Marketing
Repeat rate
The share of orders that came from customers you already had.
Formula
Repeat orders ÷ total orders
Repeat rate is the share of orders in a period placed by customers who had ordered before. Its mirror image, the new-customer share, is what acquisition spend is buying, and a repeat order matters to profit because it arrives carrying no acquisition cost at all.
It matters to profit because a repeat order carries no acquisition cost. A store with a high repeat rate can afford a CAC that would sink a store without one, which is why the two numbers only mean anything side by side; the blended CAC calculator puts them there.
Read it together with time to second order: a rate that looks healthy can be an artefact of a long measurement window, because given enough months even a rarely returning customer base looks loyal.
Judge it against your category before judging it against a goal. Consumables and sized goods repeat naturally; durables do not, and pushing repeat rate on a product people need once a decade buys discounts, not loyalty.
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