Multiple Store Locations - overview

Multiple Locations - overview

This article may be interesting if you do business in multiple locations.  This may be the case for a couple of reasons:

1. Multiple Stores - you own a chain or more than one store / shop
2. Tour operators - you are a tour operator and hence your reservations may take place in a variety of physical locations.

Please Note - we're not talking about if you have one shop and offer a delivery service.  Please read this article for help on that.

1. Multiple Stores

there are two ways of handling businesses with multiple shops / stores:

1. independent (multi-site) - each shop is completely independent, pointing to its own virtual shop (i.e. BRM account).  You have a login for each person who works in that shop. Each virtual shop has its own fleet of bikes, and bikes cannot (easily) be shared between shops.
2. amalgamated (multi-location) - you only have one virtual shop (within BRM).  This shop has just one fleet.  However, you will also add in the names of each of your shops.  Each asset can be tagged to be in a location, and each reservation can be tagged to start and end at a specific location.

2. Tour Operators

tour operators can enter in each of the locations in which they operate, and hence track each reservations start and end location, as well as the location of each asset within that reservation.

In addition, tour operators might well like to use the ReservationTypes feature to customise how the different types of reservation will look within the planning window etc.

Here are some PROs and CON's of each configuration

	Multi-store (MS)	ML - global	ML - location-based
Multiple BRM stores
Control each configuration at the location (Store) level
Single BRM store
Control booking by location online

1. one BRM - multi-location functionality

• PROS
  • great if you really share your bikes pretty dynamically
  • only one store to manage / login / get stats etc
  • one fleet to manage - with sub-locations
• CONS
  • can be challenging for online booking
    • BRM will check availability per bike per date.
    • BRM won't check availability per bike per location - you need to manage that with longer lead times etc.
  • It also means all your bikes / reservations are visible to all.   Potentially hard to find what you are after.
    • though you can use a filter to only book bikes available in particular location.

2. many BRM versions - one BRM per store

• PROS
  • great if the locations are pretty autonomous / truly independent
  • you can have multiple accounts so you can be logged into many at same time
  • independent fleets - so online booking just works; availability across bike / date & location
• CONS
  • not easy to 'share bikes' between stores
  • you can't have one Online booking on your site to aggregate across your locations.

3. hybrid of the above two.

Coming in the future.  Some people would want this:

please vote for this solution here

4. hybrid but the other way around!

please note we now do this and the feature is called;

Multi-location - location based mode. 

related articles

running multiple 'locations' within one BRM / RSM