% New Quantity
Which products bring you buyers you have never sold to before.
What it means
% New Quantity is the share of a product's units bought by customers purchasing from your store for the first time — first ever, not first inside the dates you picked.
It counts units, not orders and not people, so a single order of 4 items moves it four times as much as an order of 1. The repeat side of the same row is % Returning Quantity% Returning QuantityWhich products earn loyalty and reorders.30% or more is healthy.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Units bought by first-time customers is the units of that product bought by people with no earlier order anywhere in your store's history.
The denominator is QuantityQuantityThe core volume measure across products. for the same row — every unit of that product sold in the period, to anyone.
Worked example. A starter kit sells 1,000 units in March and 780 of them go to people buying from you for the first time: 780 ÷ 1,000 = 78%, comfortably past the 70% mark.
A refill in the same table also sells 1,000 units, but only 200 go to first-timers, so it reads 20%. Both products are working. They have different jobs, and the column is measuring the job, not the quality.
Because it counts units, one bulk order can swing a low-volume row a long way. Read the unit count before you read the share.
It answers the question
Which products open the door, and which ones live off the customers you already have? The answer decides what goes in front of people who have never heard of you.
Why it matters
Ad money is spent on products, not on stores. Knowing which items convert strangers tells you exactly what to put in a prospecting campaign, and stops you paying cold traffic prices to advertise something only your regulars buy.
It also tells you what not to cut. A product with a small revenue share and a high figure here is paying for itself in customers rather than in euros, and a range tidy-up that goes by revenue alone will remove it.
What good looks like
These bands are written for the card at the top of Products, which reads the whole store. A single product row is a different question: a starter kit should sit high and a refill should sit low, and a refill at 20% is doing its job rather than failing. Read a row against the job you gave the product, and use the card for the store.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Advertise what already converts strangers | Point prospecting campaigns at the products sitting highest in this column | More first-time units on those rows | 1–2 weeks | Cold traffic costs more per order than retargeting, so NCPA rises straight away and this column only moves after it. |
| Fast Give people something small to start with | Offer a single unit, a smaller size or a trial pack at an entry price | First-time units climb on that row | 2–4 weeks | Entry-priced units drag AOV down, so the first order pays back less of what it cost to win the customer. |
| Slow Widen the range around what new buyers pick | Add variants and companions to the products already recruiting | More of the catalogue starts pulling first-timers | 1 quarter | New stock and cash tied up in it, and a larger share of the shop now depends on one theme working. |
| Slow Open a market that doesn't know you | Take your best recruiting products to another country you already ship to | A step change in first-time units | 1–2 quarters | Postage and returns in a new market are worse than at home, so % Shipping Cost rises first and the margin catches up later, if it does. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A share of units and a count of units answer different questions. One tells you who bought; the other tells you whether enough people did.
A working front door
More units, and more of them going to people who had never bought from you. This is the product to advertise to strangers.
Your regulars left it
The new share rose because repeat buyers stopped picking it up, not because new ones arrived. The row shrank and the column reads like a win.
A reorder product
Volume from people who already know you. Exactly what a refill or a consumable should look like, and the cheapest units in the table.
Losing both ways
Fewer units and fewer new buyers at once. Something changed before the customer reached the product page.
The two columns split the same units. A catalogue where every row is high on new and low on returning is a shop that buys its customers again every month; the opposite is a shop with a loyal base and no door. A healthy range has both kinds of product in it, and only the pair shows you whether yours does.
Revenue share says what a product earns, this says what it recruits, and the two are often carried by different products. A row with 4% of Gross Sales and 85% here is not a small product — it's the front door, and cutting it on revenue grounds removes customers rather than euros.
Common misreads
Refills, consumables and add-ons should read low — almost nobody starts there. Judge a row against what you designed the product to do, not against the store-wide bands.
It's units. One first-time buyer taking 6 of something counts 6 times, and a low-volume row can be swung by a single bulk order. The people version of the question is % New Customers.
Then nobody is coming back. A catalogue with no low rows has no repeat business behind it, and every month starts from zero. Read it next to % Returning Quantity before you set a target.
Also called
First-time unit share · new-customer unit rate · acquisition share of units
See yoursThe store-wide card at the top, and % New Quantity per product in the table underneath, next to units and % Returning Quantity.
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