Downturn, slow economy, recession advice

Repeat Customer Insights comes with a set of analyses to help your Shopify store get through (and thrive) in a downturn.

This can be outside your control, like a recession or dragging economy. Or it could be a slow period in your business or industry. Or anything else that makes business more difficult to keep going.

The focus of the analyses are on improving profitability through cost control and finding easy revenue.

Weak products and variants

The ideal products and variants would lead new customers to become repeat customers. Any products that under-perform should be either improved or cut.

This is vital whether you're a retailer or manufacturer of your products. As a retailer you don't want to hold inventory of unproductive products. As a manufacturer you don't want to tie up your capital in materials and any machines needed for those products.

The decision to retire or improve a product is left up to you and your merchandising team. A lot will depend on the individual product.

This analysis will compare the Repeat Purchase Rate from individual products and variants against your overall Repeat Purchase Rate.

Repeat order timeline

Customers and repeat customers are likely to reorder on specific timelines. This means you can tie your marketing schedule to them and start to warm-up those customers near their reorder periods.

This analysis will report on how long customers are taking to reorder on average. Using this you can build up a campaign (or three) to warm-up customers prior to their order.

Customers who should order again soon

Similar to above, knowing which customers should be ordering again soon can be valuable if you want to send them a custom warm-up campaign. This analysis combined with the specific list of customers should allow you to target them easily.

New vs Returning Customer Ratio

Keeping track of the ratio of your new customers to your returning customers is a great way to measure the health of your repeat customer system.

The higher the ratio, the more returning customers have been buying this year, the less acquisition costs you'll have.

This ratio can be used to decide on how to allocate marketing resources. When it gets too low (e.g. too many new customers), shifting money/time/attention to your existing customers can bring the ratio back into balance.

Loyal customers

Additionally, anything you can improve for loyal customers can help you through a downturn. Many times it's the loyal and repeat customers that pull a business through the downturn so it can thrive once things start growing again.

Eric Davis