Weather Info on the Portal
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Lawrence Winstead
We're in North Dakota and exclusively use a single shipping company for domestic shipments for our aftermarket Parts sales (for which we use Documoto as a "Dealer Portal"). It's December and the weather is pretty bad, and our sole shipping company naturally is experiencing shipping delays. One of our Parts associates made a suggestion to add some kind of weather indicator to our main product website, and I think that's also a great idea for our Documoto "Dealer Portal". Seeing current weather information could have huge benefits for the site visitor, including better order planning and better understanding of shipping delays, not to mention the little benefits like making a stronger connection to us as the manufacturer or a reason to keep the dealer on the portal longer.
Is there any way to display current weather on the Documoto site? A Browse Flow tile? A Message Banner? A "current temp" icon on the top bar next to the Account drop-down that links out to a configurable weather service? If none of this is possible, I'd like to formally suggest this as an enhancement for all Documoto tenants. It's maybe not a game changer, but it could be just the thing to spruce up what is already a great aftermarket tool for us.
Thanks!
Erin Steinmann
Great to hear your perspective, Lawrence Winstead! I have a few more questions for you:
- What specific weather information would be most useful for your team and site visitors (e.g., temperature, precipitation, wind speed)?
- How frequently would you like the weather information to be updated on the portal?
- Do you have a preferred weather service provider that you would like us to integrate with, or should we choose one for you?
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Lawrence Winstead
- Temperature and precipitation are the most useful factors for sure, but just for some kind of "widget" view, especially if the intention is to present the greater weather data in a separate window or screen (or if the intention is to redirect the user to the weather service website).
- I would think the most logical approach would be to refresh the data every 30 minutes or when the user refreshes the page. I haven't built a weather tool or delved into any API for weather services in a hot minute, so I have no idea how often those services would support the information refreshing.
- I'm partial to Open Weather Map, and I've had very good accuracy of forecast info from their services. I don't know how similar APIs are for weather services, but building a tool that would allow different weather services would obviously be ideal.