ChurnMiserWhat is a good repeat purchase rate for a Shopify store?
Repeat purchase rate is the share of your customers who have bought from you more than once. Here's the exact formula, honest benchmarks, why the number moves, and six ways to raise it.
What is repeat purchase rate?
Repeat purchase rate is the percentage of your customers who have bought from your store more than once. If 1,000 people have ordered in the past year and 240 of them came back for a second (or third, or tenth) order, your repeat purchase rate is 24%.
It is arguably the clearest single read on retention health, because it strips out everything acquisition can hide. Revenue can grow while retention quietly collapses — as long as ad spend keeps replacing the customers who never return. Repeat purchase rate exposes that treadmill: it tells you what fraction of the people you paid to acquire ever produced a second order.
It sits in a family of related numbers. Customer churn rate measures the share of existing customers you lose during a period, while repeat purchase rate measures the share of all customers who came back at all. They move together but answer different questions — churn is a flow you watch month to month, repeat rate is a snapshot of cumulative behavior. For how the whole dashboard fits together, see our guide to ecommerce retention KPIs and benchmarks.
How to calculate repeat purchase rate
The formula is simple; the discipline is in defining the measurement window and sticking to it.
A worked example on a trailing 12-month window:
Three measurement rules keep the number honest:
- Fix the window. Trailing 12 months is the common default. A longer window flatters the number (customers get more time to repeat); a shorter one punishes slow purchase cycles.
- Keep the window constant over time. The trend only means something if June's number is measured the same way as January's.
- Mind Shopify's built-in metric. Shopify's "returning customer rate" answers a different question — of the customers who ordered this period, how many had bought before. A store with shrinking acquisition can show a rising returning-customer rate while actual repeat behavior stalls. Compute repeat purchase rate on your full customer base for the real picture.
What is a good repeat purchase rate?
Benchmarks here deserve honesty: published figures come from different vendors measuring different stores over different windows, so they cluster rather than agree. The cluster is still useful. Across most published ecommerce datasets, the typical repeat purchase rate lands somewhere around 20–30%. Treat the ranges below as directional orientation, not laboratory precision.
| Repeat purchase rate | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Under 15% | Mostly one-time buyers — revenue depends on constant acquisition |
| 15–20% | Below the typical range — clear room to improve |
| 20–30% | The band most published ecommerce studies cluster around |
| 30–40% | Strong — repeat revenue is compounding |
| Over 40% | Exceptional — usually consumables, replenishment cycles, or subscription-like behavior |
Don't read the table as a grade. A 19% rate can be excellent for a furniture store and alarming for a coffee brand — which is exactly why the next section matters more than any benchmark.
What moves the number
Before comparing yourself to anyone, understand the structural forces acting on your rate:
- Product type. Consumables (coffee, supplements, skincare) get reorders by nature; durables (furniture, electronics) don't. This one factor explains most of the spread between categories.
- Purchase cycle vs. measurement window. A mattress brand measured on a 12-month window will look weak no matter how loved it is. If your natural cycle is long, lengthen the window — or accept that your "good" is lower than the ecommerce average.
- Acquisition mix. Deep-discount first orders attract one-and-done deal hunters, and gift buyers rarely return for themselves. Two stores with identical products can post very different repeat rates purely on who they acquire.
- Assortment breadth. A single-product store gives a satisfied customer nothing to come back for. Cross-sell range and consumable add-ons widen the path to order two.
Repeat purchase rate is also the main lever behind customer lifetime value — CLV is largely a function of how many times a customer comes back and what they spend each time. See how to calculate customer lifetime value on Shopify for that math, computed from real order data.
Six ways to raise your repeat purchase rate
- Time follow-ups to the reorder cycle. Send replenishment reminders slightly before your typical time-between-orders, not on a generic calendar. A coffee customer who reorders every 5 weeks should hear from you in week 4.
- Obsess over the second order. The jump from one order to two is the hinge of the whole metric — customers who buy twice are far more likely to buy a third time. Target first-time buyers within 30–60 days with a cross-sell based on what they actually bought.
- Segment before you send. New, loyal, at-risk, and dormant customers need different messages and different offers. RFM segmentation is the fastest way to build those groups from order history alone.
- Reach at-risk customers before they lapse. Waiting for a customer to go quiet for six months makes every win-back harder. Per-customer churn-risk scoring lets you act while they're still reachable.
- Protect margin in your offers. Blanket 20%-off blasts train deal-hunting and erode the profit repeat orders are supposed to deliver. Size discounts to the customer — deepest for high-value customers at genuine risk, none for people who were coming back anyway.
- Automate the loop with a retention app. Manually exporting CSVs to find lapsing customers doesn't survive contact with a busy quarter. See our roundup of the best Shopify customer retention apps for tools that do this continuously.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good repeat purchase rate for Shopify?
Most ecommerce stores see a repeat purchase rate of roughly 20–30%, so anything above 30% is strong and anything under 20% usually signals a retention gap. Consumable categories with short reorder cycles (supplements, coffee, beauty) trend toward the high end; durable goods trend lower. Judge your number against your own purchase cycle, not a universal target.
How do you calculate repeat purchase rate?
Repeat purchase rate = (customers with two or more orders ÷ total customers) × 100, measured over a fixed window such as the trailing 12 months. If 240 of 1,000 customers ordered at least twice last year, the rate is (240 ÷ 1,000) × 100 = 24%.
What is the average repeat purchase rate for ecommerce?
Published ecommerce studies generally cluster around 20–30%, though the honest answer is that averages vary with category, purchase cycle, and how the measurement window is defined. Consumables average higher, often 30% and above; one-off durable purchases average lower, often under 15%.
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