How the Customer Purchase Latency metric can guide subscription frequency in your Shopify store

When Shopify stores first start selling subscriptions, they default to once a month. Or they copy Amazon and offer a few monthly subscription offers.

That's fine to start but there's a better way.

You can use a metric called the Customer Purchase Latency to see how often customers actually are re-ordering. Not only that but it breaks that down further based on how many order's they've placed. A customer on their 2nd order will order differently than one on their 34th order.

In a healthy Shopify store, you'd expect to see the Latency decrease over time as the customer orders more. In other words, they'll be buying more often over time.

You can use those rates to set your subscription frequency options.

Say you see early of latencies of 95, 92, 88, 84, and 81 days for the first five orders.

Offering a subscription that renews every 75 or 90 days makes sense. The 90 day one will catch newer customers and accelerate those purchases, while the 75 day will work the same for the repeat customers.

You could also add some more to tempt even faster reorders (60 days) or try to catch people who haven't considered a subscription (120 days).

But whatever you choose, using the data can help you make a better-informed decision.

If you haven't installed Repeat Customer Insights yet, its reports are an easy way to get a detailed look at your customer behavior like this.

Eric Davis