How to See Shopify Sales by City, Region and Country

Shopify's sales reports can be grouped by location, so you can see sales by country and region in the admin, and by city with a more detailed report or an order export. The first decision is which address to group by: shipping address for anything about delivery or local demand, billing address only when you care about who paid. This guide covers that choice, four practical uses for the report, how to avoid being misled by small numbers, and why to split by sales channel as well.

Billing address or shipping address?

Use the shipping address for almost every purpose. It records where the goods went, which is what matters for delivery cost, local marketing and stock placement.

The two addresses differ more often than you might expect:

• Gifts. The buyer is in one city and the recipient in another. Gift-heavy periods widen the gap.
• Work addresses. People have parcels sent to an office in a different town from their home.
• Trade buyers. A head office pays, and a branch or warehouse receives.

Before reading any location report, check which address it uses. Shopify labels the dimension, for example billing country or shipping city, and two reports with the same title in different tools may not use the same one.

Some orders have no shipping address at all: digital products, in-store purchases and local pickup. Decide how to treat them, usually by the billing address or the location of the shop, and keep the rule the same each month.

What can you do with sales by location?

Four uses come up again and again.

Local advertising. Knowing which cities and regions already buy lets you test ads aimed at those areas, or at similar areas you have not reached. Compare orders per region before and after, not just clicks.

Shipping zones and rates. If a large share of orders goes to a region where your delivery charge loses money, the report shows it. It also shows where a faster service or a nearer fulfilment point would cover enough orders to justify itself.

Pop-ups, events and stockists. A physical presence makes most sense where online customers already cluster. A city list ranked by customers, not only by revenue, is a reasonable shortlist for where to hold an event or approach a retailer.

Tax exposure. Sales tax in the United States and VAT in Europe are both tied to where you sell, and obligations can arise as sales into a state or country grow. A running total by state and by country is the starting point for that conversation; ask your adviser which address the totals should be built on. This guide is not tax advice; our pieces on tracking US sales tax nexus and VAT reporting for the EU and UK describe what to keep in view, and an adviser should confirm what applies to you.

How do you avoid being misled by small numbers?

Check the order count before the revenue. City-level data is thin for most stores, and thin data produces dramatic-looking results from very little.

An example with made-up round figures. Say a store's report shows one small town at the top of its growth table, with sales up from $200 to $1,400 on the previous month. That is a sevenfold rise, and it came from a single customer placing one $1,200 order. Meanwhile the store's largest city went from 400 orders to 440. The second change involves forty more buying decisions, and it is the one worth acting on.

Habits that help:

• Show orders and customers next to sales. A location with three orders tells you nothing yet.
• Set a minimum. Ignore growth percentages for any place below a number of orders you choose in advance.
• Lengthen the period. A quarter or a year gives a city list that a single month cannot.
• Roll up. When cities are too sparse, read by region or state, or by postcode area.
• Watch spelling. City is a free-text field at checkout. The same place can appear under several spellings or with a district name instead. Country and region come from fixed lists and are more dependable.

Why break location down by sales channel?

Because a location total can hide two different businesses. Online store orders, point of sale orders and orders from other channels are mixed together unless you separate them.

A store with a shop in one city will see that city dominate through the till. Strip those out and the online picture for the same city may be ordinary. Equally, a marketplace or social channel may be strong in a country where your own online store sells little, which tells you the demand is there and your site is not yet capturing it.

How do you get the report?

In the Shopify admin, open a sales report and group it by a location dimension. For cuts the admin does not offer, export orders with shipping city, region, country and sales channel, then pivot in a spreadsheet. Our guide to exporting and scheduling Shopify reports covers the export side.

Marka Metrics includes a geography dashboard on its free plan and breaks sales down by city and by sales channel, following Shopify's sales definitions so the totals agree with your admin. Location figures built from orders are complete. Location figures for visits depend on tracking consent and are partial, a distinction explained in the guide to what Shopify analytics show and leave out.

A short checklist

1. Confirm whether a report uses billing or shipping address.
2. Use shipping address for delivery and local demand questions.
3. Put order and customer counts next to every sales figure.
4. Set a minimum order count before reading growth by city.
5. Split location by sales channel.
6. Keep running totals by US state and by country, and take tax questions to an adviser.

A location report earns its place when it changes a decision about ads, delivery or where to turn up in person. To have sales by city, country and channel ready without building the pivot each month, see Marka Metrics.