CSV Bulk Uploads

With the v1.5 release of Store Locator Plus you know have the ability to load your store locations via a CSV upload file. The bulk upload appears on the bottom of the Add Locations page. Click the browse button to upload your CSV file. It will process the CSV file and add the records to the database. A copy of the file is stored within the uploads subdirectory within the plugin.

The Store Locator Plus uploads directory must have write permissions to be able to upload the CSV files.

Data Format

The CSV file must have the data appear in the following order:

Store Name
Address Line 1
Address Line 2
City
State
Zip
Country
Tags (if commas they must be properly quoted)
Description
URL
Hours
Phone
Email (version 1.8+ only)

You can leave off fields from the end of a line, for example just have the Name, Address 1, Address 2, City, State, Zip and nothing else. This can vary from line-to-line.

If you want to skip a field that column in the CSV file must be blank:

My Store, 111 Main St, ,Charleston, SC

Do not include a header record.

Error Codes

Google will return various error codes depending on the data format or request timing.

Code Moniker Description
200 G_GEO_SUCCESS No errors occurred; the address was successfully parsed and its geocode has been returned.
400 G_GEO_BAD_REQUEST A directions request could not be successfully parsed. For example, the request may have been rejected if it contained more than the maximum number of waypoints allowed.
500 G_GEO_SERVER_ERROR A geocoding, directions or maximum zoom level request could not be successfully processed, yet the exact reason for the failure is not known.
601 G_GEO_MISSING_QUERY The HTTP q parameter was either missing or had no value. For geocoding requests, this means that an empty address was specified as input. For directions requests, this means that no query was specified in the input.
602 G_GEO_UNKNOWN_ADDRESS No corresponding geographic location could be found for the specified address. This may be due to the fact that the address is relatively new, or it may be incorrect.
603 G_GEO_UNAVAILABLE_ADDRESS The geocode for the given address or the route for the given directions query cannot be returned due to legal or contractual reasons.
604 G_GEO_UNKNOWN_DIRECTIONS The GDirections object could not compute directions between the points mentioned in the query. This is usually because there is no route available between the two points, or because we do not have data for routing in that region.
610 G_GEO_BAD_KEY The given key is either invalid or does not match the domain for which it was given.
620 G_GEO_TOO_MANY_QUERIES The given key has gone over the requests limit in the 24 hour period or has submitted too many requests in too short a period of time. If you're sending multiple requests in parallel or in a tight loop, use a timer or pause in your code to make sure you don't send the requests too quickly.

Error Resolution

620 Error : Too Many Queries

This is Google throttling your connection because you are abusing their servers. If you hit them too hard and too fast they will drop your current requests until things "cool down" a bit. With large lists this can happen every half-dozen listings.

The easiest way to address this is to increase your Retries on the General Settings page in the admin panel. Our plugin will automatically add a delay between each request before re-retrying a failed attempt. Each retry has a successively longer delay. For example:

  • Initial Request Fails
  • Wait 1 second, then retry
  • 2nd Request Fails
  • Wait 2 seconds, then retry
  • 3rd Request Fails
  • Wait 3 seconds, then retry

Thus, if you set the retries to 10 you will very likely get all valid addresses encoded. However processing a long list can take quite some time as you could end up waiting for 55 seconds (10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1) for each address to load if you hit the throttle on the Google servers.

Example CSV Files

store-list.csv - Example CSV with variant data (232 Bytes) Lance Cleveland, 02/03/2011 12:43 am

store-list.csv - CSV with variable records & email field (v1.8+) (383 Bytes) Lance Cleveland, 04/15/2011 02:09 pm

mass_libraries.csv - 1783 Libraries In MA. Full Address + Tags + Description (218.3 kB) Lance Cleveland, 04/12/2012 12:17 pm

mass_libraries_new_working.csv - FIXED 1700ish Libraries In MA. Full Address + Tags + Description (165ish kB) (165 kB) Corey Blalock, 05/15/2012 03:09 pm