Spotting reordering problems in you Shopify store with Customer Purchase Latency

Repeat Customer Insights will detect and make suggestions based on your store data.

A recent addition was to detect higher customer purchase latencies.

This means that if your customers are taking a long-time to reorder, the app will make note of where and when it's happening.

What causes high customer purchase latencies?

Long latencies can occur for a variety of reasons but an critical driver is based on your products.

The first thing you want to do when you see the latency is high is to consider your frequently purchased products.

If you have durable products that last a long time, customers will tend to purchase less frequently. The counterpoint are consumable products that run out at regular times.

Another factor is the depth of your product catalog. A small catalog with only a few products can mean fewer repeat purchases. More products can mean more opportunities to attract another purchase, even if it's just for accessories of their prior purchase.

Once you've examined your products, you'll want to look at your marketing campaigns that target your existing customers.

First off, yes you should have dedicated campaigns for customers. You should be spending as much or more on marketing to your existing customers as you do for new ones.

When you're looking at those campaigns, pay attention to the timing of any offers.

If you have an offer scheduled to go out 30 days after the first purchase and your latency for the second purchase is 32 days, that's a clear signal that the offer is driving repeat orders.

On the other hand if you have an offer that you feel is solid but isn't causing customers to buy until months later, that's a sign that the offer isn't working. Start trying to shift it to a different time or changing up the offer details.

Tracking how quickly a customer orders

The point of the customer purchase latency metric is to know how long repeat orders take on average.

The recommendation system in Repeat Customer Insights is designed to point out occurrences where it's worse than industry averages. Use those recommendations as a trail of crumbs to help find the weaker areas in your Shopify store.

Eric Davis

Segment your customers automatically with RFM

Segmenting your customers has always been touted as a powerful marketing tool but many stores avoid it because it can be time-consuming.
Repeat Customer Insights will automatically segment your entire customer base for you based on the valuable data Shopify has already collected for you. Ranging from 5 to 30 to over 125+ different segments using RFM and other models, you can pick how much power you want to harness.

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Topics: Customer purchase latency

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