Every brand wants to know the same thing: is my retention any good? The honest answer is that it depends heavily on what you sell. A coffee brand and a mattress brand live in completely different retention universes. Here are the 2026 benchmarks, and how to read them for your category.
The headline numbers
Across direct-to-consumer brands, the average retention rate sits around 31%, while the average repeat purchase rate lands in the 25–30% range. The brands with mature lifecycle programs — real email and SMS flows, loyalty, replenishment — pull away to 45–55% retention. One analysis across roughly 156,000 DTC stores put the median repeat purchase rate at just 18.8%, which tells you how many brands have no retention engine at all.
Retention by category
Replenishment is destiny. The faster a product gets used up, the higher the natural repeat rate:
- Consumables (supplements, coffee, food, skincare): 35–55% for top performers. Natural replenishment does a lot of the work — your job is to be the brand they reorder from.
- Pet: roughly 30–35%. Food and treats replenish, and pet owners are loyal once they find something that works.
- Beauty & skincare: 22–40% depending on the sub-category. Routine-based products retain; one-off treatments don't.
- Apparel & accessories: 25–32%. Style-driven, less predictable, but strong brands build a wardrobe relationship.
- Home goods & electronics: 12–25%. Long purchase cycles mean retention shows up as cross-sell and referral, not fast reorders.
Why marketplace brands score worse than the benchmark
These benchmarks come from DTC stores that can see their customers. If you sell on Amazon, TikTok Shop, or Walmart, the marketplace owns the customer relationship — so most sellers can't even measure repeat rate, let alone improve it. That's the real gap: not that your retention is low, but that it's invisible.
How to close the gap
- Capture the customer. Use a covered, on-product QR sticker to turn anonymous marketplace buyers into known, first-party contacts.
- Match your flows to your category. A coffee brand reminds at 21 days; a supplement brand at 25–30; an apparel brand cross-sells seasonally.
- Measure repeat purchase rate as a first-class metric, with SKU-level cohorts.
How Swapt helps
Swapt is the marketplace retention CRM that makes these benchmarks measurable — and beatable — for Amazon, TikTok Shop, and Walmart brands. It captures your customers, automates category-specific flows, and reports repeat purchase rate you could never see before. See how it works.
Own the relationship with every customer.
Swapt captures your marketplace customers and turns one-time orders into lifetime value — compliantly.