The 90-day repeat rate: the number that says your catalogue is thin
The share of buyers who come back within three months tells you whether you have a catalogue or a series of one-offs. How to work it out and what to change.
Your monthly revenue is steady, which feels like progress. Look closer and it is the same figure earned from a completely different set of people every month. Nobody is coming back. That is not a marketing problem and it is usually not a quality problem either — it is a catalogue problem, and there is a single number that exposes it. Work out what share of your buyers purchase again within ninety days, and you will know within twenty minutes whether you are building a business or running a treadmill.
Steady revenue can hide a leaking catalogue
Acquisition is a flattering metric. As long as new people keep arriving, the monthly total looks healthy, and it can stay that way for a year while the underlying business gets no easier. The moment traffic dips — an algorithm change, a quiet month, a holiday — the whole figure moves with it, because nothing in the business is carried by people who already trust you.
The honest complication is that repeat purchase is not a fair test for everyone. If you sell one thing that solves one problem permanently, a buyer coming back would be strange. Wedding materials, exam preparation for a specific year, a guide to moving countries: these are genuinely one-shot. In those cases the number to watch is referrals rather than repeats, and a low repeat rate is a feature of the field, not a fault in your work.
For everyone else — and that is most people selling to a continuing interest rather than a one-off event — a low repeat rate is a message about your catalogue, delivered by people who liked what they bought enough that they would have bought again if there had been anything there.
Two ways of reading the same month
Most creators track one figure, which is what came in this month. That figure cannot distinguish between a business getting deeper and one running to stand still. The repeat rate can, and it uses data you already hold in your customer list.
| Watching monthly revenue | Watching the 90-day repeat rate |
|---|---|
| A flat month looks like stability | A flat month with no repeat buyers looks like a warning |
| Every sale counts the same | A second sale from the same person counts as evidence the ladder works |
| Traffic dips read as bad luck | Traffic dips read as over-reliance on new visitors |
| No signal about what to build next | A direct signal: nothing to buy next, or nothing they wanted next |
| Buyers and free downloaders blur together | Lifetime value per person separates the two immediately |
| Improvement means finding more strangers | Improvement can also mean selling one more thing to people you already have |
Working it out in twenty minutes
Pick a month that finished at least three months ago, so everyone in it has had a full ninety days to come back. Then follow this in order.
- 1Open Customers in your store.fan dashboard and export the full list to CSV. Export is available on every plan, including Free.
- 2Filter to people whose first purchase falls inside your chosen month. Exclude anyone whose only order was a $0 lead magnet — free downloads matter, but they are a different measurement.
- 3Count that group. Call it your cohort. If it is under thirty, note the number but do not draw conclusions from it yet.
- 4For each person in the cohort, check whether a second paid order landed within ninety days of the first. Lifetime value above the price of their first purchase is the quick way to spot them.
- 5Divide the repeaters by the cohort. That percentage is your 90-day repeat rate.
- 6Repeat the exercise for the month before, so you have two figures rather than one. A single number tells you very little; a direction tells you a lot.
- 7Write both figures somewhere you will see them next quarter. This is a number to check four times a year, not four times a week.
Reading a plausible result
Say April brought 64 first-time buyers. By the end of July, 11 of them had bought something else. That is a repeat rate of roughly 17%, and the useful part is not the number itself but what the 11 bought. If ten of them bought the same second product, that product is your ladder and everything else on the page is decoration. If the 11 are spread evenly across five products, you have breadth but no obvious next step, and the people buying twice are doing it by wandering rather than by being led.
Now compare it with March, where 51 buyers produced 4 repeats, around 8%. The difference between the two months is worth more than either figure alone: something changed in April, and your per-product analytics will usually tell you what — a new product landing, a bundle going live, or a different traffic source sending better-matched people. None of this predicts what next quarter earns. It does tell you where the next fortnight of work should go.
If you have no customer list to run this on yet, start one — every purchase, membership and free download joins it automatically.
Start your listThe mistake most people make
When the rate comes back low, the instinct is to discount. A code goes out to past buyers offering money off the product they already own, or off a second product they were never going to want, and the result is a small spike and a smaller list of people who now wait for sales. Discounts are a fine tool for a launch window and a poor tool for a structural problem. A low repeat rate says there is no next rung. Build the next rung. If you are on Pro, discount codes and countdown campaigns are there when you have something worth pointing them at, and the email tools exist to announce it rather than to chase people with reductions.
Ninety days is short enough to act on and long enough to catch a genuine second purchase. An annual figure arrives too late to change anything you are doing now.
Keep them separate. Renewals measure whether the membership is worth staying in; the repeat rate measures whether your catalogue gives people somewhere else to go.
There is no universal figure worth quoting, and anyone who gives you one is guessing about your field. Compare yourself with your own previous quarter and look for the direction.
Neither, as long as you exclude them from the cohort. They matter separately, as the top of the funnel that feeds paid orders later.
Work it out once and it stops being an abstraction. Either a reasonable share of your buyers are coming back, in which case build more of what they came back for, or almost nobody is, in which case the next thing you make should be aimed squarely at the people who have already paid you once. Both answers are useful. Not knowing is the only bad outcome.
Put your products and your buyers in the same place, so this calculation takes twenty minutes instead of an afternoon.
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