Repeat Purchase Rate

It depends heavily on vertical, but a useful rule of thumb is 25-30% at 12 months for apparel and home, 35-45% for beauty, and 45%+ for consumables like supplements and pet food. Below 20% across any consumable category is a red flag.

Match the window to your category's natural repurchase cycle. Consumables: 90 days. Apparel and accessories: 180 days. Home, furniture, electronics: 365 days. Whichever you pick, hold it constant across reports — changing the window mid-year makes trends meaningless.

Customer retention rate usually measures whether existing customers remain 'active' (any order in a period). RPR is stricter and cohort-based: did the customers acquired in period X place a second order by deadline Y? RPR is cleaner for evaluating acquisition quality.

Functionally yes — the terms are used interchangeably. Some teams use 'repeat customer rate' for the share of all-time customers who have ever bought twice, and 'RPR' for the cohort-windowed version. The cohort version is more actionable.

LTV ≈ AOV × purchase frequency × gross margin × customer lifespan. RPR is the leading edge of purchase frequency: a 5-point RPR lift typically translates to a 10-20% LTV lift over 18 months, because repeat buyers tend to buy a third and fourth time at much higher rates.

In order of typical impact: (1) a post-purchase email/SMS flow timed to the reorder cycle, (2) a strong second-purchase incentive within the first 30 days, (3) product breadth so customers have something else to buy, and (4) shipping/unboxing quality. Loyalty programmes help but rarely move RPR on their own.

Report it both ways. Total RPR (subscription + one-time) tells you commercial reality; one-time-only RPR tells you whether your non-subscribed customers actually love the product. If subscription masks weak one-time RPR, you have a churn problem waiting to happen.

Heavy discounting on cold traffic pulls in deal-seekers who don't return at the same rate as organic or referral customers. A falling RPR alongside rising new-customer volume is the classic signature of acquisition-quality decay — worth segmenting RPR by channel.

Track a rolling cohort monthly so you can see trend without waiting a full year for each cohort to mature. Pair it with a 'days-to-second-order' median — that catches changes in cadence before they show up in the headline rate.

Yes. The highest-ROI levers are non-discount: a reorder-timed email, a personalised 'next product' recommendation based on first purchase, and faster shipping on order two. Reserve discounts for win-back at month 6+ where the alternative is losing the customer entirely.