Show HN: Localmint - Quickly find local store opening hours | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Localmint - Quickly find local store opening hours

localmint.com

34 pointsoisin31 comments

Gave it a try on a chain of sporting goods store with several locations in my area.

Google: Correct hours

Yelp: Correct hours

Localmint: No stores found

Looks like you've got a long road ahead if you want any chance of making this work. I personally don't see any need for such a website since Yelp and Google have pretty much got it covered.

Hi DontBeADick, We have most of the data for top retail stores in US, But we are adding more stores to our site every week.

But here is Dick's Sporting Goods http://www.localmint.com/us/search?q=sporting+goods&l=san+fr...

Thanks for feedback.

Competing with Google's built-in search results with a separate application is highly challenging and I wouldn't recommend it unless you can add tremendous value and even then I think it is a tough sell for the large majority of users.

Also, Yelp has this pretty much cornered. (4sq as well maybe?)

That is a very targeted market.

And I'm not sure what you are using, but nothing is turning up for me. For example...

http://www.localmint.com/ie/search?q=tim+hortons&l=toronto%2...

http://www.localmint.com/ie/search?q=starbucks&l=toronto%2C+...

http://www.localmint.com/ie/search?q=starbucks&l=new+york+ci...

http://www.localmint.com/ie/search?q=winners&l=new+york+city

Now there is def Tim Hortons and Star Bucks in Toronto. There is at least 4000 of them.

I can found starbucks, http://www.localmint.com/us/search?q=starbucks&l=new+york

Hrm it seems to be working for me now. It wasn't before.

Must just be slow or something.

They've just gotta do better at normalizing the location. 'new york' vs 'new york city'

We have built Localmint to help consumers avoid the tedious task of browsing store locators, which typically offer terrible user experience, especially on smartphones. Would love to hear any feedback you have. Oisin Ryan - Co-Founder

Tedious? Open google maps, search on phrase, and note closest search results.

This is awesome! I built something similar as a side project a few years ago [1]. Our approach is a little bit different since we're focusing on crawling updated opening hours weekly (when available), so our data will never be stale.

It's currently very popular in Denmark, but we have a US version as well.

We have been looking into opening up our dataset for anyone to use, shoot me an email if this is something you would be interested in: me@codemonkey.io

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whats-open-nearby-find-hours...

I would go to Yelp for this info (usually the store hours). The site looks good but just throwing that out there, I don't think you have any info that Yelp doesn't.

Hi Chuinard, we have made the Localmint website and apps as simple and clean as possible. We see having less info than Yelp as a positive. Thanks for commenting!

Less information doesn't necessarily correlate with simplicity. Now that you've got a clean product, figure out a way to segment the market so that there's more reason to use localmint. Maybe adding more information (in a clean way) is the answer.

As I see it, to use your site there's still the extra steps of

    1. Having to remember the "localmint.com" name and
    2. Having to type it in the browser every time I need to look up store hours.

When I open a new tab I'm already at a Google search engine. Why not just use it instead? You'll need to build a compelling enough reason to visit localmint, because right now it's not the easiest solution.

Looks and works great! Here are a couple things:

Have some sort of indication of what's currently open or not. Many folks would look for whats "available now" if they are on mobile... .

When you select a category it doesn't give you an option to search an area - especially when you are already looking in an area.

I've been developing something similar for a small area doplaces.com

Hi Larry, we have considered the "open now" feature and it is in the pipeline. Really keeping it simple to start with. Search by area option should always be available? Doplaces looks great. Best of luck!

Say you are looking at grcery stores in SF and pop open categories and select bookstores, instead of seeing bookstores in SF you see a list of all the bookstores... Categories in area view I think would work better as a filter. or at least have a way to pop back to your last map view with that category from the businesses page.

Comment on the app. nice interface, works well in Dublin, nice quick reference if you are unsure of the name of chemist or shop. Good for emergencies when you need the nearest open chemist. Could do with more suburban shops. Probably useful for students or visitors to a new city, is it multi lingual?

Unlikely to visit very often if it's just opening times...what I want is to be able to give feedback!

Two things that annoy me about SuperValu, Deansgrange...over-charging (I only bought one punnet of blueberries Mr SuperValu, not TWO!)...and constant out-of-stocks of products I want to buy.

There... I feel better after that.

Meltdown, you should get on our early adopters list, you'll be able to give feedback to any local business. See www.tipnik.com

Hello,

I am one of the co-founder of Localmint. Localmint site helps users to find local store opening hours fast and convenient way from any device.

We love to take feedback from the community on how we can improve our service.

Thanks Ranga Vadhineni

Are you trying to build a business off this service, or will it just be an open dataset that anybody can use for whatever they want (along the same idea as openstreetmap)?

I'm just asking because I've toyed with the idea of building the latter, and I strongly believe it's something that will exist eventually, whether I build it or someone else does.

We are trying to build business on this idea, So we have no plans to open data for others.

If I ask Google it usually works. They seem to have added some support for this, probably via their Google Maps for Businesses or something like that. So it is a challenging market to enter.

Siri also answers these kinds of questions.

I've found google maps to be very reliable for store hours around southern California. Google maps has become my go-to app for business location, phone number, and hours

i live in santa monica / los angeles.

these searches failed to produce any results:

'burgers', 'ramen', 'sushi', 'citibank', 'chicken', 'bar'

so like... if i can't find a burger at a weird hour when i'm craving one, or the hours of my local bank, i'm not really sure what i would use this for. japanese restaurants always have infuriatingly weird hours and they don't show up here either.

Interesting application. Is there a way to recommend merchants/stores to add? (e.g. there are no entries for HEB, a grocery store, in Austin)

HEB is on our list kolencherry. You can use the http://www.localmint.com/home/addbusiness link to add individual stores, or just contact us on info@localmint.com and we will add the chain.

Pretty cool. How are you getting the data?

Hi grimtrigger, some retailers submit and manage their own data, but mostly we get it from their websites.

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