Customer Retention Rate Benchmarks

Customer retention rate is the share of last year's customers who bought from you again this year. At the median Shopify store in our benchmark, it was 15.8%. Retention depends heavily on what you sell: stores selling coffee, beverages, or skincare keep far more customers than stores selling furniture or jewelry.

The useful comparison is your own industry's range, then your own number over time. This page gives you both, with one fixed definition so the numbers mean the same thing for every store.

What is customer retention rate?

Customer retention rate measures how many customers from one period came back in the next. For an online store, a customer is retained when they place another order. There is no contract to renew, so an order is the only sign a customer is still with you.

That makes the rule for "retained" the most important choice. Here it is fixed: a customer who ordered in one 12-month period is retained if they ordered again in the following 12 months. Customers who went quiet for a year count as lost, even if they come back later.

Retention matters because returning customers already know your products and cost little to reach. A store that keeps more of its customers needs fewer new ones to grow, and it gets more from every customer it acquires.

How to calculate customer retention rate

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

Retention rate=Last year's customers who ordered again this year÷Last year's customers

For a hypothetical example, say a store had two thousand customers who ordered last year. Four hundred of them ordered again this year. Its retention rate is twenty percent. New customers who first ordered this year don't enter the calculation; they start next year's count.

Use a 12-month window and compare matching windows. Twelve months covers each season once, so a holiday rush or a summer slump doesn't distort the result. Shorter windows understate retention for products people buy a few times a year.

Subscription businesses often use a different formula: customers at the end of a period, minus new customers, divided by customers at the start. That counts active accounts, not repeat orders. Stores with subscriptions will read high on either formula, so compare them with other subscription stores where you can.

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

A good customer retention rate for a Shopify store sits above the median of 15.8%, and a strong one is in the top quarter, above 25.3%. 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 retention rate by industry

What you sell sets the baseline. Products people use up and reorder keep customers; products people buy once every few years don't.

Coffee and tea stores led, with a median of 25.4%, close to skincare at 26.2%. Decor and furniture stores sat at 7.3%, and shoes at 10.0%. A furniture store with a modest rate may be doing well for its category.

How much do stores in the same industry differ?

Stores in the same industry differ almost as much as industries differ from each other. The chart shows the middle half of stores in the largest industries.

These are correlations. Stores with high retention may sell more consumables, run subscriptions, or have more loyal audiences. The benchmark shows where you stand, not what caused it.

Retention, churn, and repeat purchase rate

These metrics are easy to mix up, and each answers a different question.

• Churn rate is the flip side of retention: the share of last year's customers who did not order again. Retention and churn always add up to the whole.
• Repeat purchase rate counts customers who ordered two or more times inside one window. It describes buying habits within a year, not whether last year's customers came back. See the repeat purchase rate benchmarks by industry.
• Returning customer rate is the share of this period's buyers who had ordered before. Its denominator is current buyers, so it can't show how many earlier customers you lost. The returning customer rate guide explains it.

Retention by count treats every customer the same. Revenue retention weights customers by what they spend, which matters when a few large accounts drive sales. To see when customers drop off, track each group of first-time buyers month by month. By the Numbers' cohort analysis shows what share of each first-order group comes back in later periods.

How to improve customer retention

The first order decides most of retention. Ship on time, make returns easy, and answer support questions quickly. A customer whose first experience went wrong rarely tries again.

Ask customers why they did or didn't come back. A short survey after delivery, plus a review of support tickets, shows recurring problems worth fixing first.

Time follow-ups to your product's buying cycle. Remind a coffee customer before the bag runs out, and send a furniture customer care advice instead of another sales offer. Use loyalty rewards where they change behavior, such as a reason to make a second order, not as a discount for customers who would buy anyway. The customer retention strategies guide covers each tactic in more depth.

How to use these benchmarks

Calculate your own rate 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. A different window or a different rule for "retained" makes the comparison meaningless.

Then compare in this order:

1. Your industry's range. If your rate sits inside the middle half for your industry, you're typical. Below it, look at the first order experience and your follow-up timing first.
2. Your own history. Run the same calculation for the previous pair of years. A rate that rises while you grow is a better sign than any single benchmark.
3. Your customer mix. A year of fast growth adds many first-time buyers, and most of them buy once. That pulls retention down even when your loyal customers stay put.

Wholesale accounts and subscriptions push retention up, 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 the cohort analysis framework.

Related reading: Repeat Purchase Rate by Industry, How to Predict Churn Using Segmentation (Shopify) and Shopify First Time Buyer Mistakes That Kill Sales.

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