I just launched sales by state, a new plugin brand with its own site. The idea isn't new to me though. It started years ago as a single report inside a much bigger WooCommerce plugin, and it ended up being the best seller I've ever shipped, better than the plugin it lived inside. That told me the idea was bigger than one feature buried in one plugin for one platform. So I'm rebuilding it as its own product, and this time I want to take it everywhere ecommerce happens. Here's why, what I've planned, and how I'm building it in public.
Why I'm building this
Years ago I added a simple report to a bigger WooCommerce plugin: revenue broken down by state. It was a small addition next to everything else in that plugin, but it consistently outsold every other feature I built into it. Store owners kept coming back for that one report, and support tickets kept confirming why: US sellers needed it for sales tax, and everyone else just liked knowing where their business was actually coming from.
That's the kind of signal you don't get to ignore. A feature outselling the plugin it was born from is a pretty clear sign it deserves to be its own thing, built properly, with a name, a roadmap, and room to grow well beyond what it could ever be as a side feature. So that's what sales by state is now, a dedicated product built around one job: showing you where your revenue actually comes from.
The real problem: sales tax nexus
In the US, this isn't just nice to know. Most states use an "economic nexus" rule: cross a certain amount of revenue or a certain number of transactions in that state, commonly $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions, and you're now required to register and collect sales tax there, even without a single employee or warehouse in that state. Miss it, and the problem doesn't go away, it just waits for an audit to surface it.
Outside the US, the same report tells a different kind of story. There's usually no threshold to cross, but knowing which state, county, province, or region actually drives your business is still genuinely useful, for marketing, for stock decisions, for knowing where to double down. Same report, same numbers, two very different reasons to look at them.
Why this is a vertical
The actual idea behind sales by state has nothing to do with WooCommerce specifically. Any store, on any platform, has orders with a billing or shipping address, and any of those addresses can be grouped by state or region. WooCommerce is just where I happened to build it first, because it's the platform I know best.
That's why sales by state exists as its own brand and its own site now, instead of staying a WooCommerce-only plugin. WooCommerce is live today, and FluentCart, Easy Digital Downloads, and others are next. Building the same idea across different platforms is also a good excuse to properly learn how each one handles orders, data, and extensibility, which is something I've wanted to do for a while.
Building in public
I'll be writing about this here as it happens: what ships, what doesn't work the first time, what merchants ask for, and where the roadmap changes because of it. That's partly for anyone following along, and partly because writing it down keeps me honest about actually shipping instead of just planning.
The next post covers exactly that: the free WooCommerce version, already live on WordPress.org, what it does, and what I'm hoping to learn from the first people using it.
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