What is the difference between Customer Returning Rate vs. Customer Repurchase Rate vs. Repeat Orders Rate per Cohort

Returning Customers Rate

This metric looks at the # of customers that return each month. By the 12th month since original purchase, a certain % of the customers may came back from that cohort to buy again. Customers Returning Rate is looking at that amount each month that comes back and is non-cumulative. With the Returning Customers Rate — a customer can be unique each month if they come back to purchase but it resets at the beginning of the next cohort.

Customers Repurchase Rate

This metric looks at how many customers from a specific cohort - cumulatively - have come back to purchase again. So look at a cohort like "August 2021" and then a future month like "January 2022". If some % of the August cohort has come back at least once to purchase again then that is counted and added to the total. Each customer is counted only once even if multiple purchases were placed in that month.

This metric allows you to make summarizing statements, "like by 6 months, 25% of our cohorts have come back and repurchased at least 2 additional times, 10% have come back and purchased 5 additional times.

Repeat Orders Rate per Cohort

Every month, customers will choose to repurchase or not and we track this. You have 100 customers in your August 2021 and 20 buy again in September 2022. This means 20% have come back and made an additional purchase.

If this got to 100% that means that there is an order equivalent to the amount of customers. If it got to 200% it means that there are 2 orders equivalent to the amount of customers. It is showing you how some customers are more loyal to the brand and order more than the rest of the cohort. It is counting the same customer multiple times because it is looking strictly at orders.

If the same customer came back 10 times, those 10 times would be counted each time because we are counting orders.

The metric Indicates the weighted likelihood of customers coming back by a certain month. We can segment by products or codes or tags to see if anything jumps out.