REPEAT COMMERCE: 04 - How To Improve Your "Second Order" Rate.

Here's what most Shopify stores I talk to call a reorder strategy. They set one reminder, which on average is 30 days after purchase, and they send it to every single customer the same way and forever. Now, think about who's getting that email. The person who bought one bag of coffee and the person who bought six bags of coffee, both getting it after 30 days.

Now, one of those customers is out, and the other still has five months of coffee left in their cupboard. Also, the customer on their first order and the customer on their fifth order who has a track record you could set your watch to, but they're all treated identically. One-timer, every human, no memory of what they actually bought or when they bought it last, and we can do so much better than that, and today I wanna show you how.

So welcome back [00:01:00] to Shopify 1%. I'm Jay Myers, and this is episode four of the Repeat Commerce series. Now, if you missed the first three episodes, definitely go back and listen to them because they are building on each other, and there is actually a PDF in the show notes. In each episode, I am adding another section on that PDF, and it's basically a scorecard, and each episode you're gonna add one number to it that builds on it, and at the end you're gonna have this beautiful audit, repeat audit of your store.

So there's been three episodes. You can go back. All the details are on the PDF, but it is... I w- highly recommend listening to the episodes too because we actually walk through how to actually get the numbers. So, um, m- make sure you grab the one from this, and if you didn't listen to the last three, go back and listen to them now.

If you did, and if you did that work, you should be holding a scorecard with some [00:02:00] honest numbers on it, and I know many of you are thinking, "Jay, enough measuring. Just tell me what to actually do." So in this episode, we're gonna do that. We're gonna stop measuring, and we're gonna actually start fixing. And so we're gonna start with what I believe is the single highest leverage point in your entire customer relationship.

What do you think that is? Think in your head for a moment. I'll tell you what it is. It's the second order. The second order is the most important point in your entire customer relationship. Now, I said it on the end of the last episode, and I'll say it again. I, I believe this but... so deeply. There is no more important order than the second one.

The first order you basically paid for. You probably got them with some ads. You probably lost money on it, and we covered that in episode one. The second order is where the actual business starts. So by the end of this episode, you'll have [00:03:00] one automation live in your store timed to a customer's real behavior instead of just a blind 30-day timer, one concrete thing that we're gonna build today.

I wanna be clear about why I keep hammering this second order thing specifically, because think about the jump from the first purchase to the second. A first-time buyer, they don't know you, they don't trust you. They might not even remember who you are. They just, they took a chance on you. They saw an ad, they were scrolling Instagram, a friend told them, uh, they mentioned you, uh, maybe there was a sale or a price.

Like, they're not loyal, they're just curious. The second order is the moment that curiosity turns into a relationship or doesn't. And once someone orders from you twice, the odds of them ordering a third and a fourth time increase dramatically. The second purchase is the [00:04:00] hinge that the whole thing swings on.

And remember the numbers from the last episode on our whiteboard store example. We had 6,000 out of 8,000 customers had a full year to come back and reorder, and they just didn't. Uh, the store had a 25% reorder rate. So, I mean, that's not a subscription problem. That's not an ads problem. That's what I would call a second order problem, and almost nobody is actively working on it.

Everybody optimizes for the first purchase. They optimize their ads, the landing page, the checkout. The second purchase, it doesn't get any love. It gets a s- a th- a static 30-day email, and that's it. So that's the gap, and we're gonna address it. So let's talk about why the way that most stores attack this is actually broken.

So the core mistake, and I just wanna go out and and actually name it, is most reorder reminders run on a static timer. 30 days after a purchase, send an email to [00:05:00] remind them to reorder. Same delay, same time window, same message to everyone.

And a static timer ignores three things that actually decide when someone reorders. So number one is, well, how much did they buy on their last order? If a bag lasts 30 days, then someone who bought one bag needs a nudge around day 25, but someone who bought six bags doesn't need a nudge until maybe month five or six It well, un- unless, I'll get into it, but they might need a nudge after one if they have a really big family, but that is gonna be to my, uh, next one, which is order history.

So this is number two. A customer on their fifth reorder has a rhythm, so, you know, m- there's a chance that a customer who orders five bags doesn't need it every month if they're buying it for a restaurant or a really big family. But that would be because you looked at their order history and you looked at their rhythm, and you can see it.

