Repeat Purchase Rate
CRM & RetentionAlso: RPR · Repurchase Rate
Quick definition
Repeat purchase rate is the percentage of your customers who have bought from you more than once. It's calculated by dividing the number of customers with two or more orders by your total customer count over the same period. It's one of the clearest signals of whether customers actually like what you sell.
Compare against your own category and purchase cycle, not a blended average. A furniture brand and a coffee subscription should never be judged on the same scale.
How it varies across Australia
Repeat purchase rate varies enormously by category in the Australian market. Consumables and fast-moving goods sit well above discretionary or big-ticket categories, where a second purchase might genuinely take years. Compare your rate against your own category, not against a blended average.
See retention benchmarks across Australian industries →What it actually means
Repeat purchase rate answers a question most acquisition-obsessed businesses never ask: did anyone actually like it enough to come back? Conversion rate tells you if someone will buy once. Repeat purchase rate tells you if the product, the experience and the follow-up were good enough to earn a second decision.
The metric is deceptively simple but the time window you choose changes the story completely. A skincare brand with a two-month replenishment cycle needs a much shorter measurement window than a mattress company where a second purchase might be five years away. Measuring both on a 90-day window makes the mattress company look broken when it isn't.
Repeat purchase rate sits close to churn rate and retention rate in the same family of metrics, but it's blunter. It doesn't care about frequency or timing, only whether a second order happened at all. That bluntness is useful. It's the fastest gut check on whether your acquisition spend is buying one-off transactions or the start of a customer relationship that feeds lifetime value.
Businesses chasing customer acquisition cost improvements often ignore this number entirely, then wonder why growth stalls once the paid channels get expensive.
A high conversion rate with a low repeat purchase rate means you're good at first dates and bad at relationships.
How to calculate it
Repeat Purchase Rate = Customers with 2+ orders ÷ Total customers in period
Worked example. You had 1,000 customers place an order in the last twelve months. Of those, 280 placed a second order in the same window. Repeat Purchase Rate = 280 ÷ 1,000 = 28%.
The Australian context
Australian consumers face a smaller domestic market with fewer brand alternatives in some categories, which can inflate repeat purchase rate simply through lack of choice rather than genuine loyalty. Postage costs and delivery times across Australia's spread-out geography also shape repurchase behaviour differently to denser markets, particularly for regional customers who may batch orders less frequently but at higher order value. Read repeat purchase rate alongside average order value before drawing conclusions.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
What is a good repeat purchase rate?
It depends entirely on your category and purchase cycle. Consumables and fast-moving goods should sit much higher than big-ticket or infrequent purchases. Compare against your own category benchmarks and your own historical trend rather than a single universal target.
How is repeat purchase rate different from retention rate?
Repeat purchase rate simply checks whether a second order happened at all, regardless of timing. Retention rate typically measures whether a customer remained active across defined periods, which matters more for subscription and recurring revenue businesses.
What time window should I use to measure it?
Match the window to your natural purchase cycle. A skincare brand replenished monthly might use a 90-day window. A furniture retailer might need two or three years. Using the wrong window makes healthy businesses look broken or broken businesses look healthy.
Why is my repeat purchase rate low even though customers seem happy?
Happiness and repurchase timing aren't the same thing. Check whether your product genuinely needs replacing or repeat use in your measurement window. Also check whether your email and retention marketing are actually prompting the second purchase at the right moment.
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About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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