Repeat Purchase Rate
The percentage of customers who make a second or subsequent purchase within a defined time window, used to determine whether paid acquisition is building a profitable customer base.
Your Meta prospecting campaign shows a 2.4× ROAS. Whether that number works depends on something the campaign report doesn’t show — how many of those buyers come back.
Repeat purchase rate (RPR) is the percentage of customers who place a second order within a defined window, most commonly 30, 60, or 90 days. A brand with a 25% 90-day RPR recovers first-order losses faster, unlocks more aggressive prospecting, and compounds revenue from the same customer base.
How it shows up in the wild
Balance Me (UK skincare D2C) saw repeat purchases rise 83% after building Klaviyo replenishment flows timed to each customer’s predicted reorder interval rather than a fixed calendar date. Their back-in-stock notification email converts at 4.9% on a 69% open rate. Both figures sit above category benchmarks for triggered retail emails.
L. Eyes Eyewear (New Zealand sunglasses D2C) moved repeat customer revenue from 16% to 50% of total revenue after adding Klaviyo pop-up forms for subscriber capture and automated post-purchase flows. Email subscribers grew 2000% in the same period. The brand had no automated retention infrastructure before Klaviyo.
Why it matters
A good RPR for most ecommerce brands sits between 20–30%, per Klaviyo’s benchmark guide, with consumables running 30–45%, apparel 20–32%, and home goods below 18%. Fashion D2C brands hitting 30–40% within 90 days unlock a specific Meta playbook. Retention campaigns at 5–10% of total Meta budget deliver the highest ROAS of any funnel stage at that threshold — higher than prospecting or interest-based retargeting.
Past-purchaser custom audiences on Meta average 5–10× ROAS versus 2–3× for cold prospecting. The gap exists because the customer already knows the brand. RPR is the metric that tells you how many of those high-ROAS audiences you’re building.
My hunch is that most D2C brands misread a low RPR as a product problem when it’s a post-purchase sequence problem. A low RPR in a category with long repurchase cycles — home goods, considered purchases — is category-normal. A low RPR in consumables is a structural issue.
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
What’s a good repeat purchase rate for a D2C brand? Klaviyo’s benchmark for most ecommerce brands is 20–30%. Category matters more than the absolute number: consumables run 30–45%; apparel runs 20–32%; considered purchases like furniture or specialty eyewear run 12–20%. A 22% RPR in a category that averages 15% is a strong result. A 22% RPR in a category that averages 35% is a retention problem.
Is repeat purchase rate the same as customer retention rate? No. Retention rate measures whether customers remain active — opening emails, browsing, engaging — over a period. RPR measures only whether they bought again. For paid media budget decisions, RPR is the more directly useful number.
Does RPR matter if we run subscriptions? Yes, but the signal is different. Subscription brands use RPR to track customers who cancel and re-subscribe, or who lapse and reactivate. A 90-day RPR below 50% for a subscription-first D2C brand is worth investigating as a passive churn signal.