Your Repurchase Rate Is Lying to You

Happy Wednesday!

I've been inside Shopify cohort reports a lot lately. Not because I love spreadsheets (I do), but because I keep having the same conversation with founders.

They tell me their repurchase rate, I pull up their data.

And the number is almost always different from what they think.

I posted about this on LinkedIn this week and it clearly hit a nerve, so I wanted to go deeper.

The Number Everyone Gets Wrong

Repurchase rate looks simple. Customers who bought more than once, divided by total customers. Most DTC brands land between 20-30%. The ones with strong retention architecture sit between 40-60%.

The problem is that when you pull that number from Shopify, it blends every customer you've ever had into one bucket. The person who bought three years ago and never came back sits next to someone who bought last month and hasn't had time to reorder yet. That all-time number isn't a metric, it's an average of completely different stories.

Cohort Analysis Is the Whole Game

Take everyone who made their first purchase in January. What percentage bought again within 30 days? 60? 90? 180? Do the same for February and March, then line them up.

This is how you see whether retention is actually improving or whether you're just accumulating old repeat buyers who inflate the number. If your January cohort hits 22% at 90 days and your March cohort hits 29%, something you changed is working. If it's flat or declining, your campaigns might be masking a problem underneath.

Shopify's customer reports can show this, and Klaviyo's CDP lets you segment by first purchase date and layer on order count filters. You don't need a data warehouse, but you do need an hour and a spreadsheet.

Where the Levers Actually Are

When I look at cohort data across accounts, the same gaps show up. Four things move repurchase rate more than anything else, and most brands are only doing one of them.

Post-purchase flow architecture is the biggest. The post-purchase window is where a first-time buyer decides if your brand is worth coming back to. Most accounts I audit have two emails: a thank you and a review request. That's housekeeping, not retention.

I rebuild these into 5-8 emails over 21-45 days, with product education, usage tips, cross-sells based on what they bought, and timed replenishment reminders.

The sequence is built around when customers in that cohort typically reorder.

Win-back timing is the easiest fix. Most win-back flows trigger at 60 or 90 days because that's what the template said when someone set it up. But if your median days-between-orders is 45, your win-back should start around day 50. By day 90 they've already moved on, so pull your actual data from Shopify before setting this trigger.

The other two levers are less about timing and more about who you're talking to.

Segmentation by purchase frequency changes what you say to each group. A first-time buyer needs trust-building and product education. A three-time buyer already trusts you and wants early access, new drops, and the feeling that they're part of something. When you send the same campaign to both, you're speaking to neither well. Segment by order count inside Klaviyo and build sends around where each group sits.

Product-specific flows are the one almost nobody builds. If you sell consumables, replenishment timing is everything. A 30-day supply should trigger a reminder at day 22, not day 30 when they've already run out and maybe bought from a competitor. If you sell durables, cross-sell is the play. Someone who bought a jacket doesn't need another jacket, but they might need the matching bag.

What This Adds Up To

Even a 5-point improvement in repurchase rate compounds over time, because every repeat buyer you create is a customer you don't have to pay Meta or Google to acquire again. The brands that consistently grow retention don't treat repurchase rate as a dashboard number. They treat it as a system output, and they change the inputs until the output moves.

Pull your cohort data this week. Line up the last six months. If you don't like what you see, that's where we start.

Or just reply to this email. I read every one.

Talk soon.

- Raymond

P.S. Check your Shopify cohorts today.