Solutions for finding website visitor's geolocation

Question

I am aware that there are many services which provide geolocation tools for working out where users are visiting from. The website I'm working on is an e-commerce site which runs in multi-territories. When a visitor hits the website it should work out where they are from and show the relevant currency/language for the user.

In the past we have used maxmind but I'm wondering if there are better solutions out there. I'm calling out to developers with experience in this area to share their knowledge and expertise on what's available and what the pro's and con's are of various solutions.

Additional info: The website in question runs mainly on a combination of Java (Spring) and PHP (Kohana), so libraries for either of those can also be considered. We already have a solution for working out which currency to use provided we can obtain the ISO code of the visitor's country.

Update
Thought I'd leave a rough explanation of the outcome for anyone who visits this question.

Geolocation: I've used freegoip for detecting user location as suggested in this thread.
Language: When working out which language to use for the user I have used PHP to check the language set in the user's browser: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.http-negotiate-language.php

Hi, we built ipdata.co for this exact usecase, our API provides the currency symbol, currency code, user timezone, hosted country flag icons as well as location data. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/47141807/3176550 below for a PHP example. — Jonathan, Nov 06 '17 at 16:47

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '12 at 17:55

On a small-ish ecommerce site I worked on we used Akamai to provide geolocation data which would serve customized advertisements and prices based on which state the visitor was in. Check this out for more information: http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/personalization.html.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 31 '14 at 22:01

Another option is the http://ipinfo.io API (my own service). Here's an example of what the API returns.

$ curl ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8
{
  "ip": "8.8.8.8",
  "hostname": "google-public-dns-a.google.com",
  "loc": "37.385999999999996,-122.0838",
  "org": "AS15169 Google Inc.",
  "city": "Mountain View",
  "region": "CA",
  "country": "US",
  "phone": 650
}

You can also query for specific fields, such as country in this example:

$ curl ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8/country
US

More details are available at http://ipinfo.io/developers. It's free for up to 1,000 requests per day and you can signup to a paid plan beyond that (see http://ipinfo.io/pricing)

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 20 '20 at 07:37

IPGeolocation would be a better option for you. They build their own database and update their database twice a week. They have 99% accuracy at the country level and 75% at the city level. They also offer paid as well as free (1000 requests/day) API plans that you can see here: https://ipgeolocation.io/pricing.html.

To facilitate the developers, IPGeolocation API offers some SDKs for various programming languages:

The endpoint to get geolocation information of an IP address:
This endpoint is meant to be called from the server side.

$ curl 'https://api.ipgeolocation.io/ipgeo?apiKey=API_KEY&ip=8.8.8.8'

The JSON response will be:

{
    "ip": "8.8.8.8",
    "hostname": "google-public-dns-a.google.com",
    "continent_code": "NA",
    "continent_name": "North America",
    "country_code2": "US",
    "country_code3": "USA",
    "country_name": "United States",
    "country_capital": "Washington",
    "state_prov": "California",
    "district": "",
    "city": "Mountain View",
    "zipcode": "94043",
    "latitude": "37.4229",
    "longitude": "-122.085",
    "is_eu": false,
    "calling_code": "+1",
    "country_tld": ".us",
    "languages": "en-US,es-US,haw,fr",
    "country_flag": "https://ipgeolocation.io/static/flags/us_64.png",
    "isp": "Level 3 Communications",
    "connection_type": "",
    "organization": "Google Inc.",
    "geoname_id": "5375480",
    "currency": {
        "code": "USD",
        "name": "US Dollar",
        "symbol": "$"
    },
    "time_zone": {
        "name": "America/Los_Angeles",
        "offset": -8,
        "current_time": "2019-01-14 03:30:00.135-0800",
        "current_time_unix": 1547465400.135,
        "is_dst": false,
        "dst_savings": 1
    }
}

You can also filter specific parameters from the entire response.

After getting the visitor's location, you can also redirect him to the page according to his language/currency by using this simple code:

var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); 
request.onreadystatechange = function() { 
if (4 === this.readyState && 200 === this.status) { 
var json = JSON.parse(this.responseText); 
if (json.country_code2 == "FR" && window.location.hostname !== "http://fr.exmaple.com") { 
window.location.href = "https://fr.exmaple.com"; 
} else if (json.country_code2 == "US" && window.location.hostname !== "http://us.exmaple.com") { 
window.location.href = "https://us.exmaple.com"; 
} else if (json.country_code2 == "UK" && window.location.hostname !== "http://uk.exmaple.com") { 
window.location.href = "https://uk.exmaple.com"; 
}else { 
window.location.href = "https://exmaple.com"; 
} 
} 
} 
request.open("GET", "https ://api.ipgeolocation.io/ipgeo?apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY&fields=country_code2", false); 
request.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json"); 
request.send();

I hope it would be the best option for you.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 06 '12 at 18:05

0

I've been working on a project that requires geolocation, unfortunately I find that most services are working on MaxMind database , at last I used freegeoip , free and so far precise in my region.

Regards.

answered Jul 06 '12 at 18:05

Mohamed Farrag

1,682
2
19
41

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:27

0

For the language, it should come through from the browser. That's more useful and more accurate than geolocation.

For example, if you were traveling with your laptop and you used the internet, you'd probably want to see things in your language than the native language of the country you were in.

Look at this question for more information: Checking browser's language by PHP?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:27

Community

1
1

answered Jul 06 '12 at 18:35

databyss

6,318
1
20
24

That's a good point. When implementing the detection of locations I intend to notify the user of the detection and give them the option to change language and currency. Similar to what Etsy does when you first visit. – diggersworld Jul 06 '12 at 19:02

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 06 '17 at 16:45

As I mentioned we built https://ipdata.co for this exact usecase

$ip = '78.8.53.5';
$details = json_decode(file_get_contents("https://api.ipdata.co/{$ip}"));

This will return

{
    "ip": "78.8.53.5",
    "city": "G\u0142og\u00f3w",
    "region": "Lower Silesia",
    "country_name": "Poland",
    "country_code": "PL",
    "continent_name": "Europe",
    "continent_code": "EU",
    "latitude": 51.663,
    "longitude": 16.0757,
    "asn": "AS12741",
    "organisation": "Netia SA",
    "postal": "67-200",
    "currency": "PLN",
    "currency_symbol": "z\u0142",
    "calling_code": "48",
    "flag": "https://ipdata.co/flags/pl.png",
    "time_zone": "Europe/Warsaw"
}

This has a number of Ecommerce relevant datapoints, specifically

Currency Symbol
Currency Code
Country Flag Icon
Country Calling Code

The currency symbol z\u0142 is ASCII for the Zloty

zł

Solutions for finding website visitor's geolocation

6 Answers6

Linked