While researching companies that use technology in a sales environemnt I came across a sweet visualization that the folks over at Zappos are using.

http://www.zappos.com/map/

I work for a sales services company and thought doing something like this would be sweet if each of our sales team is able to enter what they are selling real time in the field. We are already investigating putting PDAs in our reps hands to track what they are doing in the field real time to avoid lengthy call reports when they return home and to get a sense of how sales progress through a time continuum intraday. What Im thinking is we could link up their sales and field activity and give the client a real time visual of "whats up" like Zappos is doing.

Im not a programmer but just looking for thoughts on what might be involved in hooking our sales data up to something like this.

General thoughts on what Zappos has done are also welcome.

I searched for Zappos in Chit Chat and Tech and nothing came up.

[Edited on May 6, 2009 at 7:34 PM. Reason : .]

5/6/2009 7:33:52 PM

Looks like it's just http://code.google.com/apis/maps + http://jquery.com

Their JS: http://www.zappos.com/map/zappos.js

[Edited on May 6, 2009 at 8:02 PM. Reason : ]

5/6/2009 8:00:28 PM

there's a thread in the lounge about why zappos pays employees to quit. not exactly relevant.

i think that's neat. i wish i knew about it last night when we ordered shoes for the wedding.

5/7/2009 7:57:23 AM

My guess is it's a periodic ajax call to check where the send address of the most recent order is, geocoding that, and shoving it onto the map if it's not already there.

It may be a comet call instead of ajax but i'd doubt that

5/7/2009 9:08:15 AM

That's neat and all, but that's its only purpose as far as I can see... It's one of those things you look at for 30 seconds and never look at again.


If you want something really easy for tracking sales , just have everyone post their hourly sales to the same Twitter account and have your clients subscribe to your feed.

We do that for our vendors who have subscribed, ie "20 lp-jajax to TEK at $225. per". At the end of the day, we have 15-20 orders entered into our feed and it takes 10 minutes to see what we've done as a company for the day.

[Edited on May 7, 2009 at 10:27 AM. Reason : d]

5/7/2009 10:23:59 AM

^ pretty nice idea.

The purpose is to synch our soon to be handhelds which we will already be tracking sales with to this mapping system. Zappos uses this as a marketing opportunity, but we would like to use it to show who is working in the field, where, what they are selling, etc.

5/7/2009 12:35:11 PM

Zappos.prototype.fetchData = function() {
    var that = this;
    $.ajax({ url: '/n/zappos_maps.cgi?' + (new Date).getTime(), type: 'GET', timeout: 2500, dataType: "json",
        success : function(order) {  
            if(order.sku != that.order.sku && order.location != that.order.location) {
                that.order = $.extend(true, {}, order);
                
                var point = new GLatLng(order.location[0], order.location[1]);
                that.map.panToInclude(point, 85, 85, 145, 85);
                var bubble = new ZBubble(point, order.image, order.sku);
                that.map.addOverlay(bubble);

                var remove = (function(marker) { return function() { marker.remove(); } }(bubble)); 
                setTimeout(remove, 35000);
            }
                        
            var check = (function(that) { return function() { that.fetchData(); } }(that)); 
            setTimeout(check, 4250);
        },
        
        error : function() {
            that.fetchData();
        }
    });
}

5/7/2009 12:45:54 PM