Repeat purchase rate
Repeat purchase rate is the share of customers who buy again. A report needs an explicit period, customer identity and distinct orders.
Repeat purchase rate is the proportion of customers who buy again within a defined customer group. Reproducible reporting requires an explicit purchase criterion, period and customer identity. Order lines or records imported more than once must not increase the purchase count.
Deduplicate orders before counting customers
A fictional shop–ERP report considers completed orders in month 2026-10. Here, a repeat purchaser must have at least two different orders within that month. After deduplication, the result is:
Customer identifier | Distinct orders | Count |
|---|---|---|
|
| 2 |
|
| 1 |
|
| 1 |
A second imported row for O-23 must not turn C-2 into a repeat purchaser. Processing first counts distinct order identifiers per customer. One of the two identified customers meets the criterion: 1 / 2 × 100 = 50 %.
null indicates a missing customer association. This guest purchase remains separately visible as a data gap and is not counted as another known customer. Period, time zone and status filters apply equally to numerator and denominator.
This is a custom monthly rule. Shopify also documents customer reports that include earlier orders. The respective rules therefore need to be aligned before comparison. Customer retention over later periods is a different analysis.
Sources
Related terms
- Customer retention rateCustomer retention needs a fixed starting group. A SaaS report must count customers distinctly and separate new accounts from reactivated ones.
- Average order valueAverage order value needs an order-level calculation. An import with multiple line items per order must not inflate the order count.
- Event trackingEvent tracking records selected actions on websites or in apps. A clearly defined trigger explains what a counted event actually establishes.
- UTM parametersUTM parameters label a campaign link with information such as source, medium and campaign.
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