What is Time Between Purchases?
Time Between Purchases metric is the average number of days a customer takes between making two purchases, when looking at the past 365 days. Time Between purchases expressed as a formula: TBP= 365/(Number of orders in past 365 days/number of unique customers in past 365 days). This metric is huge for understanding the cadence at which your customers naturally make purchases. This unlocks a whole trove of useful information that can inform the timing of your marketing outreach.
How to use Time Between Purchase data
This metric, like many other ecommerce metrics, is all about monitoring it over time. Let’s say you want to send out the perfectly-timed email campaign that encourages customers to come back and buy something. It’s a good practice to monitor your average time between purchases over 90 days. Giving your customers time to build a natural cadence for how much they need to replenish their purchases or buy something new gives you the ability to nudge customers via a perfectly timed email when the average time window expires and they haven’t made their next expected purchase.