Repeat purchase rate is the share of customers who buy from a brand more than once in a set period. It is one of the most direct ways to see whether a loyalty program is working.
Divide the number of customers who made two or more purchases in the period by the total number of customers who bought at all in that period. If 400 of a brand's 2,000 customers bought twice or more, its repeat purchase rate is 20%.
Two choices change the answer, and both should be stated whenever the number is shared. The first is the window, because a 12-month repeat rate and a 90-day repeat rate are different metrics and can't be compared with each other. The second is the denominator, because counting all customers or only loyalty members gives very different figures. That is why comparing members with non-members is usually the more useful view.
Some teams, especially those that sell through retail, call the same behavior retrial, as in trial and retrial. Repeat purchase rate is also different from buying rate, which measures how much each buying household purchases rather than how many customers came back.
Winning a new customer usually costs much more than selling to one a brand already has. Repeat purchase rate shows whether the work to keep customers is landing, and it moves faster than customer lifetime value, which can take quarters to shift.
It is also the number a loyalty program is most directly accountable for. A program can raise engagement, collect data, and generate content, but if members don't buy more often than non-members, it hasn't paid for itself.
There is no benchmark that holds across categories. A product people buy every month and one they buy every few years can't be judged against the same number, so the better comparison is against the brand's own baseline from before the program launched, and between members and non-members over the same period.
A home goods brand that sells online and through retail partners measures repeat purchase rate for program members and non-members over the same 12 months. Members come back at a noticeably higher rate, and the difference between the two groups is what the program is accountable for, more than the headline number on its own.
The most common mistake is sharing a repeat purchase rate without stating the window or the denominator. It is one of the most misreported metrics in loyalty, because two teams can calculate it from the same data in different ways and both can defend their answer.
Where TrueLoyal® fits: TrueLoyal Rewards puts a member's online orders and scanned receipts from any store on one member record, so a brand can see how often its members come back across channels. That view covers members only, so it sits alongside the brand's overall sales data.
Divide the number of customers who bought two or more times in a period by the total number who bought at all in that period. 400 repeat buyers out of 2,000 total gives a 20% repeat purchase rate.
There is no benchmark worth quoting across categories. A product bought every month and one bought every few years can't be judged against the same figure. The useful comparisons are against your own baseline from before the program, and between members and non-members over the same period.
Repeat purchase rate counts how many customers bought more than once. Retention rate measures how many customers you still have at the end of a period compared with the start. A brand can have a healthy repeat rate among its remaining customers while losing customers overall.
It almost always comes down to the window or the denominator. A 90-day rate and a 12-month rate are different metrics, and counting all customers instead of only members changes the figure a lot. Both choices should be stated whenever the number is shared.
Buying rate is how much each buying household purchases of a brand or category over a set period, usually a year. It is measured in units, dollars, or purchase occasions per buying household. Together with household penetration it explains where a brand's volume comes from, because penetration times buying rate equals volume.
Retrial is every purchase a household makes of a brand after its first one. Many teams call it repeat purchase, and it is usually discussed together with trial as trial and retrial. Retrial drives buying rate, which is how much each buying household purchases over a period.
Trial is a household's first purchase of a brand or product. It is the moment a shopper moves from never having bought to having bought once, and it is what grows household penetration. In TrueLoyal®'s vocabulary trial is the first buy and retrial is every buy after it.
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