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Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform

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At a glance

Order count by state / region (billing_state for US, province for CA, region for UK / AU) over the trailing 30 days. The sub-country geographic decomposition that complements BC AOV by Country and BC Orders by Channel. Useful for state-tax routing decisions, regional shipping zone optimisation, and identifying geographic concentration risk (one state contributes 40%+ of revenue = exposure to that state’s consumer trends).

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your BigCommerce data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A US homewares brand on BigCommerce Pro. Snapshot for 1 Apr to 30 Apr 26, US-only view (top 10 states by order count). What’s interesting:
  1. CA + NY together = 39% of order count. This is healthy concentration for a US homewares brand; the two largest population states should be ~40%. Concentration above 50% would be a risk (single-state-trend exposure); concentration below 25% would suggest under-coverage in core states.
  2. The state-AOV pattern reveals demographics. Higher-AOV states (NY, MA, WA) trend urban / premium; volume states (TX, FL, GA) trend value-conscious. The merchant could test premium-positioning ads in high-AOV states and value-positioning in volume states, the same product, two different funnels.
  3. MA at 4.6% but $142 AOV is the standout. The Boston / Cambridge demographic loves the brand; AOV is 18% above headline. Worth investigating, is there an academic / professional cluster the brand resonates with? Doubling MA spend would likely produce above-average ROI.
  4. Long tail at 14.6% across 40 states is moderate. Healthy stores see 15-25% in the long tail (national reach with concentration); below 10% means under-covered (geographic gap to fill); above 30% means under-concentrated (no flagship markets).
  5. Sales-tax routing implications: states with >5% revenue share need tax-nexus consideration. CA, NY, TX, FL, IL all qualify here. Cross-reference with BC Settings → Tax configurations to ensure proper sales-tax collection in these states.
Action priority order:
  1. Identify top-3 states for marketing concentration; ensure your ads spend matches your customer base.
  2. Identify high-AOV niche states (MA in this example) for double-down testing.
  3. Audit long-tail coverage, are there mid-population states (NC, VA, MI, AZ, CO) absent from the top 10 that should be present?
  4. Cross-reference with BC AOV by Country for the country-level comparison.
  5. For sales-tax purposes, ensure states above 5% revenue have tax-nexus configured in BC.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in BigCommerce Control Panel: Analytics → Customers (Plus / Pro / Enterprise) shows per-country customer counts but not natively per-state. Reports → Custom lets you build a state-level report. For tax-nexus configuration: Settings → Tax → Tax Zones shows configured tax states. For shipping-zone analysis: Settings → Shipping → Shipping Zones shows configured zones; cross-reference against this card’s state distribution. Why our state breakdown may differ from BC reports: Cross-connector reconciliation (when shipping and tax integrations are connected): The orders-by-state view is BC-aligned with similar cards on Shopify (per billing_address.province_code) and Adobe Commerce (per region_code); merchant-facing semantics are equivalent.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My UK orders show no state breakdown. Why? Because UK addresses don’t widely use state / county fields. BC’s address forms collect city and postcode but not always county. The card auto-degrades to country-level for UK; configure under Settings → Geography to enforce postcode-prefix grouping if you want pseudo-region UK reads (London, Manchester, Birmingham, etc.). My CA (Canada) orders show provinces correctly but my US states are jumbled. Why? US BC stores using “California” vs “CA” inconsistently in the billing form. We normalise to ISO 3166-2 codes; if your customers hand-type, expect 2-5% data quality issues. Configure address validation in BC Settings to enforce the dropdown. Should I attribute orders to billing or shipping state? Depends on use case. Marketing decisions: billing (where the customer lives). Shipping decisions: shipping (where the package goes). Tax decisions: depends on the state; most are ship-to. Default is billing; configure under Settings → Geography → Attribution. **My state breakdown shows Hawaii at 0.5% but my AOV in Hawaii is 250(morethan2xnormal).Real?∗∗Yes.Hawaii/Alaska/remote−areacustomershaveshipping−inflatedAOV;theactualbasketvalueissimilartomainlandbuttheshippingcostadds250 (more than 2x normal). Real?** Yes. Hawaii / Alaska / remote-area customers have shipping-inflated AOV; the actual basket value is similar to mainland but the shipping cost adds 50-100. For comparable per-state AOV, configure Settings → Display → Exclude shipping. I’m in NY but my BC store is registered in DE. Are state collections correct? This card uses customer billing state, not your business state. NY customers buying from your DE-incorporated store appear under NY here. For tax-nexus compliance, this is the right view (you owe NY tax on NY sales above NY’s threshold). My multi-storefront US + UK reads aggregated. Should it? Default per-storefront. Use the storefront filter to switch. Aggregating US + UK states is rarely useful (different country tax rules); split is the norm. Why is my “long tail” so big (40% of orders across 30+ states)? Geographic spread suggests national-brand reach without flagship-state concentration. Healthy stores typically have 60-75% in top-10 states; 40% in long tail with 60% in top-10 is normal-tilted-toward-coverage. Below 40% top-10 means under-concentrated; above 80% top-10 means under-covered. I see orders from “Other” / “Unknown” state. What does that mean? Orders where the state field was empty or didn’t map. About 1-2% on most US-heavy stores. Higher percentages indicate address form quality issues; audit the BC checkout form. Should I run state-specific promotions based on this card? Possibly. State-by-state promotions work well for (a) free-shipping campaigns to remote-area states, (b) tax-holiday-day campaigns timed to specific state events (TX has back-to-school tax holiday), (c) regional brand-building (NE patriotism for Boston-based brand). They don’t work well for general percentage-discount campaigns. My B2B portal shows mostly NY but my B2B customers are nationwide. Why? Probably the wholesale accounts use a corporate HQ billing address. A B2B customer headquartered in NY but with offices nationwide will appear as NY. Configure Settings → Geography → Use shipping state to attribute B2B by delivery location instead.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Orders by State/Region is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across BigCommerce and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.