DTC retention benchmarks: methodology

Sample definition

• Scope: direct-to-consumer brands trading between 5 and 50 million dollars in annual GMV.
• Inclusion requires a full order history export covering at least 24 consecutive months.
• Brands are grouped by category and by purchase frequency profile, because a supplements brand and a furniture brand are not comparable.
• Sample size and composition will be published alongside any figure.

Metric definitions

Definitions are fixed before collection and match the measurement standard we use in client work.

• Repeat purchase rate at 90, 180 and 365 days from first order.
• Cumulative revenue per acquired customer at the same intervals.
• Median time to second order.
• Share of revenue from customers with three or more orders.

Normalisation and exclusions

• Wholesale, marketplace and B2B orders excluded.
• Refunded and cancelled orders excluded from revenue, retained for behavioural counts.
• Subscription-first brands reported separately from one-off purchase brands.
• Outliers disclosed rather than silently trimmed.

Disclosure rules

• No figure is published without sample size, period and category composition.
• No participating brand is named without written permission.
• Raw ranges are published alongside medians.
• Where the sample is too small to be meaningful, we say so and publish nothing.

Results

No benchmark figures are published yet.