Supplement and Health Brand Benchmarks (2026): Repeat Purchase Rate, CLV and Loyalty

Short answer: The median health food and supplement store had a 12-month repeat purchase rate of 30.9% in By the Numbers' benchmark of 1,326 Shopify stores (September 2025 to August 2026). The top quarter was above 40.9%, and the median across all stores was 18.1%. Subscribers follow a different curve. Use the repeat purchase rate to judge the store as a whole and the subscription curve to judge your subscription programme.

Supplements sit near the top of the repeat purchase table

The three categories at the top of By the Numbers' table have one thing in common: the product is swallowed and has to be bought again. Health food and supplements, coffee and tea, and non-alcoholic beverages all have medians between 30.9% and 32.2%. Skincare, which also runs out but more slowly and less predictably, sits about four and a half points lower.

The surprise is the wellness category, with a median of 15.9%, below the all-store median. By the Numbers lists it separately from supplements and does not publish what it contains, but the gap is a warning against borrowing the wrong benchmark. If most of your revenue comes from products a customer buys once (devices, books, programmes, accessories), compare yourself with the wellness figure. If it comes from capsules, powders and gummies that run out, the supplement figure is your comparison.

At the retailer level, annual retention by industry shows the same pattern. Health and beauty retailers kept 41.2% of their 2023 buyers in 2024 in Bluecore's 2025 Customer Growth Benchmarks, the highest of seven retail verticals and well above the 27.4% average. Bluecore attributes the lead partly to consumables that need replenishing. That is a broader category and a different metric, so use it as context rather than as a supplement target.

What good looks like: four tiers for supplement brands

Source: By the Numbers, health food and supplement stores, 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles.

Use the supplement quartiles, not the all-store ones. Across all 1,326 stores, the top quarter starts at 28.2%. A supplement brand at 28% could read that as excellent when it is below the median for its own category. A product that runs out every month should beat a store selling sofas, and the tiers above reflect that.

The reorder clock: plan around the bottle, not the calendar

Recharge's July 2026 analysis found that supplement subscribers reorder roughly every 30 days. That is the subscription cadence. One-time buyers have no schedule, and the timing of their second order is where most supplement brands lose them.

By the Numbers' second-order curve covers all categories, but its shape still matters for supplements. At the median store, about a third of the second orders that happen within a year have happened by day 30, and nearly three in five by day 90 (11.4 of 19.5 points). After that the curve flattens. For a consumable, a customer who has not reordered by the time the bottle should have run out has usually found a substitute or stopped taking it.

So the supply size of the first order sets the window, and the window sets when to measure and when to prompt:

These timings are our recommendation, built on Recharge's 30-day supplement cadence and the flattening in By the Numbers' curve. They assume one serving a day, so adjust for your dosing. Measure each supply size as its own cohort. A store that mixes 30 and 90-day first orders and reads one blended 60-day repeat rate will undercount the 90-day buyers and miss the 30-day buyers who have already lapsed.

Automate the reminder rather than sending it as a campaign. Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from more than 183,000 customers, put the health and beauty placed-order rate at 1.65% for flow emails against 1.02% for campaigns.

The video below covers how lifetime value builds across the whole customer journey, from first order to loyal customer. In a supplement brand most of that journey is decided in the first three reorder windows.

Subscribers: a leaky start, then a long tail

The loss accelerates before it slows. On Recharge's supplement curve, about one new subscriber in seven never reaches the first reorder. A third of those left drop out before the second, then two in five of the remainder before the third. Recharge's explanation is that the drop comes before the habit forms and before the product has had time to prove itself. Many supplements take weeks to show an effect, which is about when the second and third charges arrive.

Against the other consumable verticals Recharge measured, supplements have the weakest first reorder but catch up later:

Source: Recharge platform data, July 2025 to June 2026.

Two things stand out. Supplements have the second-lowest share of renewal cycles ending in cancellation and the highest skip rate, so supplement subscribers who are unsure tend to skip rather than leave. A skip keeps the subscription alive; treat the skip button as retention, not leakage.

Subscription vs one-time economics: a worked example

Take a supplement store with 15,000 customers in the last 12 months, a $45 average order and a 70% gross margin. Those three inputs are assumptions for the example, not benchmarks.

Moving up the repeat purchase tiers. At the supplement median of 30.9%, 4,635 of those customers order more than once. At the top-quarter line of 40.9%, 6,135 do. The extra 1,500 repeat customers are worth at least one more order each: at least $67,500 in revenue and $47,250 in gross margin a year, before any third or fourth orders.

What a new monthly subscriber is worth in year one. Filling the gaps in Recharge's supplement curve between the published points (a geometric interpolation, our estimate) gives about 2.5 reorders in the first 12 months. With the first order, that is roughly 3.5 shipments, or three and a half months of product, about $156 at a $45 order. If 3,000 of the store's customers start a monthly subscription, that is about 10,400 shipments in year one. For comparison, fewer than one in five first-time buyers at the median Shopify store order a second time within a year.

Fixing the first reorder. If the brand halves the leak before the first reorder (from 86.6% to 93.3% reaching it) and every later step keeps its current rate, each point on the curve rises by about 7.7%. That adds roughly 570 shipments across 3,000 subscribers: about $25,800 in revenue and $18,000 in gross margin a year. It is worth doing, but onboarding alone will not change the shape of the curve.

