Skip to main content
Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform

​
At a glance

Daily order count plotted as an area chart over 90 days. The trend version of Total Orders. Where Total Orders gives you point-in-time numbers, this card shows the daily shape, peaks, troughs, weekly seasonality, and the long-term direction.

​
Calculation

​
Worked example

A US homewares brand on BigCommerce Pro, 90-day window from 13 Jan 26 to 12 Apr 26. What’s interesting:
  1. The 90-day shape: peak around mid-Feb, gradual decline since. The store’s typical-day order count fell from 248 (peak) to 210 (recent), a 15% decline in 6 weeks. Concerning trend even though no individual day looks alarming. The 90-day shape is what catches slow declines that single-period summaries miss.
  2. Campaign spikes are clearly visible. Valentine’s, Spring launch, and the 11 Apr bank holiday all show as 1.5-2x baseline days. Healthy responsiveness to promotions; problematic if the underlying baseline is falling between promotions.
  3. The 28 Mar Spring launch peak (380 orders) was a single-day surge but the days after it didn’t sustain. Compare against the 14 Feb Valentine’s peak which was followed by a multi-day elevated baseline; the Spring launch retained less. That’s a customer-quality signal: the launch acquired campaign-driven first-time buyers who didn’t return.
  4. The mid-week 5 Mar spike (290) with no apparent campaign driver is suspicious. Almost always one of three causes: (a) a viral social post / influencer mention, (b) a competitor outage that pushed traffic to you, (c) a leaked discount code being aggregated. Investigate via BC Top Coupons and social listening.
  5. Day-of-week pattern visible underneath the trend. Most homewares stores see Saturday and Sunday as peak ordering days; weekends in this trend cluster 30-50% above weekdays. Healthy seasonality, not a problem.
The diagnostic playbook when the trend declines:
  1. Compare 30-day rolling avg to 30-day rolling avg from prior period, smooths out daily noise. A 5%+ rolling-avg decline is real; under 5% is noise.
  2. Cross-reference Customer Acquisition Trend. Order trend declines driven by new-customer drops are top-of-funnel; driven by repeat-customer drops are retention.
  3. Pair with BC Channel Revenue Mix. Drops usually concentrate in 1-2 channels.
  4. Audit campaign cadence. If campaigns were running steadily and have stopped, the baseline reflects the no-campaign reality, the question becomes whether your campaign cadence is sustainable as the always-on state.
  5. Check the BC Incomplete Rate trend. Rising incomplete with falling orders = checkout friction is the cause.

​
Sibling cards merchants should reference together

​
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in BigCommerce Control Panel: Analytics → Sales → “Orders over time” chart shows the daily order trend. The granularity is daily by default; switch to hourly for intra-day view (Plus / Pro). Standard plan stores need to compute manually from the order export. Why our number may legitimately differ from BC Analytics: Cross-connector reconciliation: Same-metric documentation cross-reference:

​
Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My trend has a clear weekly seasonality, what’s the right way to read it? Use 7-day rolling average instead of raw daily bars. The weekly pattern is real (weekend peaks, mid-week troughs in homewares; opposite in B2B) and obscures the underlying trend. Most stores enable rolling averages as the default chart view. The trend dropped 10% over 60 days but no single day looks alarming, is that a problem? Yes, this is exactly what slow-decline patterns look like. No single day fires an alert (the alert threshold is 20% per period); the cumulative effect is materially negative. Monitoring slow declines is what 90-day trend charts are for. Investigate via the diagnostic playbook in the Worked Example. My today bar is unusually low, did the integration break? Check the time. Today’s bar is partial until end of day. If it’s mid-afternoon and the bar reads zero, check Settings → Sources status. Most stores see today’s bar at 30-70% of normal until ~6pm local time, then it climbs to baseline. My Black Friday week dwarfs the rest of the year, can I exclude it? Yes via filtering. The rolling-90-day view will show the spike for ~3 months after; for a smoother long-term view, run 365-day or year-over-year comparisons. Why does my B2B store look so flat compared to D2C peers? B2B order volume is more even because procurement schedules drive ordering rhythm. D2C is campaign-driven and seasonal; B2B is contract-driven and steady. Both are healthy patterns. Can I overlay revenue on this chart? Not from this card directly. Pair with Revenue Over Time, the two charts together show whether order count and revenue track or diverge. Diverging trends signal AOV mix shifts. My 5 Mar spike has no apparent cause, how do I find it? Almost always one of: (a) a viral social post, (b) a competitor outage, (c) a leaked discount code. Check social platforms for spike-day mentions of your brand; check BC Top Coupons for unusual code activity that day; check status pages for major competitors. Why does my POS terminal look like it has a “ghost orders” pattern, occasional clusters of 30+ on one day, then 0 the next? Almost certainly a sync-batching issue. The terminal uploads in batches; one day’s batch lands the next day in BC. Real-time sync would smooth this out. Configure your POS to sync continuously (not in batches). Can I export this chart to share with the team? Yes, all Vortex IQ charts support PNG/CSV export from the chart menu. For embed in slides, use the PNG; for further analysis, use the CSV. Should I worry about the most recent 3 days being lower than baseline? Most recent 3 days are partially-mature. Today and yesterday will rise as orders trickle in (especially POS and Channel Manager which sync slower). Wait 48 hours before drawing trend conclusions from any 24-72 hour cliff.

​
Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Orders Over Time 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.