Home, Fragrance and Garden Ecommerce Benchmarks (2026): Repeat Purchase Rate and CLV

Short answer: Home goods sit near the bottom of the repeat purchase table by industry. The median 12-month repeat purchase rate is 11.8% for decor and furniture stores and 16.2% for fragrance stores, against 18.1% for all stores, in By the Numbers' benchmark of 1,326 Shopify stores for September 2025 to August 2026. Measured as annual cohort retention, Bluecore found 21.4% of home goods buyers from 2023 bought again in 2024, against 27.4% across seven retail verticals. A store that sells both candles and furniture should set a separate target for each and blend them by its first-order mix, as the worked example below shows.

Key figures at a glance

Where home sits on the repeat purchase table

By the Numbers' 12-month benchmark puts decor and furniture at a median of 11.8%, with the middle half of 68 stores between 8.2% and 16.3%. Fragrances sit at 16.2%, with the middle half of 25 stores between 12.7% and 19.6%. Candles have too few stores to publish a row, and the fragrance row covers personal perfume as well as home scent, so treat it as the nearest proxy for candles and diffusers rather than a candle benchmark. There is no plant or garden row either.

Baskets run the other way. In By the Numbers' order value benchmark for July to October 2026, decor and furniture stores have a median order value of $165 (middle half $97 to $421, 72 stores) and fragrance stores $99 (26 stores). The broader home and garden category sits at $154 against $91 for all stores in the same dataset's category view.

That changes how a low repeat rate should be read. On our calculation, 100 decor customers at the median repeat rate produce 11.8 repeat buyers worth about $1,947 if each places one more median order, while 100 fragrance customers produce 16.2 repeat buyers worth about $1,604. A durable store with a lower rate is not automatically getting less from its returning customers. It is getting it from fewer people, which makes each of them matter more.

Durables and consumables return on different clocks

The repeat rate alone hides when customers come back. By the Numbers' second-order data follows new customers whose first order fell between September 2024 and August 2025, across 1,299 stores.

Source: By the Numbers, second-order rate by industry, new customers first ordering September 2024 to August 2025.

On our calculation, decor and furniture buyers who return within a year mostly do it early: 45% of the year's second orders arrive inside 30 days and 68% inside 90 days. On our calculation for fragrance the shares are 38% and 60%, and for all stores 34% and 58%. In our calculation, between day 90 and day 365 decor adds only 4.1 points of second-order rate while fragrance adds 7.6.

Our reading: a decor second order is usually a completion purchase (the matching lamp, the cushion covers, the replacement for a piece that arrived in the wrong shade), clustered around delivery. Once the room is finished, the customer has no reason to buy until the next project. A candle or refill second order is a replenishment, and it keeps arriving as product runs out. So a durable brand should put its retention effort into the window from delivery to day 90, then switch to low-frequency tools (status, wishlists, new-collection launches) for the long gap. A consumable brand should run reorder prompts all year.

Home shoppers respond well to that kind of timed messaging. In Klaviyo's 2026 email benchmarks, drawn from over 183,000 Klaviyo customers, home and garden had the highest placed order rate of the industries listed, for both email flows (2.17%) and campaigns (1.34%).

Flows are where the post-delivery and reorder windows get worked, so a home brand has more to gain from building them out than most categories. Our guide to time to second purchase covers how to find your own curve.

Setting targets when you sell both

Most home stores are mixed: a candle line next to throws and ceramics, or furniture with a scent collection. A single store-wide repeat rate compares that mix with stores that sell something else. Score each first-order segment against its own row, then blend.

Source: segment bands from By the Numbers (quartiles, September 2025 to August 2026); the mixed-store column is our calculation, weighting each band by first-order share.

Three adjustments sharpen the tiers:

• Refill-led candle and diffuser brands should treat the fragrance top quarter as their typical target. Their product runs out on a schedule, which in our view puts them closer to replenishment categories such as skincare than to perfume.
• Furniture-only stores should add a 24-month view. Twelve months captures the completion purchase but misses the next room.
• Plant and garden stores have no published row. Use the all-store quartile bands and measure on a spring-to-spring year, because a 12-month window that starts in June counts one season, not two.

The blend has a useful consequence. On our calculation, a 60/40 fragrance and decor store reaches the top quarter for its own mix at about 18.3%, almost exactly the all-store median. A store at that level that compares itself with the all-store figure would conclude it is average when it is beating three quarters of its peers.

Worked example: the decor problem a blended rate hides

Take a store with 10,000 customers in the last 12 months: 6,000 first bought candles or refills and 4,000 first bought decor or furniture. In this example, its blended 12-month repeat rate is 15.0%. On our calculation it looks 3.1 points behind the all-store median, yet slightly ahead of its mix-weighted median of 14.4%.

Split by first order, the picture changes. Suppose the candle cohort repeats at 20.0%, top quarter for fragrance, and the decor cohort at 7.5%, in the bottom quarter for decor. In our example the blend is the same 15.0% (60% of 20.0 plus 40% of 7.5), but one cohort is excellent and the other needs work.

Source: order values are the fragrance and decor and furniture medians from By the Numbers; customer counts and rates are illustrative.

