Nearmio
How to keep your stockist list up to date
September 2026
Building a "where to buy" page is a one-afternoon job. Keeping it right is the part that fails. Look at the stockist pages of brands you know and the pattern repeats: a list that was accurate the day it launched, then a slow drift — shops that closed, shops that stopped carrying the line, and none of the forty retailers who came on board since. Nobody decided to let it rot. It's just that updating the stockist page is nobody's job, and the information needed to update it lives somewhere else.
That second point is the useful one. A stockist list goes stale when it is a separate copy of something you already track elsewhere — your wholesale orders. The closer the page sits to that source, the less it drifts.
What a stale list actually costs
- Shoppers sent to the wrong door. Someone drives to a shop that dropped your line a year ago. They don't blame the shop.
- New retailers left off. The shops most worth promoting are the ones that just placed a first order — they're deciding whether your brand pulls customers in. They're also the ones a stale page is missing.
- Wrong answers from AI assistants. Assistants answering "where can I buy this near me?" read whatever your page says. An out-of-date list becomes an out-of-date answer, repeated confidently. (More on that in making your stockist list readable by AI assistants.)
Four ways to keep it current
1. Edit the page by hand
A text list on a Shopify page, edited whenever someone remembers. It's free and needs no app, and up to ten or fifteen stockists it's honestly fine. Past that it breaks in two ways: shoppers can't search a list by distance, and every update means someone retyping an address from an order into a page editor. That's the step that stops happening.
2. Sync from a shared spreadsheet
Some store-locator apps read from a Google Sheet, so whoever handles wholesale adds a row and the map follows. This is a real improvement — the list now lives where your team already works. But the sheet is still a separate copy of your orders. Someone still has to add the row, and lapsed retailers only leave when someone notices.
3. Re-import a CSV each season
Export your retailers from wherever they're recorded, upload the file, done. The thing to check is what happens on the second upload. A good importer matches rows to the locations it already has and updates them in place; a poor one duplicates every shop, or wipes the pins you corrected by hand. Before you commit to a tool, import the same file twice and look.
In Nearmio, a re-import updates matching locations, adds new ones, shows you a row-by-row preview first, and keeps any pin you dragged into place as long as the address hasn't changed. Give each row a stable ID in an external_id column and matching survives a shop changing its name. The walkthrough for Faire brands is in Turn your Faire retailer list into a "where to buy" map.
4. Import straight from your wholesale orders
The shortest path is no copy at all: read the orders and derive the stockists. A retailer who has ordered is a stockist; the shipping address is, most of the time, the shop. This is what Faire Connect does for brands that sell through Faire — it reads your order history and creates one pin per retailer, tagged with the products they ordered. It's in beta, and for now you press a button to re-run it; scheduled syncing is what we're building next.
Two cautions apply to any order-driven list. A shipping address isn't always a shop floor — some are stockrooms, offices, or homes — so it needs a filter for residential addresses and a quick human skim. And retailers who order by email or through a rep won't be in the platform's data, so you still need a way to add those alongside.
Whatever you use, check for these
- Re-import without duplicates — matching on a stable ID, not just the shop name.
- Hand-fixed pins survive an update — otherwise every refresh undoes your corrections.
- Addresses that can't be placed are flagged, not silently dropped in the wrong town.
- A way to hide a shop without deleting it — seasonal stockists come back.
- The list exists as real HTML, so search engines and AI assistants can read it, not only as a map drawn by JavaScript.
A ten-minute audit of the page you have now
- Pull your last 90 days of wholesale orders and pick five retailers who ordered for the first time. Are they on your where-to-buy page?
- Pick five shops from the page at random and search for each on Google Maps. Still open? Do they still carry you?
- Open the page on your phone and try to find the shop nearest to you. Time it.
- View the page source and search for one stockist's name. If it isn't in the source, crawlers can't see it.
If the first check fails, the problem isn't effort — it's that the page is too far from the orders. Move it closer: a re-importable file at minimum, an order-driven import if your wholesale platform allows it.
Pricing, briefly
Nearmio is free for up to 5 locations. The Pro plan is $9.99/month flat for unlimited locations and CSV import, with a 7-day free trial and no per-store fees.
Nearmio is an independent Shopify app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Faire.