For decades, every study and evaluation on customer buying behavior rates referrals as an important reason why someone bought.
It's one of the sources that cannot easily be bought, at least not without long-term harm to relationships.
That means you'll need to work extra hard to make sure your Shopify store is referred and recommended. A big part will be building and keeping customer's trust. A smaller part is making referrals easier (e.g. share links, refer a friend coupons, etc).
But don't get them mixed up. The technology and process is worthless if you aren't trusted and referable.
Focus on trust and customers will figure it out.
And if you're having problems with customers not coming back or defecting to competitors, Repeat Customer Insights might help uncover why that's happening. Using its analyses you can figure out how to keep the good customers and let the bad ones go elsewhere.
Eric Davis
Market to your customer's timing
Figure out how long customers wait in-between purchases and you have a key component for your marketing timing. This is the basis of the Average Latency metric and Order Sequence Report in Repeat Customer Insights.