Visualize your e-commerce data (for free)

Step by step process using exclusively free tools

I’m ironically terrible at geography for a real estate guy. I actually skipped Geography class to take an extra math class in middle school…

So it should come as no surprise that I leaned into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) when I first started using e-commerce data to inform real estate decisions.

One of my very first newsletters was on the topic of MSAs, how I believe that geographic grain will be the future of retail reporting, and what all you can do with it.

And in this newsletter I’ll deep dive into HOW to do it — for free! The end outputs should look like this:

It starts with an “order log”

Most POS systems will let you download the minimum raw data needed for cursory geospatial analysis. Then you just need to add the formulas that convert zip codes to MSAs (you can find this at the resource hub or online for free or cheap).

Then download a copy of our MSA Dashboard and load up the Input tab — and all the tables automatically update!

Now for the visualization

You’ll also need to convert the addresses (you can use zip codes too but they’re less precise). Thankfully, geoco.io let’s you do some data appending for free, and then it’s pretty cheap after the limit.

Then head over to kepler.gl/demo to upload the list of addresses:

And then you’re done!

There’s a ton of other ways to visualize basic data too: