Ecommerce Retention Rate Benchmarks by Industry (2026)

Short answer: The median Shopify store keeps about one customer in six from one year to the next. By the Numbers' October 2026 benchmark of 1,284 Shopify stores puts median annual retention at 15.8%, with the top quarter above 25.3%, and the spread by industry runs from 26.2% in skincare to 7.3% in decor and furniture. Larger retailers sit higher: Bluecore's 2025 benchmark of more than 100 retailers found 27.4% annual retention across seven verticals, from 41.2% in health and beauty to 19.1% in jewelry and accessories.

Key figures at a glance

Ecommerce retention rate by industry

The table below uses one definition throughout: the share of customers who ordered in one 12-month period and ordered again in the next 12 months. By the Numbers tracked customers who bought between October 2024 and September 2025 through to September 2026. The repeat purchase rate column comes from the same publisher's repeat purchase benchmark (September 2025 to August 2026, 1,326 stores) and counts customers with two or more orders inside one 12-month window.

Sources: By the Numbers retention benchmark, By the Numbers repeat purchase benchmark.

Three groups stand out. Categories people use up and reorder (skincare, coffee, drinks, supplements) cluster in the mid twenties. Apparel and leisure sit in the low to mid teens. Durable and gift-led categories (jewelry, bags, shoes, decor) sit around the high single digits to low teens. Industry samples range from 25 to 121 stores. The gap between the top and bottom of the table is wider than the gap between a typical store and a top-quarter store in most categories, so picking the right comparison row matters more than any single tactic.

Pet supplies, baby and kids, CBD and electronics don't appear because the sample had too few stores in each to publish a median.

Retail chains retain more than Shopify brands

Bluecore's 2025 Customer Growth Benchmarks Report measured the share of 2023 buyers who bought again in 2024 at more than 100 retailers. The full report is gated; its vertical table is reproduced on Shopify's own retention article, which credits Bluecore.

The order of categories matches the Shopify data: beauty first, jewelry and home last. The levels don't. Bluecore's averages are 41.2% for health and beauty and 21.4% for home goods. In By the Numbers' percentiles, a top-quarter skincare store starts at 33.0% and a top-quarter decor and furniture store at 12.2%. In every category where both publish a number, the retail chain average is at or above what only the best quarter of Shopify stores achieve.

Four reasons explain the gap, and none of them mean Shopify stores are doing something wrong:

• Who is in the sample. Bluecore's sample is established retailers, department stores among them, with large existing customer files and years of brand awareness. A department store's customers come back for reasons a two-year-old brand can't match.
• Store size. Repeat behaviour rises with scale in the Shopify data too. By the Numbers' 12-month repeat purchase rate is 16.3% at the median store under $1m in annual revenue, 19.8% at $1m to $10m and 20.3% above $10m.
• Identity. Bluecore's business is identifying shoppers across devices and channels. Better matching of repeat buyers to their earlier orders raises measured retention.
• Average versus median. Bluecore reports a vertical average; By the Numbers reports the median store. A few very loyal retailers lift an average more than a median.

Use Bluecore's table as the ceiling an established multi-channel brand can reach, and the Shopify medians as the baseline for a direct-to-consumer brand. A $3m Shopify apparel brand at 20% annual retention is a top-quarter store, even though it sits well under Bluecore's 31.7% apparel average.

Six metrics that all get called retention

Most disagreement about "good retention" comes from comparing different metrics. Each one answers a different question.

Sources: By the Numbers retention, By the Numbers repeat purchase, Bluecore, Recharge, Triple Whale.

Returning customer rate is the one that misleads most. Shopify's analytics definitions calculate it as returning customers divided by all customers who placed orders in the period, where a returning customer is anyone who had bought before. In the same September 2026 snapshot of 1,421 stores, By the Numbers found a median 90-day repeat purchase rate of 11.1% but a median returning customer rate of 34.4%. The difference is that the returning customer rate counts everyone with an earlier order, including people who first bought years ago, while the repeat purchase rate only counts two orders inside the window. A store that stops acquiring customers sees its returning customer rate rise while its customer base shrinks, so don't use it as a retention target.

