Customers

The Customers screen tells you who is buying: how many are new, how many have bought before, what they are worth over time, and who your best ones are.

New and returning

A new customer is someone whose first ever order falls in the period you are looking at. A returning customer had already bought from you before.

Your repeat rate is the share of customers in the period who had bought before. It is one of the few numbers in the app that tells you something about the health of the business rather than the month.

Guest checkouts are counted properly

If someone checks out as a guest, Shopify does not always create a customer account for them. We group those orders by email address instead.

This matters more than it sounds. Without it, every guest order looks like a brand-new customer, your customer count matches your order count exactly, and your repeat rate sits at zero forever. If you have ever seen that in another tool, this is why.

Orders with no customer account and no email address cannot be tied to anyone. We count those separately rather than inventing a customer for each one.

Lifetime value

Lifetime value is what a customer has spent with you in total, across all of their orders, not just the ones in the period on screen.

It is a backward-looking figure: what they have actually spent, not a projection of what they might.

Finding your best customers

The customer list can be sorted by total spend or order count. This is the practical use of this screen: a short list of people worth treating differently, whether that is early access, a thank you, or simply not discounting to people who were going to buy anyway.

A note on privacy

This screen shows real customer details, so every time it is opened we record that it was. That is a requirement of Shopify's rules on protected customer data, and it applies to us as well as to you.

Related

• Cohorts
• Repurchase
• Geography