LTV Benchmarks by Industry Benchmarks
What customer lifetime value actually looks like across DTC verticals — apparel, beauty, supplements, food, home goods — with the context you need to compare yourself to the right benchmark.
LTV Benchmarks by Industry
Typical customer lifetime value ranges across DTC ecommerce verticals, used as a sanity check for your own LTV and CAC budgets.
LTV benchmarks by industry are the reference ranges for what an average customer is worth over their relationship with a store, broken out by vertical — apparel, beauty, supplements, food and beverage, home goods. They exist because LTV is not a universal number: a supplement subscriber and a furniture buyer have wildly different repeat behaviour, and treating them with the same target distorts every downstream decision.
The benchmarks below cover 12-month and 24-month LTV for established online stores in the €1M-€15M revenue band. Use them to pressure-test your own LTV, not to set hard targets — your product margin, repurchase cycle, and acquisition mix will shift your number significantly inside these ranges.
LTV is the single most leveraged number in ecommerce budgeting. It sets your acceptable CAC, your paid-channel bids, your discount tolerance, and how aggressively you can fund retention. Compare yourself to the wrong vertical and every one of those decisions drifts off-target.
The most common mistake is using a blended "ecommerce average" — usually a number sitting around €150-€200 — that buries the differences between a coffee subscription (high repeat, low AOV) and a mattress store (one purchase per decade, high AOV). Both can be healthy businesses; neither looks like the blended average.
12-month and 24-month LTV by DTC vertical (established online stores, €1M-€15M revenue)
| Vertical | Avg order value | Orders / yr (yr 1) | 12-mo LTV | 24-mo LTV | Repeat rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beauty & cosmetics | €45-€70 | 2.4 | €120-€180 | €190-€280 | 48% |
| Supplements & wellness | €55-€85 | 3.1 | €180-€260 | €310-€440 | 62% |
| Apparel & accessories | €75-€120 | 1.8 | €140-€220 | €220-€340 | 38% |
| Food & beverage (DTC) | €35-€60 | 4.2 | €160-€240 | €280-€420 | 55% |
| Home goods & decor | €90-€180 | 1.3 | €130-€230 | €180-€310 | 28% |
| Consumer electronics | €110-€220 | 1.2 | €140-€260 | €180-€330 | 22% |
| Pet supplies | €40-€70 | 3.6 | €170-€250 | €290-€430 | 58% |
Two patterns dominate. Consumable categories — supplements, food, pet — earn their LTV through repeat frequency on modest order values. Considered-purchase categories — home, electronics, apparel — earn theirs through higher AOV with much weaker repeat. Beauty sits in between, which is part of why it's the most over-benchmarked vertical.
12-month LTV midpoint by vertical (€)
How to read these numbers
These are gross-revenue LTV figures — what the customer pays you, not what they contribute after COGS, shipping, and returns. For acquisition decisions, you want contribution-margin LTV, which is typically 35-55% of the gross figures here depending on category. Apparel takes the biggest haircut from returns; supplements the smallest.
The repeat-rate column is more diagnostic than the LTV column. If your apparel store has a 38% repeat rate, you're at the vertical median and growth has to come from new-customer acquisition. If you're at 55%, you've built something unusual and your CAC ceiling is much higher than competitors realise — see the parent page on LTV measurement for how to calculate this cleanly.
The wrong-vertical trap
A skincare brand that benchmarks itself against "beauty" but actually sells a 3-month-supply serum is closer to supplements economically. A premium denim brand sits closer to home goods than to fast-fashion apparel. Pick the vertical that matches your repurchase cycle and AOV, not the one that matches your product category on a shelf.
Why your LTV may differ from the benchmark
Four factors move you inside the range. Subscription mix is the biggest — a supplement brand with 40% subscribe-and-save will sit at the top of the supplements range; one without will sit at the bottom. Acquisition channel is second: paid-social cohorts typically have 20-30% lower LTV than organic and email cohorts in the same store.
Discount depth and geographic mix round it out. Stores running 25%+ first-order discounts pull in a thinner cohort that under-indexes on repeat. And cross-border orders via Shopify Markets typically show 15-25% lower 12-month LTV than home-market orders because of shipping friction on the second purchase. Segment your LTV by these cuts before comparing the headline number to any benchmark.
Frequently asked questions
There's no universal "good" — it depends entirely on your vertical and your CAC. A €150 LTV is healthy for beauty if your CAC is €40; it's underwater for home goods if your CAC is €80. Always read LTV alongside CAC, not in isolation.
That's the blended cross-vertical midpoint, weighted by how common each category is. It's a real number but a misleading benchmark — almost no individual store should target it directly, because supplement and food brands should aim higher while home and electronics brands operate fine well below it.
Use 12-month for paid-acquisition decisions — you need to recover CAC inside a year for working-capital reasons. Use 24-month for strategic decisions like retention investment, loyalty programs, and channel mix. Going beyond 24 months adds noise faster than signal in fast-moving categories.
They're paired metrics. The LTV:CAC ratio (typically 3:1 as a healthy target) only makes sense when both numbers are benchmarked against the same vertical. See our CAC Benchmarks by Industry page for the matching acquisition-cost ranges.
Repeat frequency. A supplement customer reorders 3-4 times in year one because the product runs out; an apparel customer comes back 1.5-2 times because they want something new, not because they've consumed something. Frequency beats AOV in LTV math almost every time.
A store with 30%+ revenue from subscription will sit at or above the top of its vertical range, because subscription customers have ~3x the LTV of one-time buyers in the same category. If you're heavily subscription-driven, benchmark against the top quartile of your vertical, not the median.
Order values and repeat rates are broadly similar in the US (in USD) and UK (in GBP). Markets with lower disposable income or different shipping economics — much of APAC, LATAM — will sit 20-40% below these ranges on gross LTV but often have comparable margin LTV.
Cohort-based: take all customers who placed a first order in a given month, then sum their total revenue over 12 or 24 months. Average those cohort totals across the last full year. Avoid the (AOV × purchase frequency × lifespan) formula — it's directionally fine but overstates LTV by 20-40% in most stores.
Electronics has an even weaker repeat rate (22% vs 38%) because purchase cycles are 2-5 years for most categories. The higher AOV doesn't compound — most of the customer's lifetime value is locked into a single transaction, so 12-month and 24-month LTV barely differ.
Quarterly is enough — LTV moves slowly because it's an average over many cohorts. What moves faster is the trend in new-cohort LTV (the 90-day value of customers acquired in the last quarter), which is the early-warning indicator for whether your lifetime number is heading up or down.
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