First-time vs Returning Customer Sales
First-time vs. Returning Customers are the metrics you use to decide how much time/money to spend on customer acquisition vs customer retention. This report shows the value of orders placed by first-time and returning customers.
TERMINOLOGY
| First-time Customers | A first-time customer is a customer who placed their first order with your store. |
| Returning Customers | A returning customer is a customer who placed an order/refund in the selected time-frame, and whose order history already includes at least one order/refund. |
| Customer Type | Either First-time or Returning Customers. |
| Orders | Total number of orders that were placed. |
| AOV | Average Order Value. The total sales divided by the number of orders. |
| Gross sales | The product price x quantity (before taxes, shipping, discounts, and returns) of sales. Includes all paid, pending, authorized, partially paid or partially refunded orders. |
| Discounts | The total amount of discounts applied on orders on a given date. |
| Shipping charges | The total shipping charges applied to orders on a given date. This excludes shipping discounts. |
| Tax | The total amount of taxes based on the orders. |
| Total returned | The total value of goods returned by a customer. |
| Total sales | The total sales -- that is, gross sales - discounts - returns + taxes + shipping charges. |
The First-time vs Returning Customer sales report shows the value of orders placed by first-time and returning customers. It contains two rows for each time interval selected of both customer types.
The “Group By” setting determines how we count First-time and Returning Customer orders based on the period it's set to. If it’s set to Month, all orders made in the first month will count as First-time Customer orders, and any orders in subsequent months are considered Returning Customer orders. If set to Week, then every order made by a customer in their first week is considered a first-time order, and all orders made in subsequent weeks are considered returning customer orders.
To put it another way, Returning Orders are only counted after the initial “Group by” period. Therefore, if “Group by” is set to Month, then all orders in the first month are counted as first-time customer orders, and any orders in subsequent months are counted as returning customer orders.
As an example:
Alice orders on Jan 1st 2023
Alice order on Jan 8th 2023
Alice, orders Jan 15th 2023
Alice, orders Jan 22nd 2023
If Group-by is set to Month Alice was a First-time Customer 4 times and a Returning customer 0 times in Jan 2024.
If Group-by is set to Week Alice was a First-time Customer 1 time in the first week of Jan and a Returning customer 3 times in the rest of the weeks of January 2024.