Data-driven gems that can be mined from a customer purchase latency analysis on a Shopify store

In my Repeat Customer Insights app there is a report called the Customer Purchase Latency report.

It's a compact report but it packs a lot of customer analysis into one page. Sometimes I'll get questions about how to read the included metrics, so today I wanted to share this with you.

If you haven't installed the app, don't worry. The concepts are still a useful way to think about how your customer's ordering behavior evolves over time.

Above is the Latency analysis for one store that I'll use for this example.

The way to read it is to pick a row, we'll pick the 3rd.

This means: Of the 58 customers who placed their 2nd order (from the row before) 53 customers placed a 3rd order, which is a 91% Repeat purchase rate.

They spent an average of $144.44 on their 3rd orders (AOV).

They placed their 3rd order about 63 days after their second order and 126 days after becoming a customer (Latency of 63 days from the steps before + 63 days for the 3rd step).

You can read each row the same way.

Another way to think about this is using that familiar marketing funnel image that everyone uses. Big at the top, small at the bottom. Money signs pouring out of it...

100% of these customers buy at least once.

69% of them buy a second time, which means the funnel gets smaller.

91% of them buy a third time, and so on.

If you want to see how your store's metrics look, you can install Repeat Customer Insights from the App Store.

I just added a way to export the analyzed customers to a file so you can even import it into other systems (e.g. Facebook for a custom audience, Excel for some deeper segmentation)

Eric Davis