% New Customers
The share of this period's buyers who had never bought from you before.
What it means
% New Customers is the share of the period's buyers who had never bought from you before — first time ever with your store, not first time inside the dates you picked. It counts people, not orders, so someone who ordered 4 times this month counts once. The order-level version is New Orders, on the same card row.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
First-time buyers are customers who ordered in the period with no earlier order anywhere in your store's history.
The denominator is every unique customer who ordered in the period. Order 3 times in the month and you're counted once.
Worked example. In April 900 people buy from you and 585 of them are buying for the first time. New Customer = 585 ÷ 900 = 65%. At an €80 average order, those first orders are €46,800 of revenue you had to go out and buy.
The 585 first-timers place 585 orders; the 315 returning buyers place 630 between them. So the month holds 1,215 orders and Returning Orders reads 630 ÷ 1,215 = 52% while New Customer reads 65%. They're not 2 halves of one pie.
A returning buyer who checks out as a guest under a second email address arrives here as a new customer, so heavy guest checkout pushes this number up.
It answers the question
Is the flow of first-time buyers filling or drying up? A high share only means acquisition is working if the order count moved with it.
Why it matters
Every customer list loses people — they move, change taste or find someone cheaper. A shop that stops finding new buyers is on a clock even in a month that looks fine, and this is the number that tells you the clock is running.
A shop needs a busy door and a set of regulars, and this one only watches the door. That's the part most people read wrong: a store at 90% new every month has almost no regulars, and rents its revenue from ads month after month.
What good looks like
A high share is only good news while the order count grows with it. Read it against Returning OrdersReturning OrdersHow much of your volume loyalty drives.35% or more is healthy — one watches the door, the other watches the regulars, and a healthy shop is strong on one and respectable on the other.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Shift budget to cold audiences | Move spend out of retargeting and into prospecting for 2 weeks | New Customer up 5–10 points | 2 weeks | Cold traffic costs more per order and converts worse. Your cost per order rises immediately, and the share only moves after it. |
| Fast Run a first-order offer | Put a welcome code in front of people with no purchase history | More first orders within days | 1–2 weeks | Returning buyers claim it under a second email, so part of the lift is an old customer relabelled. The markdown lands in % Product Discounts either way. |
| Slow Open a second market | Take your 3 bestsellers to another country you already ship to | A step change in first-time buyers | 1 quarter | Postage and returns in a new market are worse than at home. % Shipping Cost rises first and the margin only catches up later, if it does. |
| Slow Build organic search | Answer the questions people ask before they've heard of your brand | First-time buyers at no cost per order | 2 quarters and beyond | Nothing moves for months. New landing pages pull in people who are reading rather than buying, so Bounce Rate gets worse long before revenue gets better. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A share of buyers can rise because you found more people or because you lost the old ones. The order count is what tells the two apart.
Acquisition is working
More orders, and more of them from people who've never bought before. The shop is genuinely getting bigger. The bill comes later, when this cohort has to come back.
Replacing, not adding
The new share rose because the returning buyers stopped coming, and total orders fell with them. This corner reads like growth on the card and isn't.
The base is carrying you
Growth from people who already know you. The cheapest growth there is, and the kind that runs out quietly.
The door has gone quiet
Fewer orders and fewer new faces at the same time. Something upstream moved — a channel, a budget, or a price.
One watches acquisition, the other watches loyalty, and only the pair tells you which engine produced the month. Both healthy is a shop growing on a base it keeps; New Customer high with Returning Orders low is a shop paying for the same growth again every month.
This pair tells you what kind of buyer you're attracting, not how many. New Customer climbing while AOQ falls means the new people arrive for a single item — the most expensive to acquire and the smallest basket.
Common misreads
Or nobody comes back. The same 80% shows up in a shop that grew 40% and in a shop whose repeat buyers have all gone quiet. It only means acquisition is working if the order count moved with it.
It means new to your store, ever. A customer whose first order was in 2023 never counts as new again, whatever dates you set. Narrowing the range shows which of that week's buyers had never bought before, not a week's worth of fresh customers.
They can't. One is a share of people, the other a share of orders, and repeat buyers place more orders each. 65% new customers alongside 52% returning orders is not a contradiction.
Also called
First-time customer rate · new customer share · first-purchase rate · acquisition rate
See yoursYour first-time buyer share for the period, next to Returning Orders and Orders.
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