Retention rate
Retention rate (also reorder rate or repeat purchase rate) is the share of customers who shop more than once from an ecommerce website compared to the total number of customers. Retention rate is a huge indicator of ecommerce performance as it measures:
- How loyal customers are
- How well your efforts manage to retain customersю
- How much people like your products
Higher retention rate means higher ROI on acquisition costs paid. It also helps keep your cash flow predictable with regular customers.
The formula for calculating retention rate is:
RPR = Repeat buyers number/ Total number of buyers
Here’s the average retention rate by niche as per our recent survey:
| Tea | 21% |
| Own food products | 24.5% |
| Beauty | 26% |
| Apparel | 26% |
| Meal delivery | 29% |
| Supplements | 29% |
| Coffee | 30% |
| Pet products | 31.5% |
| High-performance sports clothing | 33% |
| CBD | 36% |
| Average | 28% |
We recommend using a retention analysis tool to monitor your retention rate.
Additional resources
Retention rate for DTC brandson Metrilo blog
on Metrilo blog
See also
Customer retentionPopular— Customer retention is the process of engaging customers continuously and stimulating repeat orders. Customer retention marketing uses data to personalize and guide the customer journey, build a deeper relationship with the customer, and win their loyalty a
— Repeat orders can mean two things in ecommerce: when a product gets reordered by the same customers or when a customer just places another order. Both are signs of high customer satisfaction and good customer retention. If you monitor product performance,
