Good morning to everyone except the brand that just put "repeat rate up 8 points" in their board deck and called it a retention win,
Your repeat rate went up. Your revenue didn't. Here's why.
Here's the metric everyone tracks, the reason it may be lying to you, and the five numbers that actually tell you if retention is doing its job — or just making the dashboard look nice.
Beyond Repeat Rate: Five Retention Metrics to Track
Picture an ecommerce brand that looks great on paper. Open rates climbing. Click rates healthy. Repeat rate jumped from 10% to 20%. The team is patting itself on the back. The slides look great.
Then you look at the actual business. Revenue: flat. Ad spend: up. CAC: climbing. Somehow the brand is "retaining customers better," but the business isn't growing.
The post-mortem isn't pretty. It's not attribution. It's not seasonality. It's not the product mix. It's simpler and more uncomfortable than any of that: they were optimizing a metric that doesn't mean what they thought it meant.
The framework forces a harder question: is retention driving incremental growth or just improving optics?
So what's actually wrong with repeat rate? Here's the problem: it's a blended number. It mixes acquisition performance and retention performance into the same figure, then hands it to you as if it means something clean.
Repeat rate going up? Could mean retention improved. Could mean acquisition slowed and you're just selling to the same people. Repeat rate going down? Could mean retention broke. Could mean you just had a monster quarter for new customers. The number moves — but it won't tell you why. That makes it useless as an optimization target.
Instead of trying to improve a metric that sends false signals, Jordan rebuilt the dashboard around a single question: which purchases would not have happened without retention? Five metrics turned out to answer it properly.
The Five Metrics That Actually Tell You Something
1️⃣ Same-Quarter Repeat
% of customers who purchase again in the same quarter as their first purchase.
Most buyers are first-time buyers. Which means the single biggest thing you can do in retention is get someone to purchase #2 — and get there fast. Same-Quarter Repeat measures exactly that velocity. It filters out the whales (people on their 4th or 5th purchase) and zeroes in on the most important funnel moment you have. A low number here — say, 3% — is a red flag. Getting to 10–15% means your acquisition and on-site experience are working together. If you could only improve one retention metric, Jordan says this is the one. Everything else is window dressing by comparison.
2️⃣ 95+ Day Repeat Buyer
Among repeat buyers this month, what % last purchased over 95 days ago?
Why 95 days? Because paid media funnels typically dry up around 90. After that window, a purchase is almost never driven by ads — it's driven by email, SMS, and whatever relationship you've built. The benchmark across accounts is roughly ~75% of ecommerce revenue from recent prospects (people who showed up and bought within 30–35 days). Stale repeat buyers are about ~10% of a typical business. That 10% is largely owned-channel revenue — the kind that doesn't drive up your ad bill. When that segment grows year-over-year, your email and SMS program is actually doing real work.
3️⃣ Repeat Buyers Year-Over-Year
Total repeat customers this period vs the same period last year.
Here's a fun one: your repeat rate can fall while your repeat buyers increase — if acquisition scales faster. This happens all the time and causes totally unnecessary panic. Percentages lie. Counts don't. More repeat buyers means higher LTV, more stable revenue, and clear proof that retention is contributing to the business. Download the flat file from Shopify, look at it monthly (so someone who purchases twice counts both times), and track the year-over-year. That's your trailing proof the whole program is functioning.
4️⃣ Active Repeat Buyers as % of Active Base
Active Base = purchased in the last 12 months. Active Repeat Buyers = purchased more than once, ever.
Think of Same-Quarter Repeat as the income statement — what's happening right now. This is the balance sheet. Is your customer base genuinely getting stronger over time, or just turning over? Track both the absolute count of active repeat buyers year-over-year and their share of the active base. Together they show whether you're building structural retention or just winning temporary campaign lifts. One note: like repeat rate, this can be distorted if first-time buyer acquisition slows — so read it alongside the others, not in isolation.
5️⃣ Incremental Repeat Share
Of your year-over-year buyer growth, what % came from repeat buyers?
This is the one that ends the "so what?" conversation. All the other metrics show retention is active. This one shows whether it's actually driving the business. Consider the scenario: first-time buyers are up 5%, and repeat rate has jumped from 10% to 20%. Looks like retention is still just 20% of the business, right? Wrong — you'll have far more incremental repeat buyers than incremental first-time buyers. Repeat could be driving two-thirds of your growth, completely invisible in the standard dashboard. If over 50% of your incremental buyers are repeat buyers, you've built a growth engine. If not, your lifecycle program looks good — but it's not changing the company.
The Incremental Retention Scorecard
Takes about 20 minutes in a spreadsheet. Jordan, Pilothouse's Head of Email and Customer Retention, does this in half-year increments — long enough to capture a full lifecycle.
1️⃣ In Shopify, click on Repeat Rate → download the flat CSV of your customers.
2️⃣ For each month, you'll see returning customers and total customers. Subtract to get first-time buyers. You now have first-time, repeat, and total for every month.
3️⃣ Sum up a half-year period (e.g. H2 2025) for first-time buyers, repeat buyers, and total buyers. Do the same for H2 2024.
4️⃣ Subtract 2024 from 2025 for each: incremental first-time, incremental repeat, incremental total.
5️⃣ Divide incremental repeat buyers by incremental total buyers. That's your Incremental Repeat Share.
Not sure whether retention is actually driving your growth?
Most brands track retention metrics. Few step back to ask what those metrics mean for growth. Pilothouse helps brands connect lifecycle performance to acquisition efficiency and long-term scale. Get connected →
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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.
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