Black Friday Customer Retention Benchmarks: What Happens After the Sale

Short answer: Black Friday Cyber Monday is now led by existing customers at large retailers, but smaller brands still fill it with first-timers. In Bluecore's 2025 Black Friday benchmarks, repeat buyers drove 53% of orders across 144 brands, yet new buyers made up 74.54% of Black Friday purchases at mid-market brands. Those first-timers are worth chasing on a short clock: across 1,299 Shopify stores, By the Numbers found the median store gets 11.4% of first buyers to a second order within 90 days and 19.5% within 365 days.

This report uses BFCM 2025 data, the most recent completed season, and is written for planning BFCM 2026, when Thanksgiving falls on November 26 and Cyber Monday on November 30. A discount-acquired cohort should be expected to trail the all-season curve unless you work it, and the sections below show by how much and what to do about it.

Key figures at a glance

• Repeat buyers drove 53% of Black Friday 2025 orders and new buyers 34.8%, according to Bluecore.
• Repeat customers produced 70.2% of BFCM 2025 GMV in food and beverage, 55.4% in health and beauty and 52.2% in apparel, according to Klaviyo's BFCM benchmarks by industry.
• Revenue from repeat customers grew 13.5% year over year over BFCM 2025 while discounts fell 10%, according to Klaviyo's BFCM recap.
• The median Shopify store gets 6.6% of first buyers back within 30 days and 19.5% within 365 days, according to By the Numbers.
• A 35% acquisition discount produced customers worth about half the long-term value of customers acquired without a promotion in Lewis's study in the Journal of Marketing Research.
• Retailers expect 17% of holiday sales to be returned, and 71% of consumers say a poor returns experience makes them less likely to shop with that retailer again, according to the NRF and Happy Returns.

Who actually buys on Black Friday

The headline answer depends on how big you are. Bluecore's 2025 Black Friday benchmarks cover 3.7 million orders and $531 million in sales across 144 retail brands, and show repeat buyers driving 53% of orders, new buyers 34.8% and reactivated buyers 12%. That reversed the year before, when new shoppers were the majority. Bluecore also splits the data by size, and at its 85 mid-market brands the picture is the opposite of the headline: new buyers made up 74.54% of Black Friday purchases and retained buyers 20.36%.

Triple Whale's BFCM 2025 data shows the same size effect in revenue terms: brands under $1M in GMV took 66.05% of their BFCM revenue from new customers, while brands above $10M took 54.69% from returning customers.

Klaviyo's 2025 BFCM benchmarks add the category view. Food and beverage was the most repeat-driven vertical, with repeat customers producing 70.2% of five-day GMV, while home and garden took 67.5% of GMV from first-time customers and sporting goods 64.7%.

Reading the three mixes together

These are three different measurements and should not be averaged. Bluecore counts orders on Black Friday itself, and its new bucket includes anyone first acquired in the previous year. Klaviyo measures GMV over five days. Triple Whale measures revenue by brand size. What they agree on is the shape: consumables and big brands lean on customers they already have, while durable categories and smaller brands use BFCM to acquire.

For your planning, use the number closest to your own situation. If you are a mid-market brand selling jewelry, footwear, home or sporting goods, expect roughly three in four Black Friday orders to come from people with little or no history with you. If you sell food, supplements or beauty and already have a base, BFCM is mostly a repeat-customer event, and the first-timers you do win are a smaller group. Either way, the cohort you build over the five days is the cheapest retention opportunity of your year, because you have already paid to acquire it.

How BFCM first-timers retain

No trusted publisher released a 2025 BFCM cohort follow-up with a clean repeat rate, so the right baseline is the all-season curve for first buyers, read alongside annual retention across industries. By the Numbers' second-order benchmark tracks customers who first bought between September 2024 and August 2025 across 1,299 Shopify stores, and reports the median share placing a second order at each horizon.

Our calculation from that curve: about a third of the year's second orders arrive in the first 30 days and close to 60% arrive within 90 days. That is why the 90 days after BFCM matter more than anything you send in spring. A customer who has not bought again by early March is not lost, but your odds have dropped sharply.

The last time Bluecore published a Black Friday cohort follow-up, it found that more than 6% of Black Friday 2018 customers bought again during the same holiday season and 22% became repeat buyers at an average of 108 days after their first order. That is old data from large retailers, but it supports the same point: the holiday season itself is part of the second-purchase window, because gift shopping continues for weeks after Cyber Monday.

Why a BFCM cohort usually trails the curve

Three things pull a BFCM cohort below an ordinary month's first buyers.

1. Discount-led acquisition. The best controlled evidence is academic. Lewis's study of acquisition promotions, using customer-level data from a newspaper and an online grocer, found that deeper acquisition discounts were linked to lower repeat buying, and that a 35% acquisition discount produced customers worth about half the long-term value of customers acquired without a promotion.
2. Gift buyers. Many BFCM orders are for someone else. The buyer may never need your product again, and the recipient never gave you an email address.
3. Anonymous shoppers. Retailers identified only 27% of Black Friday 2025 site visitors, according to Bluecore. A first-timer who checks out as a guest with no marketing consent is very hard to bring back.

The 2025 season also showed that shallower discounts did not cost growth. Klaviyo's BFCM 2025 recap, based on a stable cohort of 10,000 brands, found discounts fell 10% year over year, brands offering the smallest discounts grew fastest at 14%, and revenue from repeat customers grew 13.5%.

