Time to second purchase is the number of days between a customer's first order and their second. It is measured on its own because the gap after a first purchase behaves differently from every gap after that.
For every customer who has bought at least twice, take the number of days between the first order and the second, then take the median across customers. The median is the right choice here, because a few people who come back after a very long gap pull an average upward and produce a number that describes nobody.
The hard part is the customers who have not bought again yet. Leaving them out flatters the figure, because it only counts people who eventually returned. The honest way to report it is by cohort: of everyone who first bought in March, what share had bought again by day 30, by day 60, by day 90. That shows the curve rather than a single number, and the shape of the curve is where the decision is.
In retail language this is the gap between trial and retrial. Time to second purchase measures how long that gap takes, while repeat purchase rate counts how many customers closed it at all.
The second purchase is where a buyer becomes a customer. Across most consumer categories, someone who has bought twice is far more likely to buy a third time than a first-time buyer is to buy a second. The first gap is the steepest part of the drop-off, so averaging it into general purchase cadence hides the point where most customers are actually lost.
It is also the window a loyalty program can most directly affect. A welcome bonus, a first-purchase reward with an expiry date, or a replenishment reminder are all aimed at this specific gap, and whether they worked shows up here months before it shows up in a retention figure.
There is no benchmark worth quoting. Judge the gap against how fast the product is actually used up. A 30-day supply that takes 70 days to reorder means members are running out, buying something else, or buying the second one somewhere the brand cannot see. And watch the cohort curve flatten rather than the median fall, because a flattening curve means fewer customers are being lost in the window.
A beverage brand offers a first-purchase reward that expires after 45 days. Its March cohort reaches 38% second purchase by day 60, against 24% for the January cohort before the reward existed. The median gap barely moves. The curve does, and that is the result worth reporting.
Calculating the median across only the customers who bought twice. That answers the question of how long returning customers took to return, which is not what anyone is asking. Reported by cohort instead, including the people who never came back, the number is less comfortable and far more useful.
Where TrueLoyal® fits: For a brand selling through retailers it does not own, a second purchase made in a store looks exactly like no second purchase at all. With receipt scanning, a member scans a receipt from any store and the brand sees the purchase, the store, and the items, so it can tell a real retrial problem from a gap in its own data. That view covers opted-in members, who skew toward a brand's more engaged buyers, so it sits alongside the brand's own order data rather than replacing it.
Take the days between the first and second order for each customer, then take the median. Report it by cohort, showing what share of a month's new customers had returned by day 30, 60 and 90, so the people who have not come back are counted rather than left out.
Because the drop-off between the first and second purchase is much steeper than between any later pair. Averaging it into general purchase cadence hides the point where most customers are lost.
They describe the same event in different vocabularies. Retrial is the retail term for any purchase after the first. Time to second purchase is the measure of how long that took.
Whether the second purchase is happening somewhere you cannot see. For a brand selling through retailers, a customer who reorders in a store looks identical to one who never returned. Rule out the measurement gap before redesigning the program.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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