They come back every 42 days and they order six bags. But a static timer throws all that away and just treats them like a [00:06:00] stranger. And the third thing is the gap between their past orders. So someone whose orders are kind of slowly stretching out, like 60 days, 90 days, and then 100 days they're drifting away, and a generic 30-day email, it's not gonna catch them.

You need a different approach. So the fix isn't better email, it's better timing. So stop asking, "How many days after purchase should I send this?" and start asking, "When is this specific customer actually going to run out based on what they bought and what they've done before?" And that's the whole shift from a timer to a behavior.

So we're gonna do the whiteboard analogy again to put some numbers on it. Uh, we're gonna go back to a coffee brand so it's familiar. So say a co- bag of coffee lasts 30 days for a typical drinker. Now, this month, 1,000 customers bought from you, but they didn't all buy the same amount. Let's say 600 of them bought one bag, which would be roughly a 30-day supply.

300 bought two [00:07:00] bags, roughly 60 days. Roughly. Again, this is, like, very, very rough. For some people, one bag might last three months, but very rough. And 100 of those customers, let's say they bought six bags, so let's call that half a year supply. Now, here's the static timer approach that most stores do.

On day 30, every single one of those 1,000 customers would get the same time to reorder email. All 1,000 of them. So for the 600 one-bag buyers okay, not horrible, but not great, but it's okay. Decent timing, because they are likely about to run out, although some people don't drink much coffee, and it could definitely be off.

But then there's... gets even worse. The 300 people who bought two bags, well, they're likely only halfway through. Uh, it's way too early, so they'll just ignore it. And then the 100 people who [00:08:00] bought six bags, well, you just told someone with five months of coffee to buy more coffee, and that email is actually worse than useless.

It makes you look like you're just not paying attention. So realistically, and don't grade my exact numbers here, but this is illustrative. But out of that thousand, maybe 600, the one-bag folks convert at a roughly normal rate, but almost nobody else does because the timing's wrong for 400 of them. And then now, if we look at the behavior-based approach, the one-bag buyer should get their nudge at day 25.

The two-bag buyer should get a nudge at around day 55. The six-bag buyer roughly at five months. Every customer gets the nudge when it's true for them. Same email, same store, same thousand customers. One conversion just fires blind and annoys 400 people, and the other shows up m- pretty close to when the person might actually be running out. The [00:09:00] second version doesn't just convert better.

It roughly triples the reorders of that cohort because you stopped wasting the nudge on people who didn't need it. And honestly, the annoying people part might matter more than the conversion part because every time you send someone a, an email at the wrong moment, you're actually training them to tune you out.

So the static timer isn't just leaving money on the table, it's actually burning your list.

Okay, so how do you actually build this? And there's really four plays, and I'm gonna kind of list it in priority order here. The first two are the big ones and three and four are gonna make them work better.

So play number one is time it to their behavior, not a fixed day. Now, this is the whole ballgame, so that's why this is first, is you need your reorder window, not a guess at what the actual number is. So [00:10:00] the good news is if you did last episode's homework, like, during the episode, and you should have a number for your cohort reorder window.

That data shows how long your customers typically take to come back. If you don't have that number or if you didn't do it definitely go back and listen to the episode. But if you, if you want, I'll just tell you the easiest way to do that is you can just ask Sidekick, "What's the average time b- between my first and second order for my customers?"

And you can narrow that down by product if you want to. You can say, "What's the average time be- between my first and second order for this product?" Now, that gives you a very wide range. It's decent, but I'm gonna get into why it's not perfect, but it's, it's pretty good. It's a heck of a lot better than just a static 30 days for everyone.

It's a baseline, I would say. So but from there, you're gonna then... You can set a trigger that fires that many days after each customer's order and then adjusted to [00:11:00] how many of each product they bought. So now, how you do it, well, there's really two ways. There's the do it yourself way, which is with Shopify Flow.

So let's talk about that one first, is for those who don't know so Shopify Flow used to only be available on Plus. It's now available on every Shopify plan, so Basic all the way up. So if you're not on Shopify Plus and you didn't know that, you 100% should go check out Flow. Flow is basically Shopify's automation tool that allows you to set triggers and then have an action take out.