Changing the billing interval. This is the bigger lever. Across all verticals, Recharge measured cumulative lifetime churn of 84.2% on monthly plans and 67.7% on quarterly plans (65.1 million subscriptions started March 2025 to February 2026). That leaves roughly twice as many quarterly subscribers still active. Monthly plans make up 60.7% of subscriptions and quarterly only 14.7%. For a supplement, the arithmetic is stark: a 90-day subscriber who renews once has bought six months of product, against about three and a half for the average new monthly subscriber. Customers who choose quarterly are probably more committed to begin with, so offer the 90-day option after the first order arrives, not only at checkout.

Keeping the welcome offer modest. Across 29.8 million new subscriptions, Recharge found a first-renewal rate of 65.0% with no first-order discount, 61.3% at 40% to 60% off and 53.4% at 90% off or more. A free first bottle is the worst trial offer in Recharge's data. In its sampling analysis, subscriptions started with a $0.01 to $0.99 first order reached a sixth order 32.8% of the time, against 8.7% for a $0 first order.

Reconciling the numbers: which figure to use for which decision

Supplement benchmarks get quoted as if they were one number. They are at least five, and they do not convert into each other.

Source: By the Numbers; By the Numbers second-order curve; Recharge supplement data; Bluecore.

Three conflicts are worth spelling out:

• The cohort curve and the churn rate look incompatible, but they measure different subscribers. A constant 17.3% churn per cycle would leave about a third of subscribers active after six cycles, not 9.8%. The per-cycle figure averages over every active subscriber, most of whom have already survived the early reorders. The cohort curve follows only new subscribers through their riskiest months. Use the curve to plan acquisition payback and the per-cycle figure to forecast the base.
• Recharge's first-renewal figures do not match across studies. Its all-vertical discount study puts first renewal at 65.0% with no discount, while its supplement curve has 86.6% of new subscribers reaching a first reorder. The cohorts and windows differ, and Recharge does not reconcile them. Rely on the supplement curve for where the drop happens and on the all-vertical studies for the direction and rough size of each lever.
• Orders per customer and repeat rate are different questions. In its 2021 annual report, Thorne reported 3.0 orders per customer per year and 257,070 active subscriptions. Frequency like that comes from a minority of customers ordering monthly, which a repeat purchase rate cannot show.

Churn nobody chose: failed payments

Some subscription churn is not a decision at all. In Recurly's July 2026 churn benchmarks, 1.38 points of ecommerce subscription churn were involuntary out of 4.25 points in total, so roughly a third of lost subscribers left because a payment failed, not because they chose to. Recurly's figures cover ecommerce subscriptions generally, not supplements. Even so, retry logic, card updater services and a pre-dunning email before a card expires are among the cheapest retention work a supplement brand can do, because every recovered subscriber already wanted the product.

Loyalty in a replenishment category: what the filings show

Few supplement sellers disclose loyalty data. The clearest public example is old but useful. In fiscal 2017, The Vitamin Shoppe attributed 88% of its net sales (excluding its Nutri-Force manufacturing unit) to members of its Healthy Awards programme, according to its 2017 annual report. The report also said about 62% of points earned that year were redeemed, with 6.3 million active members who had bought within the last 12 months. That was a store chain, not a Shopify brand, but it shows how far a supplement loyalty programme can reach when it is attached to every purchase.

The redemption figure is the more useful one for a DTC brand. Supplement customers come back on a schedule, so they reach a reward threshold often enough to redeem, unlike customers of categories bought once or twice a year. That makes the reward itself a reorder trigger. Set the first meaningful reward at or just after the second order, where both the subscription curve and the one-time curve drop hardest. Avoid rewarding the first purchase so heavily that it attracts buyers who were never going to take the product for 90 days.

For subscribers, rewards should sit on continuity, not on the first box. Points on each renewal, a tier earned by consecutive months, and perks that cost little but feel valuable (early access to new formulas, a free sample of a complementary product) support the third reorder. A deeper discount would only repeat the first-order discount problem above.

How to measure your supplement store in Shopify

1. Repeat purchase rate over a year, like for like with the tiers. Count customers with at least one order in the past year, then the share with two or more. Shopify's returning customer rate is close but depends on the date range you pick and on how many new customers arrived in it, so a brand that doubles acquisition will see it fall even if no existing customer left.
2. Second-order rate by supply size. Use the customer cohort analysis report, which groups customers by the month of their first order, and split cohorts by the supply size of the first order (tag or product type). Read each at the day in the reorder-clock table above.
3. Subscribers and one-time buyers separately. Filter on the order tags your subscription app adds. A blended repeat rate hides the fact that the two groups need different fixes.
4. Subscription outcomes per renewal. From your subscription app, take the share of renewals processed, skipped and cancelled, and compare it with the Recharge supplement row.
5. Involuntary churn. The share of cancellations caused by failed payments. If you cannot see it, you cannot recover it.

For the shorter windows and the arithmetic, see our guide to Shopify repeat purchase rate and the time to second purchase explainer.

Where Mage fits

Mage is a Shopify loyalty app, and its health and wellness loyalty program is built around the levers this report points to. It awards points on every subscription renewal through the Recharge integration, adds milestone bonuses at 3, 6 and 12 consecutive months, offers multiplied points for reordering within 30 days, and runs VIP tiers that subscribers climb by staying subscribed rather than only by spending. The Customer Journey Playbook sets out how those pieces fit from first order to loyal customer. To check whether the programme is working, compare members with non-members on the two numbers that matter most here: second-order rate by supply size, and subscribers still active at the third reorder.