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.
You can click Group by to select the time interval that you want to use (Hour, Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year). The time interval specifies how the Returning Customers are counted as well as how they are displayed in the graph. A Returning Customer is only counted once per the selected time interval.
This means that if a customer places an order within the chosen time interval, it will be counted as a first-time order. If a customer places an order outside of that time frame, it will be counted as a returning customer order. This means that there can be multiple first-time orders for a customer.
As an example:
Alice buys a product on Jan 1st 2014, then again on Feb 1st 2014, Feb 28th 2014, and Jan 2nd 2015.
If Group-by is set to Year Alice was a returning customer one time on Jan 2nd 2015.
If Group-by is set to Month Alice was a returning customer two times on Feb 1st 2014, and Jan 2nd 2015.