So- And you actually don't even have to build it by hand anymore. You can just go to Sidekick and, and say "Build me this flow." Like if you went in Flow, you would set a trigger, order placed, and then add a wait step, and then add another flow, another event delay so many days and then add the action to send the email.

But you could just go to Sidekick and say, "Wait 20 days after an order, then send a reorder reminder," and it'll build that workflow for [00:12:00] you. And that gets you a solid single window reorder reminder, which is a big step up from a dumb 30-day blast for everybody, 'cause you can do this by different products and have a 20-day reminder for one product and a 35-day for a different product.

But it can be a lot better. And now I'm gonna do something that I don't always do on this show. I'm gonna tell you about a product that we've built because it's just naturally perfect for this, and I, I... As you know, I try to make these episodes not about Bold or what we build but this specific episode is a huge exception to this because the thing that we built, uh, and the thing that I'm teaching you about today are literally the exact same thing, so it would be honestly weird if I didn't mention it.

So, w- we've got a app that we launched in, about six months ago, and it's called RePete, R-E-P-E-T-E. You can learn more about it by [00:13:00] going to repeate.me. But in a nutshell, what it is, it's an AI reorder agent that predicts when every individual customer on your store is due for a refill, and then nudges each customer at a different time with a different message through a different channel, depending on how they interact, for an easy one-click reorder.

So now doing it with Shopify Flow is pretty good. You can get a different reorder time- by product. What we do is it's actually customer by customer. So one customer might need their coffee every 47 days, even though they bought one bag, and another customer might need their coffee every 14 days, even- same...

They also bought one bag. So just because it's one bag, it doesn't mean it's 25 days for everybody. So rePete figures that all out, and then actually it's an AI agent, so it messages the customer for you. You don't have to write the emails, the SMS. Uh, it does browser push, on-site [00:14:00] everything, dynamic ads, meta ads.

Its whole job is to get you more reorders. So Flow is, is very good for a better fixed window for a product. RePete is the next level. If you really want the most personalized on-demand reordering edges for your customers definitely try rePete. And I'm gonna just put a link in the show notes here for anyone who wants to try it.

RePete is completely free. There's no charge to install it. There's no app fee. There's no SMS fees even. Like, it can send 100,000 SMS for you, and there isn't a single fee for that. I mean, 100,000 SMS would... I don't know. I think that'd be about $7,000. Um, nah, that's not right, probably 3,000. But either way, um, there's no fees.

The, the way the app works is there's only a fee if it actually gets you a reorder. But I'll put a link in the show notes so that the first $10,000 in reorders are free, so if you wanna try it out. [00:15:00] Definitely worth trying. If you wanna build it yourself and tune it over time, Flow is a great way to do it, and it's free.

So do that, but if you want to go and make it very predicted and personalized per customer without having to manage it, that's what we made rePete for. So either way, the principle is the same, and the principle here is what matters. Time it to the human, not the calendar. And we have seen the impact of when you time it to a human.

We have some brands that have increased their reorder rate. We have one that has hit 24%. Most are around 12 to 15, which is still amazing. But we have brands increasing repeat revenue by 24%, which just shows that there are customers who want to order from you more. They just need to be nudged. They just need to be reminded.

Like, if you sell protein powder and you don't nudge them, the next time they're in a grocery store, they'll just buy it there. [00:16:00] So, you know, the, the principle is 100% true that better timing will get you better results. One step further, better personalized messaging, better results, and then also channel is it push?

Is it emails? Is it SMS? Gets you better results as well, too. So, so that's play number one, getting the timing right. You can do it yourself through Flow or give Re- RePete a try. It just kind of works like magic, and it does it for you. Play number two is what I say kill the reorder friction.

So the first play go back to what I wrote here. It's, uh, t-timing, timing to their behavior, and the second one is killing the friction. So even with a perfectly timed nudge, if you have too much friction in between when the customer says, "Yeah, I'll reorder," and then you have a bunch of clicks, and then you send them to the product page, and then they gotta find the variant, select them, add it to cart, go to cart, go to checkout, you're still gonna lose a percentage of customers.

