Explore Geographical Relationships in BigCommerce Data with Power Map

The CData ODBC Driver for BigCommerce is easy to set up and use with self-service analytics solutions like Power BI: Microsoft Excel provides built-in support for the ODBC standard. This article shows how to load the current BigCommerce data into Excel and start generating location-based insights on BigCommerce data in Power Map.

Create an ODBC Data Source for BigCommerce

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

BigCommerce authentication is based on the standard OAuth flow. To authenticate, you must initially create an app via the Big Commerce developer platform where you can obtain an OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL. These three parameters will be set as connection properties to your driver.

Additionally, in order to connect to your BigCommerce Store, you will need your StoreId. To find your Store Id please follow these steps:

1. Log in to your BigCommerce account.
2. From the Home Page, select Advanced Settings > API Accounts.
3. Click Create API Account.
4. A text box named API Path will appear on your screen.
5. Inside you can see a URL of the following structure: https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{Store Id}/v3.
6. As demonstrated above, your Store Id will be between the 'stores/' and '/v3' path paramters.
7. Once you have retrieved your Store Id you can either click Cancel or proceed in creating an API Account in case you do not have one already.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Import BigCommerce Data into Excel

You can import data into Power Map either from an Excel spreadsheet or from Power Pivot. For a step-by-step guide to use either method to import BigCommerce data, see the "Using the ODBC Driver" section in the help documentation.

Geocode BigCommerce Data

After importing the BigCommerce data into an Excel spreadsheet or into PowerPivot, you can drag and drop BigCommerce entities in Power Map. To open Power Map, click any cell in the spreadsheet and click Insert -> Map.

In the Choose Geography menu, Power Map detects the columns that have geographic information. In the Geography and Map Level menu in the Layer Pane, you can select the columns you want to work with. Power Map then plots the data. A dot represents a record that has this value. When you have selected the geographic columns you want, click Next.

Select Measures and Categories

You can then simply select columns: Measures and categories are automatically detected. The available chart types are Stacked Column, Clustered Column, Bubble, Heat Map, and Region.