Baby and Kids Ecommerce Benchmarks (2026): Repeat Purchase Rate and CLV

Short answer: No benchmark publishes a repeat purchase rate for baby and kids stores yet. By the Numbers left children's clothing, toys, children's care products and strollers out of its 1,326-store Shopify study for having too few stores, but its closest rows put the median 12-month repeat purchase rate at 16.2% for clothing, 26.4% for skincare and 30.9% for health food and supplements, against 18.1% for all stores. What makes baby different is the clock: Carter's fiscal 2025 10-K puts its US apparel market share at about 21% for ages zero to two and about 2% for ages five to ten, so retention in this category means winning a fixed window, not keeping a customer forever.

Key figures at a glance

Every baby customer arrives with an end date

Most retention benchmarks assume a customer can stay as long as the brand keeps earning it. A parent buying for a baby can't, because the need is tied to the child's age and the child keeps getting older.

Carter's, the children's apparel leader in North America, shows the shape in its annual report. Its brands hold about 21% of the US baby apparel market (ages zero to two), about 8% of the toddler market (three to four) and about 2% of the kid market (five to ten), according to its fiscal 2025 Form 10-K. The same filing lists birth rate fluctuations as a risk because they affect "the number of customers that are acquired and retained," and says the company built its toddler brand, Otter Avenue, to retain infant and baby customers as they grow. If the category leader loses most of its share as children age, an independent brand should plan around that curve rather than hope to beat it.

The inflow of new parents is shrinking too. The US registered 3,612,012 births in 2025, down less than 1% from 2024, and the general fertility rate fell to a record low of 53.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 (NCHS Data Brief 571). Birth rates fell for women under 30 and rose for women aged 30 to 44. Mean age at first birth reached a record 27.6 years in 2024, according to the NCHS final 2024 birth data. A smaller, older pool of new parents each year makes every window you do win worth more.

Three clocks run at once

A baby and kids catalogue usually runs three purchase cycles side by side. Each ends for a different reason and needs a different benchmark.

The feeding clock shows how a consumable window opens over months, not on the day of birth. Among US infants born in 2023, 86.1% were ever breastfed, 62.8% were still breastfed at six months and 40.8% at one year, according to the CDC's National Immunization Survey data. Formula and feeding demand keeps building through the first year as breastfeeding stops, so a feeding brand acquires its customers at different ages across that year, and each arrives with a different amount of runway left.

The size-up clock is written on the size chart. Carter's sells baby sizes from newborn to 24 months, toddler sizes 2T to 5T and kids sizes 4 to 14 (Carter's 10-K). Every step up is a new buying decision, which is both a reason to come back and an opening to switch brands. Runway depends on when you meet the parent: one who first buys at birth has 24 months of baby sizes ahead, and one who first buys at 18 months has six.

The stage-up clock is the slowest. A crib or stroller is bought once per child at most, so a gear brand's repeat business comes from accessories, the next stage of the same product line, and the next child.

What good looks like: tiers by catalogue type

By the Numbers publishes the 12-month repeat purchase rate (the share of customers who ordered at least twice in 12 months) by industry for 1,326 Shopify stores, September 2025 to August 2026. Its children's rows had too few stores to report, so the tiers below map each baby clock to the closest published row. Pick the row that matches what most of your first orders are, not how you describe the brand.

Source: By the Numbers repeat purchase rate benchmark, 1,326 Shopify stores, September 2025 to August 2026.

All figures are 12-month repeat purchase rates. Feeding and diaper products are used up and reordered on a cycle of weeks, like supplements and skincare. Toys sit with jewelry because both are bought mostly for an occasion and often by someone other than the end user. Gear sits with decor and furniture because both are large, infrequent purchases for the home.

Two adjustments apply in baby. First, a consumable brand selling only through its own site should expect the lower half of its band, because the replenishment order drifts to whichever retailer makes reordering easiest. The Honest Company stopped fulfilling orders through its own site, Honest.com, at the end of 2025, and Amazon, Target and Walmart accounted for about 39%, 28% and 8% of its $371.3 million revenue that year, according to its fiscal 2025 Form 10-K. Second, a brand with a narrow age range (newborn only, say) has a mechanically lower 12-month rate, because many customers age out inside the measurement window. Judge it on the rate inside the window, covered in the measurement section below.

Reconciling the numbers you will see quoted

Baby brands get compared against figures that measure different things. Use each for the decision it fits.

• Repeat purchase rate vs returning customer rate. In a 90-day snapshot of 1,421 stores, the median returning customer rate was 34.4% while the median repeat purchase rate was 11.1% (By the Numbers). Returning customer rate counts anyone whose first order came before the period, so a parent who bought newborn sleepsuits last year and one swim diaper this quarter counts as returning. Use repeat purchase rate for the tiers above.
• 12-month repeat purchase rate vs annual customer retention. Retention is the share of one year's customers who order again the next year. Its all-store median was 15.8% across 1,284 stores (October 2025 to September 2026), and 14.6% for clothing (By the Numbers). In baby, year-over-year retention is where the clock does its damage, because the second year is when a narrow size range runs out.
• Store AOV. The median Children store on Shopify had an average order value of $79 from July to October 2026 (By the Numbers). Use it to compare your own AOV.
• Ad-attributed AOV and CPA. Triple Whale's benchmarks put the Baby median at $75.33 for orders from paid ads, with a median cost per acquisition of $26.65, August 2025 to July 2026. Use these to model payback, not to compare store AOV.
• Market share vs retention. The 21% to 2% drop in Carter's 10-K is share across age bands, not a cohort retention rate. It shows the shape of the clock, not how fast any one brand's customers leave.

