% Returning Quantity
What share of a product's units were bought by people who had ordered before.
What it means
% Returning Quantity is the share of a product's units in the period that went to customers who had already bought from your store. It counts units, not orders and not people — buy three of the same item and all three count. Repeat status comes from the customer's whole history with you, not from the dates on screen.
Its complement is % New Quantity% New QuantityWhich products bring in new buyers.70% or more is healthy in the next column, so the two add to 100% for any product.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Units bought by repeat customers is every unit of this product ordered by someone whose store history already held an order.
The denominator is every unit of this product sold in the period, to anyone.
Worked example. A product sells 2,000 units in the quarter and 700 of them go to customers who had ordered before. % Returning Quantity = 700 ÷ 2,000 = 35%. The remaining 1,300 units went to first-time buyers, so % New Quantity reads 65%.
The column is per product, and the spread across a catalogue is usually wide. A refill sitting at 60% next to a starter kit at 8% is the shape you want — new buyers arrive on the kit and come back for the refill. The reverse, where your repeat customers keep re-buying the introductory product, means the range gives them nowhere to go next.
Guest checkout suppresses it. A returning customer who checks out under a second email address counts as a first-time buyer, and every unit on that order lands in the new column instead.
It answers the question
Which products bring people back, and which only ever sell to someone who has never bought from you? A catalogue almost always contains both, and they need entirely different marketing.
Why it matters
It separates products that earn their shelf space once from products that earn it repeatedly. Two lines with the same revenue are not the same asset if one is re-bought every eight weeks and the other is a one-off, and no revenue column will ever show you that difference.
It also tells you where retention spend should point. Follow-up emails, replenishment reminders and loyalty offers work on products people can plausibly buy again — this column is how you find those products instead of guessing at them.
What good looks like
The bands assume a product that can be bought again. A mattress or a wedding dress will read near zero and that is the category, not a failure. Read it beside % Quantity% QuantityShows how much this product contributes to total volume.: a product with a large share of your volume and a low repeat share is volume you have to buy again every month.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Remind people when it runs out | Time a replenishment email to the pack size — 30 days for a monthly product, 90 for a quarterly one | Repeat units rise on that product within a cycle | 4–8 weeks | Only works on products that genuinely run out. Sent too often it costs list health, and a code inside it discounts customers who were going to reorder anyway. |
| Fast Put it in the post-purchase email | Show the product to everyone who bought its natural predecessor, so re-buying takes one click | More of its units come from existing customers | 2–4 weeks | The repeat share can rise while total units stay flat — you moved sales from new buyers to old ones rather than adding any. |
| Slow Keep it in stock | Hold deeper cover on the products your regulars re-buy | Fewer broken reorder habits | 1–2 quarters | Cash sits in stock and carries the risk of ageing there. Deeper cover on the wrong product is the most expensive way to protect this number. |
| Slow Give the range a next step | Add the refill, the larger size or the companion product a first-time buyer would come back for | A structural lift that holds without sending anything | 2 quarters | New stock, new photography, new listings. The new product often takes its repeat units from an existing line rather than creating them. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A repeat share tells you who bought the units. How many units there were is a separate column, and a high share of very few is worth nothing.
Loyalty against volume. A product carrying a large share of your units with a low repeat share is your most expensive volume — every one of those units needed a customer you had to find. Large share of units with a high repeat share is the opposite, and the closest thing a catalogue has to an engine.
The two always add to 100%, so the value is in reading them across products rather than against each other. Sorting by the new column finds the products that recruit customers; sorting by this one finds the products that keep them. A healthy catalogue has clear examples of both, and a problem catalogue has the same products at the top of each list.
Common misreads
It is the most re-bought, which is not the same as the most valuable. A product can have a high repeat share purely because new buyers never discover it, leaving a small loyal group buying it over and over. Read the unit column beside it.
It counts units. One returning customer buying six units contributes six, so a product bought in bulk by a handful of regulars reads far higher here than the number of people behind it would suggest.
Or you found a lot of new customers for it. The share falls whenever first-time units grow faster than repeat ones, which is exactly what a successful acquisition push looks like. Check whether repeat units actually fell before you treat it as a loss.
Also called
Repeat unit share · returning customer unit share · reorder share
See yoursThe repeat share of every product's units, next to its total volume and its share of your catalogue.
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