Recurring revenue for order-based Shopify stores (no subscriptions required)

"Recurring revenue" usually gets talked about as something only subscription boxes and SaaS companies have. That's not quite right. Any store where customers reorder on their own, without being locked into a subscription, has a recurring component to its revenue. It's just uncounted.

A simple definition

For a store that sells one-off orders, a reasonable definition of recurring revenue is: the total spend, in a given window, that came from a customer's second order or later. It excludes each customer's very first order (that one's new-customer revenue) and counts everything after, whether that second order landed the same week as the first or months later.

Why the trend matters more than the number

A single recurring-revenue figure doesn't tell you much on its own, it depends heavily on store size and category. What's useful is the trend: is this month's recurring revenue up or down against the prior period. A steady climb means the existing customer base is getting more valuable over time. A flat or declining line, even while total revenue looks fine, usually means new-customer acquisition is quietly doing all the work, and that's a more fragile position to be in.

Where the number comes from

All of this comes out of order history that already exists in Shopify. Nothing needs to be reconfigured or re-tagged, it's a matter of joining each order to its customer and checking whether an earlier order from that same customer already exists.