Glossary
The customers who come back.
Repeat purchase rate is the share of your customers who have bought more than once. Healthy DTC stores often sit between 20% and 40%.
repeat purchase rate = customers with 2+ orders ÷ all customers × 100
repeat rate 25%
repeat customers add $375,000 over the year — 33% of all revenue.
The quiet compounding
A first order has to pay for its own marketing — the whole CAC comes out of it, and often most of the margin with it. A second order arrives free. No ad was bought, no discount was dangled; the customer simply came back. That is why repeat revenue is cleaner than it looks on a revenue chart: the same dollars carry far more profit. It is also the engine behind LTV — a store with a thirty percent repeat rate is not slightly better than one at fifteen, it is compounding while the other resets to zero every month.
How to earn the second order
The second order is won in the weeks after the first. Post-purchase email flows that land as the product does, not three weeks later. Replenishment timing that matches how long the product actually lasts — a thirty-day supply wants a nudge around day twenty-five. And above all, the quality of the first delivery: a late or shabby first parcel quietly caps your repeat rate no matter what the emails say.
One measurement rule: read the rate by cohort, not blended. A blended number mixes last week's buyers, who have not had time to repeat, with customers from two years ago, and it drifts every time your ad spend changes. Take everyone who first bought in a given month and ask how many of them returned within a year — that number you can trust, and compare month against month.
Made with care by Astral Commerce