Ordering in r plotly barchart

plotly does it in alphabetical order. If you want to change it, just try to change levels of factor. This would be possible if you give your data in the form of data.frame like here:

library(plotly)

table <- data.frame(x = c("giraffes", "orangutans", "monkeys"),
                    y = c(20, 14, 23))
table$x <- factor(table$x, levels = c("giraffes", "orangutans", "monkeys"))

plot_ly(
    data=table,
    x = ~x,
    y = ~y,
    name = "SF Zoo",
    type = "bar"
)

Plotly will order your axes by the order that is present in the data supplied. In case of character vectors alphabetically; in case of factors by the order of levels. To override this behaviour, you need to define categoryorder and categoryarray for the xaxis inside layout:

library(plotly)
xform <- list(categoryorder = "array",
              categoryarray = c("giraffes", 
                                "orangutans", 
                                "monkeys"))

plot_ly(
 x = c("giraffes", "orangutans", "monkeys"),
 y = c(20, 14, 23),
 name = "SF Zoo",
 type = "bar") %>% 
 layout(xaxis = xform)