One big strength of Shopify as a platform is its Analytics pages, where you can see how important marketing and eCommerce metrics change over time. Nowadays, awareness of these metrics is a huge advantage in bringing success to a business. This series, therefore, aims to show you how to access these metrics in Shopify.
For this tutorial, we will learn how to access an important customer satisfaction metric on Shopify: the Repeat Customer Rate. As a refresher, the Repeat Customer Rate is the percentage of your customer base that has made more than one purchase. If you need a full review, you can read our article here. Else, you can now start following this guide!
The Repeat Customer Rate metric is called the Returning Customer Rate in Shopify. (From this point on, we will use the Shopify term instead.) To find it, simply click on the Analytics option in the left panel. The Overview dashboard will load, and you can find the Returning customer rate box. The box contains the rate and the change in the rate compared to the previous period.
The returning customer rate metric has to be supported by other relevant customer data to make sense. For our example above, the dip in the metric is due to a first-time customer. So the dip is not bad news! In fact, if you are consistently getting a 100% returning customer rate, then that means you are not gaining new customers for some time, and that's bad news! The next section will help you look for more customer data for a better overview.
Clicking on the Reports option under the Analytics option on the left panel will load various analytics reports. One of these is the Customers box.
The box lists links to tables containing important metrics related to customer behavior. They are as follows:
Customers over time - simply displays the number of first-time and returning customers over a period. You can customize the period as days, weeks, months, and years.
First-time vs returning customer sales - divides the total sales into the contributions of first-time customers and returning customers over a period.
Customers by location - lists the location of your customers worldwide in a table.
Returning customers - lists the customers who ordered more than once, including the date of their first purchase and latest purchase, the number of orders to date, and the total price of the items they purchased.
One-time customers - lists the customers who ordered only once, the date when they ordered, and the total price of their purchase.
Two more pages are available if you opt for Advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus plan:
At-risk customers - lists the customers who have the medium or low probability of returning to your store. Shopify employs its own algorithm to estimate which of your customers will qualify as at-risk.
Loyal customers - lists the customers who have a high probability of returning to your store. They have also placed more orders than your average customer.
Using the information from these reports, you can now have a better picture of whether your efforts to attract new customers work, and whether your returning customer rate is good news or bad news.
While the customer metrics are accessible on Shopify, checking every day, week, or month for each of these can be a pain. For those who don't look forward to manually finding numbers over and over again, you can check out our Shopify integration that will pull your conversion funnel data alongside other Shopify and eCommerce platform data! Spend more time on data analysis and less time metric-hunting with Lido.