Like, the, the data shows that every extra click and the longer it takes, unless they're, like, [00:17:00] helpful clicks, but these are not helpful clicks. Like, if you know what they ordered last time, just make it super simple. And to be honest, Shopify checkout is really your best friend here because you can permalink right directly to their checkout with the product in there, variant in there, and 80% of people are logged into Shop Pay.

So at that point, it's just a click, and the reorder's on the way. We do actually have, uh, with RePete, we send them through a smart cart which shows other replenishable products that they might also want to reorder, uh, which does extremely well. And so it is an extra click, and maybe it loses 1 or 2% of people who would reorder.

But on average, reorders are, I think it's 37% higher. Like, the numbers it's wild because these are customers who are reordering from you. They know you, so they're very likely to accept an offer. So the net gains of that extra click far outweigh the 1 or [00:18:00] 2% that you might, you might lose it.

But the, the point here is, as much as possible, you wanna close that gap and make it as close to one-tap reorder as possible. So, yeah, like I said, if you can get them directly to checkout, uh, in the cart with a permalink that's the way to do it. Okay, so then kind of play three is I like to say give a reason that just isn't a discount to reorder.

'Cause, like, the lazy thing that most stores do is they say, "Come back and reorder. Here's 15% off." And a discount can work, and it has its place, but if it's your only tool, really, like all you're doing is training your best customers to wait for a coupon. And I've got coupons from people to reorder stuff, and now I won't reorder until I get my coupon.

And I, I know so many brands like this. I, I keep getting coupons, and I will never reorder unless I get that coupon. And so, if I don't see the email, they might lose me as a customer 'cause I can only wait [00:19:00] so long. But basically, you're just teaching them that buying at full price is for suckers. So before you reach out with a discount try a, a reason.

So, the simplest reason is, is good timing, so, uh, with a good message, just saying like, "You're probably running low. Is it time for more?" And honestly, like, that type of message converts, and we see this because we, with Re- RePete's an AI reorder agent, it tries thousands of different messaging. And short, simple, to the point, helpful, not salesy, not marketing, not any extra words.

The shorter the better. It's a reorder reminder. It's not a marketing message. It, that- that's what works the best. And then or if it's an add-on, if it's a, if it's a genuinely good complementary product, that is helpful too. "So here's the grinder that fits with the coffee maker that you got," or, "The filters that work with your coffee maker," so, um, which is also a reorder play.

So, you know, [00:20:00] save the discount for customers who are actually starting to drift. Like those-- If, if a customer hasn't reordered for three or four times that's when you wanna use a discount. And I'll just say, like, we, the RePete handles this really well. You can set discounts that only after a while do they kick in, so it handles that nicely.

But the most important thing is to just don't by default give a discount, uh, right off the bat. The... I will say this, though. If you have a discount on your subscription, so if your subscription program is subscribe and save 5% or 10% I think the right thing to do is to match the subscription discount.

I think treating Your customers who will, who like to reorder when they want it, not on a subscription, they're still valuable customers. They just choose not to subscribe, but they might reorder from you 20 times. So treat them the same as you treat a subscriber, but don't give them any extra discount [00:21:00] on top of that.

Okay play number four is the one of the best ways to get the second order is to make the first order memorable enough to reorder. So, the first order is really the foundation, and if it, if it's broken, and if it... The other three th- are just useless, like that we talked about already.

Like, the you're shooting those messages into the void if the first order experience was really bad. So, a few episodes back I actually had Matt Edmundson on the show, and I remember talking with him about how people often actually can't remember a brand that they bought from, and I've done this myself.

I bought something, I loved it, I wanted more, and then I couldn't remember where I ordered it. Uh, I talked about this in the episode with Matt. I went back through my Gmail. I tried searching for the product. But the bottom line is, if your customers can't remember you, a perfectly timed reorder reminder still might fall flat [00:22:00] because they don't remember you, and it's not recognizable.

So to be recognizable, there's a lot of things you can do, but it starts with the unboxing experience needs to be memorable. The order confirmation, the wording you use, the imagery, the follow-up emails. Those aren't just fluff. They're what makes you memorable. It's your brand, and it's often what makes the reorder possible.

