Population map: where your customers live

Every order as a point on the real map, with what became of it. Zoom out and nearby points join into numbered circles. Draw a shape on a neighbourhood to see how it buys.

Open Analysis › Population map. Where the city map shows one bubble per city, this one shows one point per order, at the address the parcel went to. That lets you see which neighbourhoods buy from you, not only which cities, for example to choose where to run an advert or whom to target.

Reading the map

Each point is one order. Its colour is what became of the parcel: green delivered, red returned, amber still on the way, grey lost.
Zoom out and nearby points join into one circle with a number in it, so the screen stays clean. A bigger circle is more orders. The coloured slices show how many were delivered, returned, on the way or lost.
Tap a circle to zoom into it. Tap a single point to see the order number, the city, the value and what happened.
The coloured buttons above the map (Delivered, Returned…) show or hide a kind. Switch off Delivered to see only where parcels come back.
Use Dates, Product, Courier and Shop to narrow the map. Without dates it shows the last 90 days.

Busiest areas

The list beside the map splits the country into squares of about 4 km and ranks them. Rank by the most orders, the highest order value, the highest return rate or the best delivery rate (areas with fewer than 5 orders are left out of the two rates, because a few parcels prove nothing). Tap a row to zoom there. Export saves the list as a spreadsheet file.

Draw an area

Press the circle or the shape button on the map. For a circle, press and drag out from its centre. For a shape, click each corner and finish by clicking the first corner again (or double-click).
The Drawn area tab shows the orders inside, how many were delivered or returned, the value, the area in km², the orders per km² and which cities it covers. It also compares them with the whole map: is this area better or worse than your average?
Clear drawing removes the shape.

Where do the positions come from?

When someone orders, Shopify finds their address on the map and gives the position with the order. The tracker keeps it from then on, together with what happened to the parcel. Orders that arrived before this feature existed have no position yet. The yellow bar above the map says how many orders on the map have one, and the Load positions button reads them from Shopify for the last 90 days, 6 months, a year or 2 years. It runs in the background and continues if you leave the page.

NoteShopify does not always find the exact house. Many points are exact to the street, some only to the area or the city, and some addresses cannot be found at all. Orders from WooCommerce shops or spreadsheets, and orders typed in by hand, have no position. They stay in the totals on the dashboard but are not drawn here.

TipLook at the return rate of a neighbourhood before you spend on an advert there. A busy area with many returns is often worth less than a quiet one where almost everything is delivered.