3,000 stores across 13 countries, dm is one of Europe’s largest and most beloved drugstore chains. To help customers find their nearest store and check product availability, dm uses a fast-loading store locator paired with a personalized click-and-collect e-commerce experience on its websites and app.

Built with Mapbox, dm’s store locator provides real-time information, allowing customers to order ahead and pick up items with confidence. A seamless integration of online to offline experiences helps dm maintain its strong brand presence. Mapbox Geocoding provides a smooth searching experience for nearby stores. Mapbox GL JS ensures smooth and fast map rendering, and the flexibility of the Mapbox platform allows easy integration with existing applications.

“With tens of thousands users every day, the storefinder perfectly combines dm’s online and offline business.” -Tobias Hallmayer, Head of Product, dm

Advanced customization & optimization

Personalized, location-based features can help drive customer engagement and make retail brands stand out. Mapbox offers designers and developers a powerful toolkit for building tailored interactions, such as targeted promotions and optimized store maps, that keep customers coming back.

The flexibility to build custom location experiences within existing applications and websites is a key reason that many businesses choose Mapbox. With robust documentation, developer playgrounds, templates, and extensive code examples, building with Mapbox is developer-friendly and efficient.

Darden Restaurants: Full control over map customization

The Darden family of restaurants, including Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and The Capital Grille, uses Mapbox to elevate the customer experience. By styling their basemaps in Mapbox Studio, Darden can fully control which points appear on their maps, highlighting their restaurant locations and hiding irrelevant points, providing a superior experience for diners.

“Switching to Mapbox was easy. We gained design control to customize our maps and deliver a better customer experience at a lower cost.” -Athi Krishnamurthy, Senior Director of Innovation, Darden

Looking ahead, Darden plans to expand its use of Mapbox GL JS to enhance its catering business, allowing customers to have their favorite dishes delivered directly from the Darden family of restaurants.

Instacart: Optimizing delivery routes and checkout experience

Grocery giant Instacart uses Mapbox Geocoding and Directions APIs to optimize delivery routes, ensuring shoppers get groceries faster. The Address Autofill SDK reduces friction during checkout, improving order completion rates by providing precise location suggestions. By tailoring navigation and geocoding to meet their operational needs, Instacart minimizes errors and delays, enhancing both the customer and driver experience.

“We wanted to understand how we can build these tools in a scaleable, reliant, and performant way, and that’s where we started to look at technologies like Mapbox to understand how we can build the right tools so that our operations can go ahead and diagnose the live issues, fix them in a way that our customers can still get their deliveries on time, and our shoppers can also have the right experience on our platform.” -Raghav Mohan, Senior Product Manager, Marketplace, Instacart 

Picnic: Custom navigation for safer, faster deliveries

Picnic revolutionizes food delivery by making it faster, easier, and more affordable. Their user-friendly app simplifies grocery shopping, and their custom electric Picnic Vehicles are designed to minimize emissions and navigate narrow streets without causing disruptions. This data-driven approach has positioned Picnic as one of Europe’s leading online supermarkets, with over 2,500 vehicles delivering across the Netherlands, France, and Germany.

Picnic keeps its promise of a 20-minute delivery window in part by using  Mapbox to build a fully customized navigation solution for their drivers. With the Mapbox Navigation SDK, Picnic integrated in-app routing and turn-by-turn directions, enabling drivers to stay within the Picnic app for a seamless delivery experience. This approach not only improves driver behavior but also allows precise navigation adjustments directly within the app. With the design flexibility of Mapbox, Picnic developers have full control over every map element, from highlighting buildings and house numbers to optimize the map experience for their drivers.

With Mapbox logistics solutions, Picnic has enhanced both driver and customer experiences, resulting in safer, more efficient deliveries. Since adopting Mapbox-powered navigation, Picnic has reduced drive times per delivery and boosted its on-time delivery rate.

“Mapbox has equipped us to build our own navigation experience that is tailored to our drivers and vehicles. Our custom routing is already increasing the accuracy of our trip planning, improving safety, and helping our drivers to fill more orders - and all within a clean interface that fits perfectly into our driver app.” -Joris-Jan Kraak, Product Owner, Picnic

Seamless implementation on a unified platform

Mapbox offers a powerful suite of APIs, SDKs, and exclusive data products — including Boundaries, Movement data, and Traffic data — designed to seamlessly integrate and work together. This unified platform helps developers to efficiently build, scale, and maintain location-based features in their web and mobile applications, enabling faster time-to-market and ongoing flexibility.

Symaps: Smarter site selection with Mapbox Movement

Symaps, a leading SaaS location intelligence platform, analyzes Mapbox Movement Data to guide businesses’ retail site selection and expansion decisions. With comprehensive global coverage, Mapbox Movement data provides Symaps with precise footfall insights, even in non-urban areas. This reliable data foundation enables Symaps to deliver exceptional location analysis to clients, optimizing their geographic presence with confidence.

“Our customers rely on us to provide them with accurate and reliable insights for their location decisions. With Mapbox, we are confident that we can offer them the most comprehensive and up-to-date footfall and traffic patterns available. This partnership helps us to take Symaps to the next level and provide our customers with the high-quality data they need to make better location decisions.” -Mickaël Mas, CEO, Symaps

Retail leaders like Darden, dm, and Instacart are transforming their operations with Mapbox. From improving customer engagement to optimizing logistics, Mapbox provides the advanced location solutions needed to thrive in today’s dynamic retail environment.

Ready to see how Mapbox can elevate your retail strategy? Explore our retail solutions to discover how Mapbox technology can drive your success.