Repeat Purchase Rate
Definition, formula, a worked example, and the mistakes that make it wrong. For DTC brands.
What is repeat purchase rate?
Formula
New customers who order again within 90 days ÷ new customers in the cohort with a full 90 days of history
What each part means
- Cohort
- New customers grouped by the month of their first order. The first order date sets the cohort and starts the 90-day clock.
- Repeat order
- A second qualifying order within the window. Decide in advance whether subscription renewals and fully refunded orders count.
- Full 90 days
- Only include customers whose first order is at least 90 days old. Recent buyers have not had time to come back and drag the rate down.
Worked example
1,000 customers place their first order in March. By the end of June, 250 of them have ordered again within 90 days of their first order. The March cohort's 90-day repeat purchase rate is 250 ÷ 1,000 = 25%.
Run your own numbers: Retention value calculatorWhere the numbers come from
- Shopify orders, with customer ID and order date
- Shopify customer records, to find each customer's first order
- Subscription platform data (such as Recharge) if renewals need to be split out
- Refund lines, if fully refunded orders are excluded
Mistakes that make it wrong
- Comparing it to Shopify's returning customer rate
- Shopify's returning customer rate is returning customers divided by all customers in a period. That answers a different question from a cohort repeat rate.
- Including customers without the full window
- Customers who bought last week cannot have repeated within 90 days yet. Leaving them in makes the rate look worse than it is.
- Not deciding the edge cases
- Subscription renewals, fully refunded orders, and test or staff orders can each move the rate. Write down the rule before anyone builds a dashboard.
- Counting all the gain from a change
- Some customers would have come back anyway. Test a retention change against a holdout group before you count all of it.
What good looks like
There is no single benchmark that fits every brand, because it depends on what you sell and how often people need it. Measure your own rate by first-order month for a few quarters, then set a target from that baseline.
Common questions
What is a 90-day repeat purchase rate?
The share of first-time buyers who order again within 90 days of their first order. Only count customers who have had the full 90 days.
Why does my repeat rate not match Shopify's returning customer rate?
Shopify's rate looks at everyone who ordered in a period. A cohort repeat rate follows new customers from their first order and only counts those with enough time to come back.
What is one point of repeat rate worth?
Multiply new customers by 1% to get extra repeat customers, then by repeat orders each, average order value, and gross margin. With 10,000 new customers, one point is 100 more repeat customers.
Do subscription renewals count as repeat purchases?
Decide and write it down. Many brands split subscribers from one-time buyers, because renewals behave differently from a customer choosing to come back.
Is repeat purchase rate the same as LTV?
No. Repeat rate counts customers who came back. Contribution LTV adds up what all of a cohort's orders were worth after costs over a longer window.
Want repeat purchase rate from your own data?
We build the reports that calculate it the same way every month, from the systems you already use.