What good looks like for a BFCM cohort

These are planning tiers for your 90-day second-order rate on BFCM first-timers, built from the median curve above and the "about half" penalty in the Lewis study. They are our calculation, not a published BFCM benchmark, so use them to set your target and then replace them with your own prior-year cohort.

Source: tiers derived from the By the Numbers second-order benchmark and Lewis (2006).

For context on the full year, the median 12-month repeat purchase rate across 1,326 Shopify stores was 18.1%, with the top quarter above 28.2%, according to By the Numbers' repeat purchase rate benchmark.

The size of the 2025 season, and what 2026 looks like

Source: Adobe holiday season 2025 results, Salesforce Cyber Week 2025, Shopify BFCM 2025, NRF Thanksgiving weekend survey.

Adobe's 2026 holiday forecast puts US online holiday spend at $275.1 billion, up 6.7%, with Cyber Week at $47.5 billion and Cyber Monday at $15.1 billion. Shopify reported 81+ million customers buying from its merchants over BFCM 2025, at an average cart of $114.70. Volume is not the problem for most brands. Keeping a meaningful share of it is.

Discounts were deep again. Apparel discounts peaked at 25.1% off list price over the 2025 season, according to Adobe, which is in the range where the Lewis study found long-term customer value falling sharply.

Returns land inside the retention window

Retailers expect 17% of holiday sales to be returned and 19.3% of online sales over 2025 as a whole, according to the NRF and Happy Returns 2025 Retail Returns Landscape. The same survey found 76% of consumers are more likely to choose a return option that gives an instant refund or exchange, and 71% say a poor return experience makes them less likely to shop with that retailer again.

Most holiday returns come back in late December and January, which falls in the second and third months of your BFCM cohort's life. A refund ends the relationship. An instant exchange or store credit keeps the customer and turns the return into the second order you were trying to win. If your returns flow defaults to refunds, your BFCM retention ceiling is lower than it needs to be.

The 90-day post-BFCM timeline, with targets

Day 0 is the customer's first BFCM order. For BFCM 2026, day 90 lands in late February 2027. The targets are the median all-season curve, which is the bar your BFCM cohort should aim to match.

Source: targets from the By the Numbers second-order benchmark; returns context from the NRF and Happy Returns.

Two practical rules for your flows. First, give your BFCM incentive an expiry inside the window, for example credit that must be used by mid-February, so the deadline does the work a discount email would otherwise do. Second, exit customers from the sequence the moment they place a second order, because the third order is the next job.

Bluecore reports that once a buyer makes a second purchase, the likelihood of a third surges by 95%. For tactics by month, see what to do with your Black Friday customers in January.

Worked example: what converting more BFCM first-timers is worth

Take an example store that acquires 2,000 first-time customers over BFCM 2026, with an average order of $115, close to the Shopify BFCM 2025 average cart above.

• Baseline: the cohort would behave like a typical discount-led cohort, with 7% placing a second order within 90 days. That would be 140 customers.
• Target: you work the timeline and reach the all-season median of 11.4%. That would be 228 customers, or 88 more.
• Immediate value: 88 extra second orders at $115 would be $10,120 in revenue inside the 90 days.
• Year-one value: if each of those 88 customers would go on to place 2.5 orders in their first year (an assumption; pull your own figure from the cohort report), that would be about $25,300 in revenue, or roughly $12,650 in gross profit at a 50% gross margin.

The rule of thumb for your planning: every percentage point of 90-day second-order rate is worth 10 second orders per 1,000 BFCM first-timers, times your average order value, before counting any later orders.

The incentive you use changes the margin. In this example, a 20% discount on the second order for all 228 returning customers would cost about $5,244. A $10 credit issued to the whole cohort would cost $2,280 if only those 228 customers redeem it, because unredeemed credit costs nothing. That gap is why a credit or points balance is usually the cheaper way to buy your second order. Run the numbers for your store with the customer lifetime value calculator.

How to measure your BFCM cohort in Shopify

Shopify's customer cohort analysis report groups customers by the date of their first order and shows retention in each later period, so you can read a BFCM cohort directly. To compare like for like:

1. Define the cohort by first-order date. Use Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, and exclude anyone with an earlier order. Bluecore's new buyer counts anyone first acquired in the past year; yours should not.
2. Measure at fixed horizons. Report the share of the cohort with a second order at 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days, the same horizons as the benchmark above. Never compare a cohort that has had 40 days with one that has had a year.
3. Compare against your own non-BFCM cohorts. Run the same horizons on first buyers from September or October. The gap between the two is your real BFCM penalty.
4. Split by first-order discount. Tag your first orders by discount depth: none, under 20%, and 20% or more. If deep-discount first-timers return at half the rate of full-price ones, your problem is the offer, not the follow-up.
5. Track returns separately. Count an exchange as a retained customer and a refund as a lost one, and report the exchange share for your cohort.

Where Mage fits

Mage is a Shopify loyalty app, and the levers that move a BFCM cohort are the ones a loyalty program runs. Points or store credit earned on the BFCM order give every first-timer a balance to come back for, with an expiry that lands the second order inside 90 days. Store credit gives January returns an exchange path instead of a refund. VIP tiers let you reward existing customers with early access instead of deeper discounts, which is how the brands in Klaviyo's data grew repeat revenue while discounts fell.

The BFCM 2026 Retention Playbook walks through turning Black Friday buyers into repeat customers after the sale, including the post-purchase sequence and the credit mechanics above.