What Our Repeat Customers Come Back For

The number I didn't expect

Median time between a customer's first order and their second: 53 days.

Not a year. Not "if they come back at all." Fifty-three days, which is close enough to two months that there's probably a rhythm behind it — a project cycle, a build that got finished, a batch of parts that got used up.

I went looking for this because I wanted to know whether reordering was common or rare, and the honest answer is that it's neither. It's normal, it happens on a timescale of weeks rather than months, and it says more about what our customers are doing than any other number in this dataset.

How many come back

	Count	Share
Customers who ordered once	492	85.7%
Customers who ordered 2 or more times	82	14.3%
Total unique customers	574

Most people order once. That's the headline, and it's true of most businesses whether they admit it or not.

But then look at what the 82 do:

82 customers — 14 percent — placed 224 of our 725 orders, carrying 39 percent of all the units we've shipped.

So a seventh of the customer base accounts for a third of the orders and nearly two-fifths of the volume. Our biggest-selling specification, the 22 × 19 × 1000mm, gets 96 percent of its units from customers on their second order or later. It's not a product that strangers buy. It's a product that gets reordered.

So there are two different questions here and they have different answers. How many customers come back? Not many. How much of the business do the ones who do represent? A disproportionate amount of it.

What they come back for

Here's the part I found genuinely interesting. Of the customers who reordered, and who bought at least two specifications over their lifetime with us:

Behaviour	Customers
Reordered at least one spec they'd bought before	42
Bought a different spec every time	37

Almost a clean split. Forty-two people came back for the same thing. Thirty-seven kept buying something new.

Those are two different kinds of customer and they need different things from us.

The repeat-spec buyers are running a process. They found the tube that works, they know it works, and they're replacing or extending. What they care about is that the next batch is dimensionally the same as the last one, and that it's in stock. Consistency matters more than choice to them.

The new-spec buyers are building. They bought a 16mm for the first version, then a 20mm when it needed to be stiffer, then a 12mm for a smaller variant. Each order is a design decision, and what they want is for us to have the size they've settled on and to answer questions sensibly.

The same catalogue serves both, but the failure modes are opposite. Let a repeat-spec buyer down by changing a wall thickness between batches and you've broken their process. Fail to stock enough sizes for a new-spec buyer and they go elsewhere for the third iteration.

The specification that gets reordered

Spec	Units from repeat customers
22 × 19 × 1000mm	190
18 × 16 × 250mm	30
20 × 14 × 1000mm	22
17 × 15 × 500mm	21
18 × 14 × 1000mm	17
32 × 29 × 1000mm	17
40 × 36 × 1200mm	17
46 × 44 × 1000mm	16
8 × 4 × 1000mm	15
25 × 23 × 1000mm	13

Some of these are obvious, some aren't. The 22mm is the trade specification from the last article, so its presence here is consistent — the same buyers who order it in bulk are the ones ordering it again.

The 18 × 16 × 250mm at second place is more curious. A 250mm length with a 1mm wall, ordered repeatedly. Short, light, and bought over and over. Whatever that is, it's a part that gets consumed and replaced rather than built into something permanent.

And the 20 × 14 × 1000mm is worth noting because it appeared in the bulk data at the opposite extreme — zero bulk orders, all single pieces. So it's a spec bought one at a time, repeatedly, by people who came back for more. A consumable rather than a project part.

Why the 53-day figure matters if you're the customer

This is the practical bit, and it's why I pulled the numbers in the first place.

Gap between orders	Occurrences
Within 30 days	60
31 to 180 days	47
More than 180 days	35

A quarter of reorders happen inside a month. Another third within six. And then there's a long tail — the longest gap in the data is nearly four years, which is someone coming back to a supplier they used once, years ago, because the thing they tried in between didn't work.

If you're planning a build and you think you'll need more tube in two months, that's exactly what our data says people do. The useful consequence is that you can order a metre for the current job and get the rest when you actually need it, without starting the search over. We'll have the records.

And if you're doing something where the specification is settled — a process rather than a project — say so when you order. It's worth us knowing which customers need batch consistency, because it changes how we cut and how we record what went out.

What the numbers don't say

Being careful about three things.

"Repeat customer" here means two or more orders with the same email address. People change addresses, buy through a work account one time and a personal one the next, or check out as a guest. The real repeat rate is almost certainly higher than 14.3 percent, and by how much I have no way of knowing.

It's six years of a small business. 574 customers is enough to see a pattern and nowhere near enough to call it a law. A larger supplier would show different numbers, probably with a higher repeat rate simply because bigger customers order more often.

And a gap of a few years tells you nothing about why. Someone might have come back after a long break because the alternative was worse, or because a project got resurrected, or because a colleague recommended us. Order timestamps can't distinguish those, and I'd rather say so than invent a story.

Frequently asked

Do most customers order more than once?

No. 86 percent of our customers have ordered once, and 14 percent have come back. But that 14 percent placed 31 percent of our orders, so they're a small group doing a large share of the buying.

How soon do people reorder?

The median gap is 53 days. A quarter of reorders come within a month, another third inside six months, and there's a long tail stretching out to years.

Do people buy the same size again or something different?

Both, in roughly equal numbers — 42 customers reordered a specification they'd bought before, 37 bought a new one each time. If you're the first type, tell us, because batch consistency matters more to you than range.

Which size do people reorder most?

The 22 × 19 × 1000mm, by a wide margin, and 96 percent of its units go to repeat buyers. The 18 × 16 × 250mm is the surprising one at second — a small part that gets bought over and over, which suggests it's consumed rather than built in.

Can you keep a record of what I ordered?

Yes. If you tell us a specification is for a recurring need rather than a one-off, we'll note it, and the next order can reference the last one instead of you re-specifying it.

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Standard sizes are grouped by outside diameter in the tube sections, and if you're buying repeatedly, the wholesale listings carry 10 and 20 piece packs. The order data write-up covers which sizes sell overall, and the sizing guide is the place to start if you're specifying for the first time.