An earlier version of this page quoted repeat rates and lifetime values for baby consumables and gear that had no primary source. They have been removed rather than carried over.

Second children and gifts restart the clock

The clock does not always run out. Of 2024 US births with a known birth order, 39.5% were first children, 31.5% were second children and 29.0% were third or later, so 60.5% were born to a mother who already had a child (our calculation from NCHS Table 3). Mean maternal age was 27.6 at a first birth and 30.0 at a second. That 2.4-year difference compares different mothers in the same year, so it is not a measured gap between siblings, but it is close to the length of a 24-month baby size range. A first-time parent is likely to age out of a baby brand at about the time a second child could bring them back.

What restarts differs by clock. Diapers, wipes and feeding start again from zero. Apparel restarts partly, since some clothing is handed down. Gear restarts least, because a crib or stroller is often reused. Keeping a lapsed parent reachable costs far less than a new acquisition at the $26.65 median cost per acquisition in Triple Whale's Baby benchmark, which is why asking for a due date or the child's birth date matters as much as any discount.

Gifts work the same way from the other direction. Baby showers, registries and birthdays bring in buyers who are not parents, at no acquisition cost to the brand when the parent shares the list. Each one is a first order you can try to turn into a second.

Worked example: a baby apparel brand with 10,000 new customers a year

Take a Shopify brand selling sizes newborn to 24 months that acquires 10,000 first-time customers a year. Its average order value is $79, the By the Numbers Children median. Its cost per acquisition is $26.65, Triple Whale's Baby median. Gross margin is set at 55%, which is our assumption.

The year-two row uses By the Numbers' churn split across 1,284 stores: 91.8% of customers with one earlier order did not order the following year, against 78.3% of those with two or three (By the Numbers). On our calculation, that means 8.2% of one-order customers and 21.7% of repeat customers buy again in year two.

Three things follow. The top-quarter move is worth about $29,500 of gross margin in year one, as much as the budget to acquire 1,109 new customers at the Triple Whale Baby median CPA. The year-two gain is small (92 customers), and for a brand whose sizes stop at 24 months it is an upper bound, because many of those parents age out during year two. And the timing of acquisition matters as much as the rate: met in the first three months of life, each of the 10,000 customers has 21 or more months of sizes ahead, against 12 on average if first orders are spread evenly across the size range. Win the second order inside the window, and earn the right to contact the parent again when a second child arrives.

How to measure it in Shopify

• Record the child's age. Ask for a due date or birth date at account creation, on a registry or in a post-purchase survey, and store it as a customer field. Without it you cannot tell a parent who aged out from one who left unhappy.
• Cohort by first-order clock. Segment customers by the product type of their first order (feeding, diapering, apparel, gear, toys) and calculate the 12-month repeat purchase rate for each. Compare each against its row in the tiers table, not against one blended number.
• Measure inside the window. For each cohort, count only customers whose child was still inside your age range for the full 12 months. That within-window rate is the fair comparison for a narrow-range brand.
• Separate graduation churn from dissatisfaction churn. Recharge describes how infant formula brand Bobbie uses baby-age data to tell the two apart and treat them differently (Recharge). A formula subscriber who cancels around the first birthday has likely graduated; one who cancels in the first few weeks has a problem you can fix.
• Time flows to the clocks. In Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks (183,000+ customers), toys and hobbies emails placed orders at 1.75% for automated flows against 1.07% for campaigns (Klaviyo). Size-up and refill reminders are flows by nature.
• Expect the second clothing order late. For clothing, 6.8% of new customers ordered again within 30 days, 11.0% within 90 and 19.1% within 365 (By the Numbers). About two in five of those second orders came after day 90, which fits a size change rather than a quick top-up.
• Use Shopify's definitions. Shopify's returning customer rate is not a repeat purchase rate (Shopify analytics field definitions), so build the annual repeat rate from a customer export or Shopify's customer reports.

The Ecommerce Retention Playbook video covers repeat purchase rate on a 90-day window and time to second purchase, the two numbers to watch against a size-up or refill clock.

Where Mage fits

Mage is a Shopify loyalty app, and the levers above map onto it directly. VIP tiers can reward parents for staying through each size step rather than for spend alone. Birthday rewards bring parents back on a date that matters to them. The wishlist doubles as a shareable gift registry, so shower and birthday guests arrive as tracked traffic. A two-sided referral program suits a category where parents ask other parents what to buy. Points on subscription orders through the Recharge integration support the feeding and diapering clock, and the Klaviyo integration puts point balances into size-up and refill flows. Our guide to keeping parents as children grow covers the program design in more detail.

For related categories, see the fashion and apparel benchmarks, pet supplies benchmarks and subscription box benchmarks.