So put your name where they'll see it. Send a per- a personalized message. Tell them you know, what they bought, in plain language, how it works. Just make it stupid easy for them to remember who you are so that when you send the nudge, th- they connect the dots instantly. Okay, so here's what I want you to do today, and it's very doable.

So step one get your reorder window from your cohort data which we did in the last episode, so you should have that. Or just go to Sidekick and ask it for [00:23:00] the average time between the first and second order in general, or if you wanna get one step better, for specific products. Write that number on your scorecard.

Uh, it's gonna be line eight on your scorecard, and that's your reorder window in days. Now, step two, uh, go build one trigger in Shopify Flow. Open Flow or actually you could just tell Sidekick to build it. You could say, "Wait 27 days after an order for this product and then send an email reorder reminder."

And that's it. One automation that's better than the blind 30 days that you've been sending to everyone else. Now, if you wanna take it one step further and really take it to the next level try RePete. It's, I mean, it's these reorder reminders on steroids. So, then you don't have to worry about flow and managing and setting it up for every single product.

Um, but either way, the important thing is, is that you get some level of personalized reorder [00:24:00] reminders going out. Okay. So just a quick recap here. You know, if there's something you leave from this episode, just make sure you remember the second order is the most important order in your entire customer relationship.

It's what your whole RePete business hinges on, and almost nobody works on it. I, you know, you could probably tell me, if I said to you, " How many orders do you get a month?" You probably know, like you probably know you get 1,000 orders a month, 10,000 orders a month. But if I said to most cust- or most merchants, "Hey, how many second orders do you get a month?"

I don't know. I have no clue. Do you know? Listening right now, like if I said to you, "How many second orders do you get a month?" That is a very important metric and it's one you should track. So you can, you can actually ask, uh, you can ask Sidekick this. It's very easy to ask. You can run a query, but you would just wanna say to Sidekick, " How many customers ordered last month [00:25:00] that was the first time?

And... "Or sorry, sorry, scratch that. That's a different query. You would, you'd wanna say, "How many customers ordered this month where it was their second order and it was within- Let's say if your average reorder window is 30 days, let's just say say, and their previous order was within 90 days. Like, what you don't want to count are customers that ordered five years ago, and now they just ordered this month.

That is not a reorder. That's someone... It is, I know it is a second order but it's like someone who completely forgot about you, and then they came back. What you're looking for is the customers who order, enjoy the product, finish it, and then choose to come back and order again within a reasonable window.

Find out what that number is. I'm actually gonna add that to the scorecard. I think that is a very important metric. I [00:26:00] know we g- we're gonna talk about that a little bit more in other episodes, but the second order rate I actually don't have that in the scorecard as I am recording this, but by the time you're listening to that, it's gonna be in there.

So I want everyone to get that. Just go to sh- go to Sidekick and say, " How many s- customers placed a second order last month where their previous order was within the last 90 days or within the last 120 days?" That's probably gonna work for most stores. If your average reorder is every three months, just expand that timeframe out.

Okay, and then add that in your scorecard. That's gonna be in there. So, like, you know, most stores, they attack this with that static 30-day email for everyone, but the most important thing is that you get this on some type of personalized timing by product and by customer. And then we also talked about killing the fr- the friction, which, which is super important.

So next episode we're gonna [00:27:00] stay on the second order concept, but we're gonna go a lot deeper on the friction side and the actual reorder experience and how some of the best brands are making reordering just completely effortless. because that's a part that there's a lot more to it, and we just kind of touched the surface of it.

So that will be on the next one. Lastly, if you got 1% better today, you know what to do. Uh, if there was anything you learned today, if there's anything you're gonna go to apply to your store, make sure you're subscribed.

This is why we're doing this episode. I wanna help you run your store better, so hit subscribe. That way you'll get notified when there's a new episode, when episode five comes out, and, uh, and leave a five-star review. I read every single one. It means a lot. It helps others find the episode.

And write a comment in it. Five stars is great, super thankful, but when people write nice comments in it, I actually print them out. I've got a bunch stuck up on my wall. It means a lot, so really appreciate it. Thank you so much, and I will see you on the next episode