Annual retention and 12-month repeat purchase rate are close but not the same. In the By the Numbers data, the repeat purchase rate is about seven or eight points higher than retention in coffee, drinks and supplements because fast-reordering customers often place two orders within a single year even when they don't carry into the next. In skincare, cosmetics, hair and clothing the two figures are within about two points of each other. If your repeat purchase rate is far above your annual retention, you have a group of customers who buy in bursts and then lapse.

Subscription retention is a different scale

Subscriptions change the denominator from customers to renewal cycles, and the numbers stop being comparable with the tables above.

Recharge's July 2026 analysis of its platform data (cohorts from July 2025 to June 2026, about 1,800 supplement brands plus four comparison verticals) found that between 15.4% and 20.7% of renewal cycles ended in an active cancellation: 15.4% in pet supplies, 17.3% in supplements and vitamins, 18.3% in health and wellness and 20.7% in both coffee and tea and beauty. Most of these products ship roughly every 30 days, so that is close to a monthly cancellation rate.

The same data shows how few subscriptions last. In Recharge's order-sequence data, only 6.6% to 15.3% of first-time subscribers reached their sixth reorder, and 0.6% to 3.1% reached their twelfth.

Enterprise subscription programmes hold on longer. Ordergroove's holiday subscription report, based on its enterprise subscription network, found that roughly two in five subscribers acquired on an ordinary day were still subscribed twelve months later, against just over a third of those acquired during BFCM 2025. In the same report, the median brand lost 28% of an everyday cohort between the first and second order, and 33% of a BFCM cohort.

Two cautions when you compare these. Recharge counts completed reorders, so a subscriber who skips or pauses stops progressing; Ordergroove counts subscribers who are still subscribed. And Recharge's base is mostly small and mid-sized Shopify brands, while Ordergroove's is enterprise.

Recurly's churn benchmarks give ecommerce a 4.25% median churn rate from July 2026 network data, and label it annual. It can't sit on the same scale as Recharge's per-cycle cancellations, and Recurly doesn't describe which ecommerce businesses are in its network. Use it to compare against other Recurly-billed businesses, not to set a target for a Shopify replenishment subscription.

Revenue share shows dependence, not loyalty

The share of revenue from returning customers answers a separate question: how much of this period's sales would disappear if acquisition stopped.

Triple Whale's BFCM 2025 data across more than 33,000 businesses found returning customers produced 33.95% of revenue at brands under $1m in GMV, 44.39% at $1m to $10m and 54.69% above $10m. Klaviyo's BFCM 2025 benchmarks show the category pattern: repeat customers made up 70.2% of GMV in food and beverage, 55.4% in health and beauty and 52.2% in apparel and accessories, while first-time customers drove 67.5% of GMV in home and garden and 64.7% in sporting goods.

Both line up with the retention tables: consumables and bigger brands lean on returning buyers, and durables lean on new ones. But a high returning share can come from a weak acquisition engine as easily as from strong retention, so read it next to annual retention, never instead of it.

What good looks like, by category group

These tiers are our grouping of the published distributions. Each group is anchored on categories for which By the Numbers publishes quartiles. "Needs work" is below the anchor's bottom quartile, "typical" runs up to about the group's medians, "strong" runs to the top quartile and "top tier" is above it, where Bluecore's retail chain averages sit. All figures are annual retention on the 12-month definition.

The anchors, from By the Numbers' quartiles: supplements' quartiles run from 14.8% to 30.2% and skincare's from 18.0% to 33.0%; clothing's from 7.4% to 20.6%; decor and furniture's from 3.9% to 12.2%. Across all stores in the same benchmark, the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles are 8.6%, 15.8% and 25.3%, and the top 10% of stores retain more than 35.0%. The durables top tier is our estimate, since no quartiles are published for jewelry, bags or shoes; Bluecore's jewelry average of 19.1% suggests it is reachable.

Source: tiers are Mage analysis of By the Numbers' retention distribution.

Worked example: median to top quarter in clothing

Take a Shopify clothing store with 7,000 customers last year placing 10,000 orders, at a $90 average order value. Those three are illustrative inputs; the retention rates are the published clothing quartiles.

