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An idea, after all the threads about "is Random Store any good".
The Store Finder is often missing stores (seperate issue), but for the stores that are there, could we get a comments section added?
Articles (another tumbleweed area) has them, so Dakka could handle it, I expect.

With Pretre doing the excellent rumours thing, how much effort would it be to police a rating system for stores?
Vet low scores for whinging, and high scores for fanboi-ism and shills, and people could see what to expect from a store before they buy.
Having a purchases-to-problems ratio could be added, or a severity of issue, if a mega-order got swallowed getting a higher ranking than a "the redshirt smells" problem.

An issue would be online sites. There's not really anywhere on the map to put most web-only sites. Make a section for online-only, and mark B&M stores with sites, maybe.

Also, with a marker for anywhere that has Dakka ads, it'd show Dakka's slight bias towards the store/site. Just as a pointer, but handy if making decisions, and also for tracking traffic.

Tear away.....

The idea of a score is useful for online only stores, but is not beneficial to B&M stores.

B&M stores can have bad days, random problems with staff and changes in management over holidays and busy periods. As such, the score that a subset of users might give a store is not representative of how good the store is, and how good a store is differs from person to person anyway as it is fairly subjective based on the type of gamer someone is (for example, I am a painter more than a gamer so I love stores with massive hobby areas and display cabinets but dont care about gaming space).

A general discussion thread for each store has some benefits but needs to be carefully crafted in a different way to normal threads to avoid unfairly penalising someone's real world business in the event of an off day. I wouldnt want to be responsible for the destruction of someone's livelihood because they had a bad response to a vocal handful of customers who then took it out on them online beyond reasonable proportions.

The store finder gets a moderate amount of traffic and the articles section gets a lot of deep linking from search engines which serves as an intro for people to dakka. The lack of discussion content on each does make it look like not much goes on there, but there is new stuff added to each place each day and a constant stream of corrections and updates in the store finder.

The store finder is missing a lot of stores and it would be a big benefit for someone to go through wargaming magazines and add any verified stores (by checking their websites, phoning them, etc) to create an ultimate, definitive list that we could all benefit from, but right now having stores that are listed and managed by users who frequent those stores ensures that we get a good level of updating.

Online stores have an article listing them somewhere, but there are so many and with they come and go with such frequency that we leave people to just use those who advertise generally as they are the most established or have the most interesting promotions at any given time. At some point it would be worth making the article into a formal link in the store finder and updating it though.

Thanks for the feedback.

Everything there makes sense, and was what I was expecting, really.

I was overly critical of the stores and articles sections, yes.
I alone have added 11 stores to the Store Finder, but I get to travel the area with work, which most people don't. How Leeds gets no stores listed is a mystery, until last week.
The articles I use are 40k army profiles and tactics, and most up already are pre-6th ed. I'm no article writer. There are lots going up that I don't look at though, so don't notice the new ones.

I was thinking of a breakdown of the store score, along the lines of
range of stock,
willingness/ability to order in unstocked items,
likelihood of getting a game in,
chances the store isn't open when expected to be,
Stuff that a general description wouldn't normally suggest.

If the store has an account on Dakka, forwarding the comment to them, as customer feedback.

And yes, online stores are very different to B&M. Lots are one-man hobby shops, as opposed to massive warehouses.

I'll have a poke through the articles and see how things work at present.

That sort of breakdown would be helpful, but the store finder does not get updated as frequently as would justify that data, and about 40% of the stores are only updated by the (biased) owners of the stores. At the end of the day, I dont think people will be put off going to a store if there is one within reach of them in any given location and the only real purpose of a score would be the few cases where someone is travelling and only has time to visit one of the three or four stores in a given city.

Here's the old article btw: http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/Buying_Bitz_and_Wargaming_Supplies_Online