The decor cohort is the bigger opportunity, and the cheapest route to it is usually not another sofa. It is moving decor buyers into the consumable line: a candle or diffuser offered in the 90 days after delivery, when decor second orders cluster. If those decor buyers then repeat on the candle clock, the cohort starts behaving like a fragrance cohort. That is the logic behind the AOV Masterclass approach of adding a low-ticket, high-frequency product to a high-ticket order.

What the big home retailers report, and how to read it

Listed home retailers disclose repeat behaviour, but never as a 12-month repeat purchase rate.

Wayfair's second-quarter 2026 results show repeat customers placed 80.2% of orders delivered, LTM orders per active customer of 1.89 and LTM net revenue per active customer of $596. RH says in its fiscal 2025 annual report that members of its paid RH Members Program drove approximately 97% of sales in its core business, with about 262,000 members at year-end. Bath & Body Works, whose hero categories include home fragrance and three-wick candles, reported in its fiscal 2024 annual report that nearly 80% of US sales came from loyalty members, with about 39 million active members.

None of these numbers is comparable with a Shopify repeat rate, and quoting one as a target is the most common benchmark mistake in this category.

Source: By the Numbers, Bluecore, Wayfair, RH and Bath & Body Works filings.

The order-share measures run high because they count every customer acquired in earlier years. The same gap shows up on Shopify: for 1,421 stores in By the Numbers' 90-day snapshot, the median returning customer rate was 34.4% while the median repeat purchase rate was 11.1%. A home store with a modest repeat rate can still take a third or more of its orders from returning customers. The member-share figures say something different again: RH and Bath & Body Works have enrolled nearly all their buyers. For a durable brand, RH is the useful signal. A paid status program can carry almost all sales in a category where purchases are years apart, because the benefit is access and price on the next big order, not points on a frequent one.

Three seasonal calendars

The Census Bureau's Monthly Retail Trade survey shows how differently the parts of the category move through the year.

Source: our calculation of each quarter's share of annual sales from US Census Bureau Monthly Retail Trade estimates; lawn and garden stores are building material and garden dealers minus building material dealers.

Company filings add the consumable calendar. Bath & Body Works' fiscal 2025 annual report says the fourth quarter typically accounts for approximately 40% of net sales, and the company has 40 million active loyalty members. RH says its sales are typically higher in the second fiscal quarter, the peak season for outdoor furniture. Williams-Sonoma reports that a significant portion of its revenue and earnings comes from October through January, and that e-commerce generated approximately 65% of net revenues in fiscal 2025.

Two practical consequences follow. First, compare cohorts with the same season: a candle store's December gift buyers should be measured against last December's, not against spring buyers who bought for themselves. Our Black Friday retention benchmarks cover how holiday cohorts behave. Second, a garden store's 90-day window starting in late spring will under-read, because the next natural purchase is the following spring. Furniture is the flattest series, so a furniture store's monthly numbers are the most comparable month to month.

Returns: a smaller drag than in fashion

In By the Numbers' refund benchmark for July to October 2026, the median home and garden store refunded 1.1% of revenue (middle half 0.4% to 2.5%), against 2.5% for clothing and fashion and 0.8% for all stores. The National Retail Federation estimated 19.3% of online sales would be returned in 2025, across all categories.

These measure different things. The Shopify figure is refunded revenue inside a short window, which By the Numbers notes understates returns on recent orders; the NRF figure is retailers' estimate of all merchandise returned. For home stores the practical point is timing. Furniture returns are rarer but large, so a loyalty reward earned on a sofa should not become spendable until the return window closes. Candles and refills rarely come back, so rewards on them can release quickly and keep the reorder loop short.

Measuring a mixed home store in Shopify

To compare like for like with the figures above:

1. Export orders with customer ID, order date and product type, and tag each customer by the segment of their first order: consumable, durable, or gift.
2. Calculate the 12-month repeat purchase rate per segment the way By the Numbers does: customers with two or more orders in the window, divided by customers with at least one.
3. Calculate the second-order rate at 30, 90 and 365 days for each first-order segment. This shows whether your decor buyers return inside the completion window.
4. Track cross-category conversion: the share of durable-first customers whose second order is a consumable. It is the number most likely to move the blended rate.
5. Add a 24-month view for furniture and a spring-to-spring view for garden lines.
6. Keep returning customer rate and repeat-customer share of orders as separate lines on the dashboard, never as the repeat rate.

Our guide to the Shopify repeat purchase rate walks through the calculation, and the pet supplies benchmarks show the same consumable and durable split in another category.

Where Mage fits

Mage gives a mixed home store the levers this data points to. Collection-specific earning rates can pay more on the consumable line, nudging decor buyers into candles and refills inside the 90-day window. Store credit shows a cash value customers understand between infrequent orders; see points vs store credit. VIP tiers on rolling spend reward the furniture buyer with status and access for the next project, the RH model at independent-store scale, and a wishlist keeps considered purchases alive between visits. Set the reward approval time to your return window so sofa rewards release only once the order is settled. For raising order value on consumable reorders, the AOV Masterclass covers thresholds and bundles.

The The AOV Masterclass covers raising average order value with thresholds, bundles and offers without hurting conversion.