A repeat customer is a paying customer who has come back to your store to place additional orders after their first.
Getting one-time customers to come back is such a huge hurdle for ecommerce stores that it's important to track customers who have gotten past that.
Repeat customers are the same as returning customers in my opinion. Some people make a distinction between the two like returning customers have placed two to four orders and repeat customers have five or more orders. I feel like that distinction doesn't matter enough to give different labels to each.
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.