Time Between Orders

Time Between Orders shows how many days your customers wait between one order and the next. It tells you when a customer is due to order again.

The Time Between Orders report, with the average and median cards and a table with one row for each pair of orders

How It’s Calculated

The cards at the top show Average days between orders and Median days between orders for the date range, each to 1 decimal place. Both are for customers’ 1st to 2nd order.

The table has one row for each pair of orders: 1st to 2nd order, 2nd to 3rd order, and so on. The columns are:

Purchase Sequence: the pair of orders, such as 2nd to 3rd order.
Avg Days Between Orders: the average number of days between those 2 orders.
Median Days Between Orders: the middle number of days. It’s approximate.
Customers: the number of customers who placed the second order of the pair.
Percentage of Customers: those customers as a share of the customers who placed at least 2 orders.

Days are counted by calendar date in your store’s time zone. Two orders on the same date are 0 days apart. Orders are numbered by date, oldest first.

What Counts

Only orders in the date range are numbered. The 1st order is the customer’s first order in the range, not their first order ever, and a customer with one order in the range isn’t in the table. To follow customers for longer, choose a longer range, such as Last year.
Orders with no customer attached aren’t counted.
Orders that were canceled, or whose payment was voided or expired, don’t count.
Sales Channel, Segment and Filters narrow the report down. There’s no comparison period.

What Good Looks Like

The right gap depends on what you sell. A store selling food or supplies has a short gap, and a store selling furniture a long one. Compare your store with itself.

Read the median as well as the average. The median isn’t pulled up by customers who came back after a long break.

What to Do About It

A known gap: send a reminder or a replenishment offer a little before the median number of days has passed.
A longer gap than you expected: customers are coming back later than your offers assume. Check Cohort Repurchase Rate to see how many return within 30 days, 60 days and longer.
Customers past the gap: Customer Loyalty groups customers by how recently and how often they buy, so you can reach the ones who haven’t ordered in a while.

Where to Find It

Time Between Orders: open Reports and look under Customers.
Purchase Frequency Over Time: average orders per customer, period by period.
Cohort Repurchase Rate: how many customers come back within 30 days to 3 years.