Shops
 Feature : Shops
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| Description |
| A place selling retail products or services. |
| Tags |
A shop is a place selling retail products or services.
These may range from the obvious shops such as supermarkets and places to buy food to video rental and car dealerships and to places offering some kind of retail service such as paying electricity bills, high street solicitors or travel agencies.
How to tag
shop=*
shop=* is the primary key used for shops.
You are free to use values that match your needs as a mapper and your local or country environment, culture and language.
Please use the singular form, for example:
- butcher not butchers nor butcher's for describing a profession
- wine not wines for a product group
amenity=*
Certain categories are mapped using the amenity=* mainly for historical reasons.
Eating and drinking places are also mapped as amenities:
craft=*
For manufacturing and selling small scale series use craft=*.
- craft=carpenter Workplace or office of Carpenters that work with timber to construct, install and maintain buildings, furniture, and other objects.
- craft=shoemaker A place where shoes, boots, sandals, clogs and moccasins are created, repaired or altered to fit personal needs.
- craft=electrician Workplace or office of an electrician which is a tradesman specialized in electrical wiring of buildings, stationary machines and related equipment.
- craft=photographer Workplace or office of a person who takes photographs using a camera.
office=*
Other places of business may be mapped with office=*.
Other Considerations
If the shop is closed or not used it can be tagged disused:shop=* (see disused=*), but it is more common for a shop to be temporarily unoccupied, so shop=vacant is found more frequently.
If using the "vacant" keyword, consider prefixing the "shop" tag like so: vacant:shop=*. This way data consumers can treat all "shop" tags as valid shops instead of keeping a "blacklist".
Use landuse=retail to describe an area where retail activity is concentrated.
Buildings
The outline of a shop is mapped as a closed way, representing the area on the ground occupied by the outlet. In many cases, the outline of a shop on the ground will equate to the outline of a building. Where this is the case, a tag such as building=retail is required to represent the outline of a building. Mapping the shop and building as a single object allows data users to prioritise rendering based on shop area.
In cases where shops occupy a land area larger than a building (a common occurrence, for example, with shop=garden_centre), the outline of the shop then represents the complete footprint of the outlet on the ground. Any buildings within that footprint will need to be added individually.
Often multiple shops / offices etc. are located within a larger building. Examples include kiosks within a railway station, or individual outlets within a shopping mall. In those cases, normal practice is to use a separate building outline to represent the overall structure. Individual shop outlines can be used represent the units within (avoiding buildings inside other buildings), but these outlines are often unknown (or at least not public information). It is more common to use simple nodes for shops inside larger buildings.
Identity
A variety of approaches are used to record the identity of a shop:
- name=* is intended to hold the name as displayed on the shop. This is usually the biggest logo or text you can find on a shop. It's what people call the shop when referring to it. Sometimes this overlaps with the operator tag.
- operator=* is intended to hold the name of the company or person that runs it. For branches of a large chain contributors use either the name of the chain (e.g. "name=Tesco"), or the specific branch (e.g. "name=Tesco Dover"). Some chains display different names on their different types of store (e.g. "Tesco Extra", or "Tesco Express"). At present some contributors choose the name tag, and some the operator tag to show this information.
- brand=* has been used to indicate the brand of the retailer, this tag was intended to show the brands which a retailer stocks. It is normally used in this way for distributors who offer a limited range of brands (e.g. in the motor trade, as "shop=car, name=Bristol Street Motors, brand=Vauxhall").
- strapline=* holds descriptive catch-phrases which are on a shop's sign but are not part of the shop's name.
- Avoid place annotations in name: Some organizations with multiple outlets refer to an individual one using place annotations (e.g. a website could list "My Cars London"), while the place isn't visible on the building (i.e. signs show only "My Cars"). In that case, it's advised to not include the place annotation in the name. Consider the resulting map if most shops had the place appended, this would add redundant text and clutter the appearance of the map. In most cases the place annotation is obvious from the location of the shop, if not, it can be included as a branch=* tag when explicitly needed (e.g. it might not be derived from its location).
Country Specific Lists of Values
Feel free to develop lists of values here that match the needs of your country.
Greece
WikiProject_Greece/Taglist. Some of the tags are with the shop=*.
UK
See United Kingdom retail chains for more information and to keep tagging consistent.
If in doubt, the following examples show how previous contributors have handled some common dilemmas:
- Food shops: The most common tags for non-specialised food shops are shop=supermarket and shop=convenience. Compared to a supermarket, a convenience store is relatively small (less than 3,000 sq. ft. of floor space), and has extended opening hours. One alternative, documented on the shop page for a small general food store is shop=grocery, but traditional grocers are rare, and use of this is not common. Common tags for specialised food stores include shop=butcher, shop=bakery, shop=greengrocer
- Hardware and DIY: shop=doityourself is the most common form (particularly for the larger chains), but shop=hardware is also widely used. For more specialised outlets, consider less common alternatives such as shop=ironmonger, shop=tool_hire, shop=builders_merchant, shop=trade
- Coffee: use shop=coffee for a shop that specialises in selling the ingredients, amenity=cafe for one which sells the drink
- Chemists and pharmacies: use amenity=pharmacy if they handle prescriptions, shop=chemist if not
- Bookmaker or betting shop: use shop=bookmaker
- Estate agents, insurance agents and solicitors: Different contributors prefer office=* or shop=* for these services. For estate agents shop=estate_agent is more common; for solicitors office=solicitor, and for insurance agents office=insurance
Most shops are tagged according to the type of goods that they sell, but because some business models are distinctive and widely understood, there are also some exceptions.
- In the UK a charity shop (shop=charity) normally means one that it is staffed by volunteers, used to raise funds, and stocks a range of goods, including many that have been donated. Because they do not follow quite the same format, Charity shops that specialise (in books, clothing, bicycles, etc) are often tagged according to their specialisation instead.
- Some chains do not easily fit the standard categories, with the result that a variety of different tags have been used. To date contributors have normally tagged Argos stores as shop=catalogue; Maplin, Currys and Comet as shop=electronics, PC World as shop=computer, Matalan as shop=clothes; Homebase and Wickes as shop=doityourself; WHSmith as either shop=books or shop=newsagent and Boots as amenity=pharmacy (sometimes shop=optician). There is little consistency in the way that branches of Halfords are tagged.