Customer Churn Rate Benchmarks

Customer churn rate is the share of last year's customers who placed no order this year. At the median Shopify store in our benchmark it was 84.2%, which looks alarming next to subscription software figures but is normal for ecommerce. Most of that churn comes from one-time buyers: customers who had ordered four or more times churned at a much lower rate.

So the useful question isn't whether your churn is high. It's how your rate compares with stores selling similar products, and how many of your customers get past their first order.

What is customer churn rate?

Customer churn rate measures the share of customers you lose over a period. A subscription business loses a customer when they cancel. An online store has no cancellation, so a customer is lost when they stop ordering, and you have to choose how long a silence counts as gone.

Here the rule is fixed: a customer who ordered in one 12-month period has churned if they placed no order in the following 12 months. Churn and retention cover the same customers, so together they always make the whole. Our customer retention guide covers the other side.

Churn matters because the customers you lose were the cheapest to sell to. They already trusted you. A store that loses customers faster than it replaces them shrinks, however much it spends on acquisition.

How to calculate customer churn rate

Divide the customers you lost by the customers you started with.

Churn rate=Last year's customers with no order this year÷Last year's customers

For a hypothetical example, say a store had two thousand customers who ordered last year. Fifteen hundred of them placed no order this year. Its churn rate is seventy five percent, and its retention rate is the remaining twenty five percent.

Use a 12-month window when you compare stores or years. It covers every season once, and it's long enough that a customer who buys twice a year isn't counted as lost. It's still a blunt rule: it overstates churn for products bought every few years, such as furniture, and understates it for products used up within weeks.

For your own win-back work, use a lapse window that fits your buying cycle. A common rule is about twice the usual gap between a customer's orders. A coffee store might act after a couple of months of silence; a mattress store should wait much longer.

Monthly churn figures from subscription businesses aren't comparable with an annual ecommerce rate. A monthly rate measures cancellations among paying subscribers, and you can't multiply it by twelve to get a yearly figure for occasional buyers.

What is a good customer churn rate for a Shopify store?

A good customer churn rate for a Shopify store is below the median of 84.2%, and a strong one is in the best quarter of stores, below 74.7%. That's across 1,284 stores: customers who ordered between October 2024 and September 2025, and whether they ordered again between October 2025 and September 2026.

Customer churn rate by industry

What you sell sets the baseline. Stores selling products people use up and reorder lose the fewest customers; stores selling products bought once every few years lose the most.

Coffee and tea stores had the lowest median churn, at 74.7%. Decor and furniture stores had the highest, at 92.7%. For furniture, much of that is the 12-month rule itself: a customer who buys a sofa every few years looks lost after one quiet year.

Churn by customer group

Churn falls sharply as customers place more orders. We split last year's customers by how many orders they had placed in total by the end of that year, then measured churn in each group at the median store.

This is a correlation. Customers who have ordered often may like the product more to begin with; ordering more doesn't by itself make them stay. But the pattern holds across stores, and it tells you where churn concentrates.

How to reduce customer churn

Start with the first weeks after a first order. A slow delivery, a confusing product, or silence after the sale pushes a new customer out before they form a habit. Avoid the common first-time buyer mistakes and check what new customers hear from you in their first month.

Reach customers while they're cooling, not after they've gone. Use your lapse window to flag customers whose usual gap has passed, and contact them before a full year of silence. Predicting churn with segmentation shows how to build those groups.

Give customers a reason to return that fits the product: a replenishment reminder for consumables, care advice for durable goods, or early access for regular buyers. A discount sent to everyone mostly rewards customers who would have ordered anyway.

Track churn alongside the share of orders from returning customers and the revenue they bring. Losing many small one-time buyers matters less than losing a few large regular ones, so revenue churn can tell a different story from customer churn. Subscription stores should also watch failed payments, which end subscriptions without the customer choosing to leave. Our returning customer rate guide explains the companion metric, and By the Numbers' cohort analysis shows what share of each first-order group comes back in later periods.

How to use these benchmarks

Calculate your own churn the same way before you compare. Use two matching 12-month periods, count only customers who placed an order, and leave out canceled orders and test orders.

Then compare in this order:

1. Your industry's range. If your rate sits inside the middle half for your industry, you're typical. Above it, look at your first-order experience and follow-up timing.
2. Your customer groups. Split last year's customers by how many orders they had placed. If one-time buyers make up most of your churn, as they do at most stores, the first order and the weeks after it are where to start.
3. Your own history. A year of fast growth adds many first-time buyers, which pushes churn up even when your regular customers stay. Compare with your previous year to see the trend.

Wholesale accounts and subscriptions pull churn down, so separate them if they're a large share of your customers. For benchmarks on order value, repeat buying, and other store metrics, see the Shopify benchmarks hub.

How we measured it

These benchmarks use anonymized, aggregated data from Shopify stores in the By the Numbers network. No individual store is identifiable from any figure. Stores that use an analytics app are not a random sample of all Shopify stores, so read the figures as a reference point, not as an average for the whole market.

Keep reading

If you want the full picture on cohort analysis and retention, start with how to read your cohort retention curve.

Related reading: Customer Retention Rate Benchmarks, Repeat Purchase Rate by Industry and How to Predict Churn Using Segmentation (Shopify).

By the Numbers builds this into the dashboard. See cohort analysis.