Published October 27, 2026
DTC brands get customers to buy again by winning the second order inside the first 90 days, and they win it mostly with the product and the experience around it. The customer needs a product that works, a reorder prompt that arrives when the first one is running out, a delivery that went right, and an easy way to subscribe or return. Email and SMS deliver those moments to the customer, and they work only when the moments themselves are right.
The window is short. BS&Co, an agency, tracked 156,110 customers of the DTC brands it manages and found that 76.4% of the second orders placed within a year came inside three months. This guide covers what drives the second order beyond email and SMS, and ends with a cohort worksheet you can fill in from Shopify. Platform details are as of 27 October 2026.
The second order matters because it is the point where a customer bought by an ad becomes a customer who chose the brand twice, and the timing data says that choice is usually made fast.
BS&Co's dataset shows how front-loaded it is. Half of all second purchases in its sample, 50.3%, landed within the first month, and 87.1% within six months. We treat the first 90 days as the period where retention is decided, and everything after it as recovery. That is our reading of an agency dataset, and the brand count behind it is not published, so check it against your own cohorts.
Think of a new customer as a houseguest. Whether they come back depends far less on the thank-you note than on whether the bed was comfortable and dinner arrived on time.
This is also why acquisition targets lean on repeat buying. A new-customer ROAS target built on 90-day contribution, as set out in how to set ROAS targets by channel and customer type, only holds if the second order arrives.
A customer should reorder at the pace the product runs out, and that pace differs by product, so a single repeat rate for the whole store hides most of what matters.
Category sets the ceiling. BS&Co's benchmark, on a 365-day lookback, puts the repeat rate of consumables well above fashion and durables.
| Category in BS&Co's data | Repeat purchase rate range | What drives the second order |
|---|---|---|
| Consumables | 22% to 44% | Running out, so timing the reminder |
| Fashion | 10% to 17% | New styles and fit confidence |
| Durables and general retail | 7% to 18% | Accessories, refills and a second need |
Replenishment timing has to come from the product itself. A 30-serving supplement used daily runs out near day 30, and a 90-day bottle near day 90. Set the reorder prompt a few days before that date for each product, then check it against the median gap between first and second orders in Shopify.
Do not rely on a predicted date alone. Klaviyo's predictive analytics, for example, notes that its expected date of next order doesn't consider which products the customer ordered. A store that sells both a 30-day and a 90-day pack needs the product rule. The way that prompt is sent, and its flow logic, belongs to email and SMS that earn more without sending more.
A subscription helps when the product is used up on a predictable schedule and the customer would otherwise have to remember to reorder.
Shopify supports this natively. Its developer documentation describes selling plans and subscription contracts, where "a subscription includes delivery, pricing, and billing policies." Shopify's own Shopify Subscriptions app can create auto-billed subscriptions that renew weekly, monthly, or yearly, and customers can resume, skip or cancel without contacting the brand, while third-party subscription apps run on the same APIs.
Our view is that skip and delay controls protect subscription revenue more than a deeper discount does. A customer who has too much product and cannot skip cancels. In our view, a customer who can push the next box back two weeks is far more likely to stay. We found no public study with a disclosed sample that measures it, so test it on your own churn data. We would offer subscriptions only on products with a clear usage cycle, and keep fashion and durables as one-off purchases, where a subscription rarely fits how people buy.
Loyalty programs make some customers buy again, mainly lighter buyers, and mostly reward heavy buyers for orders they would have placed anyway.
The best evidence we found with a stated sample design is older and offline. Yuping Liu's study in the Journal of Marketing used two years of longitudinal data from a convenience store franchise. It found that heavy buyers claimed their rewards, but the program did not prompt them to change their purchase behavior, while light and moderate buyers gradually bought more. The author's summary adds that the most visible change came within three months of joining.
Applied to a DTC brand, and this is inference from one retailer, a loyalty program pays when it is aimed at one- and two-time buyers inside the first 90 days. Points that mostly accrue to the heaviest buyers work as a discount on revenue the brand already had. Test it by comparing the second-order rate of members and non-members from the same first-order month. Members self-select, so treat the gap as an upper bound.
The experience after the first order decides the second, and delivery, returns and reviews are the three places it most often goes wrong.
A failed or wrong delivery delays the next order. A 2025 study in the Journal of Retailing, using order data from one large grocery retailer's online business, found that fulfillment failures delayed the time to the next order by 7.22% on average, and that substitutions recovered sales now but hurt later buying. The study is grocery, not DTC. The direction is the point, and the first delivery is part of retention.
Returns handled well can keep a customer. Petersen and Kumar's Journal of Marketing paper concluded that product returns are inevitable "but by no means evil." Shopify's self-serve returns let customers request a return from the order status page without contacting the brand, under rules the brand sets. We would steer returns toward exchanges and store credit first, because an exchange keeps the revenue and the customer, and store credit gives a reason to come back.
A review request, timed after the product has had a chance to work, tells the brand who is happy enough to reorder. A review that reports a problem is a support ticket, and answering it inside the 90-day window is cheaper than winning that customer back later.
Repeat purchase in Shopify is best measured with the customer cohort analysis report, which groups customers by the month of their first order and follows what each group does after.
The returning customer rate gives a different answer. Shopify defines it as the percentage of returning customers relative to all customers who placed orders, and a returning customer is anyone whose order history already includes one order. That mixes a five-year customer with last month's buyer, so it rises when acquisition slows, which is the wrong signal.
The customer cohort analysis report shows each cohort by week, month or quarter, with customer retention rate as one of its metrics. Use months.
Fill one row per first-order month, for the last 12 months.
A cohort that drops after a promotion, or after a carrier problem, tells you which part of the experience to fix, which a store-wide rate cannot show. Customers who first meet a brand through ChatGPT or Google AI Mode go through the same 90 days, so track their cohorts separately where the referral is visible.
For repeat purchase, our starting point as a performance marketing and AI search agency with Shopify partner status is the store's own order data.
Get a clear picture of where your store is losing revenue, what to stop now and which actions to take first with our DTC Growth Audit.
DTC Growth AuditIt depends on category. BS&Co's agency dataset puts consumables at 22% to 44% and fashion at 10% to 17% over a year. Your own best recent cohort is the more useful target.
No. Shopify's returning customer rate is the share of a period's buyers with any earlier order. A repeat purchase rate follows one group of new customers over time, which the cohort report shows.
No. Subscriptions suit products used up on a regular schedule. For fashion and durables, a timed reminder or an accessory offer usually fits better than a recurring charge.
Mike Le
Co-Founder, CB/I Digital and Conative AI
Mike Le co-founded CB/I Digital in New York in 2007 and has helped brands grow through search, paid media and data ever since. He started the agency's AI team in 2019 and later started Conative AI. He writes about how customers find and choose brands now that AI answers sit between them and the search results.
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