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Export Your Order Detail to a Google Earth Map

by: LongIslandClothing.com


This tutorial will explain how you can view where your orders are coming from by using Google Earth.
You can download the Google Earth program for free from Google at earth.google.com.

Your orders will be displayed by zipcode as points on the earth. When you click on them, they will display the order number, date, commission earned and status. If you have multiple orders at the same zipcode, all the data is there, it’s just that all the orders (points on map) will be displayed on top of one another so only the most recent info will be shown when you click them. Also with the Geocoder, it pretty much only works with US zipcodes, so Canadian orders won't be displayed.

(1) Go to your orders section of your shop admin.
Make sure that you have the date range set to how long you want to see the orders for.
Go to the bottom of the list and click the "Table as a CSV file" link and open it in Microsoft Excel

(2) Now you see everything's all bunched up in excel.
Select all of column A. Then go to Data, and select "Text to Columns" in that drop down menu.

(3) Click “Next” for step 1 of 3. Now in this Step 2 of 3, only check the semicolon box, then hit “finish”
Change the name of column B from "State" to "Zipcode".
Now select everything and copy it to your clipboard.

(4) Point your web browser to www.batchgeocode.com
Leave Step#1 as is. Go to Step#2 and delete the sample stuff there.
Paste your clipboard in the Step#2 field.

(5) Go to Step#3 and click the "Validate Source" button. (for those of us with more than 500 orders, a little warning will come up saying that it might take a long time, just click "ok")

(6) Step#4 fields should have set themselves up automatically when you validated.
In Step#5 click the "Run Geocoder" button. (If you have a lot of orders, you can go do something else, because it takes awhile for it to compile.)

(7) Hooray! You did it! You can just quickly review the results using the in-page yahoo maps applet. Now click the "Download to Google Earth (KML) File" button below the map.
Save this file, and open it in Google Earth. And there you go; all of your orders layed right out in front of you. It’s pretty cool.

You can also select the file in Google Earth and change the icon and colors for your displayed order points in the file properties; so you can see them better if you want.