How Average Latency is underused by Shopify stores

Recently I added the Average Latency metric to Repeat Customer Insights.

Latency is the time between events for a customer, specially purchases. For example, if Sally placed two orders 10 days apart then their Latency would be 10 days.

The app has always reported on the Average Latency in the order sequences, e.g. 10 days on average between the 1st and 2nd order, 9 days between the 2nd and 3rd, etc.

This update now looks across all orders to calculate the Average Latency storewide. It'll be useful for creating rules of thumb for your marketing, while the order sequence version will be best for refining specific timing (e.g. onboarding and welcome campaigns).

A few ways Average Latency shines are:

• comparing how quickly customers are ordering this year vs last year
• estimating your inventory turnover for repeat customers
• deciding how often you'll want to run promotions
• timing a harder selling arc in a campaign
• evaluating the impact of a loyalty program

I'll be writing about Average Latency in later articles. It's a powerful metric that I see underused by Shopify stores.

If you'd like to have Repeat Customer Insights calculate your Average Latency, install from this link and select a plan that includes the Customer Purchase Latency analysis.

Eric Davis