A good repeat purchase rate is generally considered to be at or above the 25 to 30 percent range most ecommerce benchmarks cite as average, though what counts as genuinely good varies considerably by product category.
Why "Good" Is a Moving Target
What is a good repeat purchase rate depends far more on what a store actually sells than most generic benchmarks acknowledge. Industry-wide data puts the average ecommerce repeat purchase rate around 28 percent, but the range beneath that average is enormous:
- Luxury goods: often as low as 10 to 15 percent, since high-price, infrequent-purchase categories naturally produce fewer repeat buyers.
- Grocery and consumable categories: can exceed 60 percent, since those products get used up and reordered by nature.
Comparing a luxury jewelry store’s repeat rate against a supplement brand’s using the same benchmark number would be comparing two fundamentally different purchase behaviors.
The Formula and a Common Calculation Mistake
Repeat Purchase Rate = (Customers With 2+ Orders ÷ Total Customers) × 100
The repeat purchase rate formula is straightforward, but the time window used to calculate it changes the result significantly, and this is where comparisons often go wrong.
A rate calculated over a 90-day window will read lower than the same store’s rate calculated over a full 365-day window, simply because more time gives more customers the chance to return.
Comparing a store’s quarterly number against an industry benchmark built on a 12-month lookback isn’t a fair comparison, even though both are technically “repeat purchase rate.”
Reading Your Number Against a Realistic Scale
Repeat purchase rate benchmark tiers commonly used by practitioners run roughly:
- Below 20 percent: a business still highly dependent on new customer acquisition.
- 20 to 30 percent: average performance with real room for improvement.
- 30 to 40 percent: strong retention.
- Above 40 percent: genuinely excellent, usually reflecting strong product fit combined with a deliberate retention strategy.
Repeat purchase rate by industry context matters more than the absolute number: an 18 percent rate might be disappointing for a beauty brand but perfectly healthy for a furniture retailer, given how differently those categories are naturally repurchased.
The Lever That Moves This Number Most Reliably
Across the available research, one pattern shows up more consistently than any specific tactic: converting a one-time purchase into a subscription or recurring order produces a larger lift in repeat purchase rate than almost any other single change.
Subscription-based grocery and consumable models reach retention rates in the 70 to 85 percent range, well above what loyalty points or win-back campaigns alone tend to achieve for the same categories.
This doesn’t mean every product fits a subscription model, but for anything genuinely consumable or replaceable on a predictable cycle, testing a subscribe option tends to move the needle more than incremental improvements to a loyalty program built around one-off repeat purchases.
Related terms:
Adflipr’s analytics dashboard tracks repeat purchase rate alongside AOV and lifetime value, making it easy to see whether post-purchase and loyalty automations are actually moving the number.