Source: Mage calculation using the By the Numbers clothing quartiles. Orders per retained customer is an assumption.

The difference is 420 customers, 714 orders and $64,260 a year: about 7% more orders without any extra ad spend. To get the same 714 orders from new customers placing 1.2 orders in their first year, the store would need about 595 more first-time buyers. Put your own figures through the customer lifetime value calculator to see what that is worth over several years.

The larger gain is in who you retain. By the Numbers' churn data splits next-year churn by how many orders a customer had placed before:

Turned around, a one-order customer at the median store has less than a one-in-ten chance of buying the next year, and a customer with two or three orders has better than a one-in-five chance, close to three times as high. Part of that is selection (people who reorder already like the product), but it matches Bluecore's finding that a customer who has bought twice is 95% more likely to buy a third time.

Applied to the clothing store above as a Mage calculation: turning 500 extra one-time buyers into second-order customers this year, if they then behave like the two-or-three-order group, adds roughly 68 retained customers next year on top of the orders they placed this year. The second order is where retention is won or lost.

What drives the gaps between industries

Purchase cycle. The share of new customers who come back within 30 days is 6.6% across all stores in By the Numbers' timing data, rising to 9.0% in supplements and 10.1% in non-alcoholic beverages. Within 365 days, 29.3% of new supplement customers have reordered against 13.0% in decor and furniture. A product that runs out pulls the customer back on its own clock.

Consumable versus durable. A sofa or a ring is bought once and lasts. Retention in those categories depends on range breadth (something else to buy) and gifting occasions, which is why jewelry outperforms decor despite both being durable.

Subscription and wholesale share. By the Numbers notes that subscriptions and wholesale accounts push a store's retention up, and advises separating them if they are a large share of customers. A supplement brand with half its customers on subscription and a supplement brand with none are not comparable on one blended number.

Size and age. Bigger brands have more past customers to come back, more products and more recognition. That shows in the revenue-band split above and in the gap to Bluecore's retailers.

What customers say brings them back. In Attentive's 2026 survey of 600 US adults, 88% had bought from a brand new to them in the past three months, but only 18% expected to buy again from most or all of those brands. Good deals (52%) and product quality (45%) were the most cited reasons to make a second purchase; prices that felt too high for the value (45%) topped the reasons not to.

How to measure retention in Shopify

To compare like for like with the tables above, calculate annual cohort retention yourself rather than reading the dashboard:

1. Pick two matching 12-month periods, for example October to September last year and this year.
2. Count unique customers who placed at least one order in the first period. Exclude cancelled and test orders.
3. Count how many of those same customers placed an order in the second period.
4. Divide the second count by the first.

Shopify's customer cohort analysis report groups customers by the date of their first order and shows retention by week, month or quarter afterwards. That is the right view for second-order timing, but it is a first-order cohort, not the "everyone who bought last year" cohort used in the benchmarks. Run both: the cohort report tells you when new customers drop off, and the annual calculation tells you how the whole base is holding up. If subscriptions or wholesale are more than about a fifth of customers, calculate them separately.

The Ecommerce Retention Playbook walks through the five retention metrics, why repeat purchase rate is best tracked on a 90-day window, and why time to second purchase matters as much as the rate.

Benchmarks for your industry

Each industry report goes deeper on its own data: purchase cycles, lifetime value and what good looks like for that category. The table maps each one to the closest Shopify category in the industry table above and to the tier group it falls into.

For the cross-industry picture, see what happens to Black Friday customers after the sale, referral program benchmarks, conversion rate benchmarks and ecommerce profit margins.

Where Mage fits

The data points to one lever above the rest: getting first-time buyers to a second and third order inside their category's purchase cycle. Mage is a Shopify loyalty app built for that step. Points and store credit give a first-time buyer a balance to come back and spend, VIP tiers give repeat customers a status worth keeping, and balance reminders go out through the email and SMS tools you already use. It won't fix a product people don't reorder or a category with a three-year purchase cycle. For stores where a second order is realistic, a loyalty program is how you move from the median row of your category toward the top quarter, and the churn rate calculator tracks whether it is working.