Sort your survey responses into the three groups below.
People who scored you 9 or 10.
People who scored you 7 or 8.
People who scored you anywhere from 0 to 6.
NPS tells you how customers feel. What they do next shows up in repeat purchases, so read it next to your customer lifetime value.
See how Mage helps Shopify brands lift repeat purchase rate with loyalty, referrals and store credit.
Net Promoter Score measures how likely your customers are to recommend you, using a single survey question: on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? Answers of 9 or 10 are promoters, 7 or 8 are passives, and 0 to 6 are detractors. The score is the share of promoters minus the share of detractors.
Work out what percentage of your responses are promoters, work out what percentage are detractors, then subtract the second from the first. Say 200 people answered: 120 promoters, 50 passives and 30 detractors. Promoters are 60% of responses and detractors are 15%, so your NPS is 60 minus 15, which is 45.
NPS equals (promoters minus detractors) divided by total responses, multiplied by 100. Passives sit in the total responses figure at the bottom of that fraction. The result is rounded to a whole number, and it is never expressed with decimal places in practice.
Passives are satisfied but not committed. They are unlikely to talk you up and unlikely to warn people off, so counting them as either promoters or detractors would misrepresent them. Leaving them in the denominator still means they pull your score toward zero, which is the point: a business full of passives has not earned advocacy.
No, and this is the most common misreading of the metric. NPS is a score on a scale from -100 to +100, produced by subtracting two percentages from each other. Writing it as 45% rather than 45 suggests 45% of your customers did something, which is not what the number says.
Yes. Any time detractors outnumber promoters, the score drops below zero. The floor is -100, which means every single respondent scored you 6 or below, and the ceiling is +100, which means every respondent gave you a 9 or 10. A negative score is a signal that unhappy customers are the loudest group you have.
Anything above 0 means you have more promoters than detractors, which is the minimum acceptable position. Above 30 is generally considered good, above 50 is excellent, and above 70 puts you in world class territory alongside the brands people recommend unprompted. Below 0 needs immediate attention rather than a target.
Ecommerce and retail brands commonly land somewhere in the 30s to 50s, with strong direct-to-consumer brands pushing higher and large discount retailers often sitting lower. Category matters a great deal, since customers rate a beloved niche brand very differently from a commodity supplier. The comparison worth making is against your own score last quarter, not against a published average.
Aim for at least 100 responses before you read the number seriously, and more if your customer base is large or varied. With 10 responses, a single detractor swings the score by 10 points, so early results move for reasons that have nothing to do with your business. Small samples are fine for spotting individual problems, just not for tracking a trend.
Quarterly works well for a relationship survey sent to your whole customer base, since it gives changes time to show up without fatiguing people. Transactional surveys sent after a purchase or a support ticket can run continuously, because each customer only sees one per interaction. Whichever you choose, keep the timing consistent so the scores stay comparable.
Relational NPS asks about the overall relationship at a fixed interval, and tells you how the brand is doing as a whole. Transactional NPS fires after a specific event such as a delivery or a support conversation, and tells you how that experience went. They usually produce different numbers, so track them separately rather than blending them into one figure.
Leaving passives out of the total, which exaggerates the score in whichever direction it already leans. Reporting the result as a percentage. Counting 7s and 8s as promoters because they look like good scores. Averaging the 0 to 10 answers instead of using the promoter and detractor split, which produces a completely different and much less useful number.
Start by reading the follow-up comments from detractors, since the fix is usually concentrated in one or two repeatable problems such as delivery times, sizing or support response. Then give promoters somewhere to put their enthusiasm, through a referral program, reviews or early access. Moving passives is the slowest work, because they need a reason to care rather than a problem solved.
Yes. No signup, no email, and no cap on how many surveys you run through it. It is built by Mage Loyalty, a loyalty, referrals and store credit app for Shopify.
Mage is a loyalty, referral and store credit app built for Shopify. Reward repeat purchases, run VIP tiers, and give customers a reason to come back, without writing a line of code.
