A Repair Locator That Knows Who Can Actually Fix It
Store repair capability alongside the address: vehicles serviced, repairs performed, battery work, brands handled, appointment model, and parts policy — with shop-confirmed verification and the date it was confirmed.
A pin on a map does not tell anyone whether the shop can do the job
Your customer's battery has failed. Your website shows them six shops within twenty miles. Four of them do not touch batteries, one does not service your brand, and the sixth only takes booked appointments. They drive to the first one, get turned away, and the next call goes to your support line — or to a review.
That is not a mapping failure. It is a data-model failure: a generic store locator has nowhere to record what a shop can actually do, so it cannot filter on it. A repair locator can, and the difference shows up as fewer wasted trips, fewer support calls, and less warranty leakage to shops you never approved.
What "verified" means here, precisely
Verification is a trust claim, so it is worth being exact about the size of the claim being made.
What it does mean
- The shop itself confirmed the capability details on its listing
- The listing carries a shop-confirmed status flag
- The date of that confirmation is stored and can be displayed
- A listing notice is shown with the entry, so the basis of the claim is visible to the customer
What it does not mean
- It is not an inspection, an audit, or a certification
- It is not a warranty or a quality guarantee from Maptera
- It is not automatic — a shop only becomes verified when it confirms
- It does not stay true forever, which is why the confirmation date is stored and shown
Unverified shops can still be listed. The value of the flag comes entirely from the fact that it is not applied to everything, so a directory that marks every entry verified has thrown away the only thing the flag was worth.
Five capability groups customers can filter on
These are the filter groups the repair directory supports today. They are deliberately specific to repair work rather than generic categories, because "services offered" as a free-text field is exactly what fails a customer standing in a car park with a broken machine.
Vehicles serviced
Which vehicle types a shop actually works on. An e-bike shop and a scooter shop look identical on a map and are not interchangeable to a customer holding a broken scooter.
Repair services
The specific jobs a shop takes on, so a customer can filter to the ones that do their repair rather than phoning six places to find out.
Battery services
Battery work is its own capability and its own liability. Many shops that happily do mechanical repairs will not touch a battery pack, and customers cannot tell from outside.
Service options
How the service is delivered — the practical difference between a shop a customer can walk into and one that operates differently.
Brands serviced
Which brands a shop is equipped and willing to service. For a manufacturer routing warranty work, this is the field that decides whether the referral was any good.
Filters render from the capability values actually present across your listed shops, so a group with no data does not show an empty filter. The customer-facing behaviour of the filter UI is covered in more depth on store finder software.
The two fields that decide whether somebody actually drives over
Appointment model
Walk-in, booked, or drop-off changes the customer's whole plan for the afternoon. Publishing it stops the most common wasted trip in the category: arriving at a shop that only takes bookings.
Parts policy
Whether a shop stocks parts, orders them in, or expects the customer to supply them is the difference between a same-day fix and a three-week wait. It is also the question support teams answer most often by phone.
Both are stored per shop and shown on the listing. Neither is guessable from an address, which is precisely why a generic locator cannot serve this use case however good its map is.
Building the directory
Be realistic about this: verification is an operational process, not a feature you enable. The software makes it cheap to run and impossible to fake. The three stages:
- Import candidates. Start from a nationwide list of shops in your category — trade associations, existing service records, support-ticket history, or a purchased list. Import as CSV; addresses geocode automatically. Dry run the file first with the free CSV geocoder.
- Run outreach and confirm capability. Contact each shop with the same short capability questionnaire: vehicles, repairs, battery work, brands, appointment model, parts policy. This is the stage that costs real time, and it is the stage that makes the directory worth having.
- Publish confirmed entries as verified. Confirmed shops get the shop-confirmed flag and a confirmation date. Unconfirmed candidates can stay listed without it, or stay unpublished — that is your editorial call, and it should be a deliberate one.
- Re-confirm on a cadence. Shops change what they service. A confirmation date visible to customers is only useful if you also treat it as a refresh trigger.
Feeding shop records from a service-management system rather than a spreadsheet? The REST API is included on the Scale plan.
Who this is for
- E-bike, scooter and light-EV brands whose customers need battery and drivetrain work locally
- Appliance and consumer-electronics manufacturers routing warranty repairs
- Powersports and outdoor-equipment brands with independent servicing dealers
- Tool and equipment brands whose customers need a shop that handles their specific range
- Any network currently answering "where can I get this fixed" by hand
Pricing
Standard Maptera plans — the repair directory is a way of using the product, not a separate SKU. $0 for 10 shops, $9/month for 100, $15/month for 2,000, and $19/month for 5,000 plus the REST API.
Most national service networks land on Growth. Start a pilot region on the free plan to test the questionnaire and the filters on ten real shops before committing to the outreach, or see the full pricing. For the general product, start at store locator software.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a verified repair locator?
A locator where each listed shop carries confirmed capability data, not just a name and address. Alongside the pin, the record holds which vehicle types the shop services, which repairs it performs, whether it does battery work, which brands it handles, how appointments work, and what its parts policy is — plus a verification flag showing the shop itself confirmed those details, and the date it did so.
What does "verified" actually mean here?
It means the shop confirmed its own listing. A verified record carries a shop-confirmed status, the date of that confirmation, and a listing notice displayed with the entry. It is deliberately a narrow claim: it does not mean the shop has been inspected, certified, or audited by anyone, and the page never implies it does. Verification is an operational process you run, not a toggle you switch on.
How is this different from a normal store locator?
A normal locator answers "where is the nearest one". A repair locator has to answer "where is the nearest one that can do this specific job on this specific brand", which is a filtering problem over capability data rather than a proximity problem. The map is the same; the data model and the filters are what make it useful.
Who needs a repair or service-centre locator?
Manufacturers and networks whose customers need repairs done by somebody else: e-bike, scooter and EV brands, appliance and consumer-electronics manufacturers, powersports, outdoor equipment, and tool brands. The common signal is a support inbox full of "where can I get this fixed" and a service network currently tracked in a spreadsheet.
How do we build the directory?
In three stages. Import a candidate list of shops in your category, run outreach to confirm capability with each one, then publish the confirmed entries as verified. The middle stage is real work and there is no way around it — a directory whose verification flag is not earned is worse than no flag at all, because it transfers your credibility to a listing you have not checked.
What does it cost?
The same as any Maptera plan: $0 for up to 10 shops, $9/month for 100, $15/month for 2,000, and $19/month for 5,000 plus REST API access. Networks feeding shop data from another system programmatically need the Scale plan.
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