Are my repeat customers actually coming back?
You assume your regulars will keep coming back. But are they? If repeat purchase rates are declining and you do not know it, your retention is eroding under the surface. Here's how to check.
The short answer
Measure the repeat purchase rate: what percentage of customers who bought in month 1 also bought in month 2, 3, and beyond. This is different from churn rate. Churn tells you who left entirely. Repeat purchase rate tells you whether the customers who are technically still active are actually buying with the same frequency they used to.
Why repeat purchase behavior is the earliest signal of retention health
Churn is the last step. Before a customer leaves, they usually slow down first. They buy less frequently, place smaller orders, or skip a month. If you only measure churn, you catch the problem after the customer is gone. If you measure repeat purchase behavior, you catch it while they are still technically a customer.
Consider two businesses: both have 100 active customers and 5% monthly churn. In business A, the remaining 95 customers are buying at the same rate they always have. In business B, the remaining 95 customers are buying 15% less frequently. Business B has the same churn rate but is in much worse shape because the customers who are still there are disengaging.
Repeat purchase rate is the vital sign between “healthy” and “technically alive.”
The repeat purchase rate formula and what it tells you
There are two useful versions of this metric:
Repeat purchase rate: (Customers with 2+ purchases in the last 12 months) / (Total customers with any purchase in the last 12 months) x 100
Month-over-month return rate: (Customers who bought in both this month and last month) / (Customers who bought last month) x 100
A repeat purchase rate of 60% means 6 out of 10 customers come back for a second purchase. The month-over-month return rate tells you what percentage of last month's customers showed up again this month. Both are valuable. Track both if you can.
How to measure repeat purchase rates in QuickBooks Online
- 1Go to Reports → Sales by Customer Detail
Set to the last 12 months. Export to CSV. This gives you every transaction by customer with dates.
- 2Count transactions per customer in a spreadsheet
Use a COUNTIF or pivot table to count how many transactions each customer had. Separate one-time buyers from repeat buyers (2+ transactions).
- 3Calculate your repeat purchase rate
Divide the number of repeat buyers by the total number of unique customers. Multiply by 100.
- 4For month-over-month return rate
Run Sales by Customer Summary for last month and this month. Export both. Count how many customers appear in both lists. Divide by last month's count.
Total time: 20-30 minutes. One large export for the annual rate, or two monthly exports for the month-over-month rate.
How to measure repeat purchase rates in Xero
- 1Export invoices from Business → Invoices
Filter to the last 12 months. Export to CSV.
- 2Build a customer frequency table
Use a pivot table with customer name as rows and count of invoices as the value. Split into one-time vs. repeat.
- 3Calculate the rate
Repeat buyers / total unique customers x 100. Same formula as QuickBooks.
Total time: 20-30 minutes. Similar to QuickBooks but requires the pivot table step since Xero does not have a Sales by Customer Detail report.
What it takes to track repeat purchase behavior over time
- 20-30 minutes monthly. Manageable, but it adds up with all the other retention metrics you should be tracking.
- The overall rate hides segment-level problems. Your repeat rate might be 55% overall, but if it is 70% for customers acquired through referrals and 30% for customers from ads, you have a channel quality problem that the aggregate number masks.
- You cannot see the trajectory of individual customers. A repeat buyer whose frequency is declining is technically still “repeat” but functionally disengaging. The binary measure misses the nuance.
Or track repeat customer behavior automatically
Bottomline measures both the repeat purchase rate and the individual frequency of each returning customer. You see the overall number, the trend, and which specific customers are slowing down.
The “7 slowing frequency” number is the insight you cannot get manually at scale. These are customers who are still buying but showing early signs of disengagement. Reaching out now, before they stop entirely, is the highest-ROI retention activity you can do.