Shopify Cohort Analysis: Read the Report and Act on It

Shopify cohort analysis is the Customer cohort analysis report in your customer reports. It groups customers by the period of their first order and shows, period by period, how many came back and what they spent. A cohort that keeps buying in its third and sixth month is the kind of customer to find more of; one that stops after the first order points to a product, channel or offer to change.

Everything about the report below comes from the Shopify Help Center page on customer reports, read on October 23, 2026.

Open the report

In the admin go to Analytics > Reports, click the Category filter and choose Customers, then open Customer cohort analysis. It shows as a heatmap by default; the Visualizations menu in the configuration panel switches it to a Retention curve.

Read the table

Each row is a cohort: the customers whose first purchase fell in the same period, named by that period (for example, “Feb 2026”). Each column is the time since that first purchase: Month 0, Month 1, Month 2 and so on. A cell shows how that cohort behaved in that month.

Shopify’s own example: a customer who first bought in February and bought again in February, June and September sits in the February cohort and counts as a repeat customer in Month 0, Month 4 and Month 7.

How to read it:

1. Look down a column. Compare Month 3 across cohorts. If newer cohorts are lighter in the heatmap than older ones, customers you acquire now come back less than they used to.
2. Look along a row. A cohort that holds its color for several months has loyal customers; one that fades after Month 0 is mostly one-time buyers.
3. Change the metric. In the configuration panel, the Metric menu switches between number of customers, customer retention rate, gross sales, net sales, average order value and amount spent per customer.
4. Filter by first order. The Cohort definition menu filters cohorts by details of the first order, such as the sales channel, so you can compare customers who first bought on the Shop channel with those from your online store.

Drill into a cohort

Click any cell to open its details. Shopify lists:

• total sales for the cohort, average order value and orders per customer
• amount spent per customer
• new and returning customers and their orders
• the top marketing channels that brought the cohort’s customers
• the top sales channels that processed their orders
• the cohort’s predicted spend tier overview
• the ratio of one-time to subscription orders
• the top locations of the cohort’s customers

If you choose Amount spent per customer as the metric, Show projections estimates future spending per cohort from up to 24 months of your data. The toggle only appears when 24 months exist, and Shopify warns that projections are not a guarantee. Sidekick can answer many customer questions, but not cohort projections.

Three decisions it supports

1. Which channel to spend on. Open a strong cohort and a weak one and compare their top marketing channels. If the cohorts that come back came mostly from email or organic search and the weak ones from a paid campaign, the paid campaign is buying one-time customers.

2. Whether a big discount buys loyal customers. Compare the cohort from the month of your last big sale with the cohorts around it. If the sale cohort is large but fades after Month 0, the discount brought one-time buyers; if it keeps buying, the sale paid off beyond its own month.

3. When to ask for the second order. Find the month where most cohorts drop off, and send your second-order offer just before it. Shopify’s tip: use a strong cohort to build a customer segment, for example first_order_date BETWEEN 2026-06-01 AND 2026-06-30, and target customers like them.

The formulas for retention and churn, and a segment for customers at risk, are in Shopify customer retention; loyalty programs measured with these numbers are in loyalty metrics.

Frequently asked questions

What is a cohort in Shopify’s reports? A cohort is a group of customers who placed their first order in the same period, such as the same month. Shopify’s Customer cohort analysis report follows each cohort over the following months to show repeat purchases and spending.

Can I change what the Shopify cohort report measures? You can. The configuration panel lets you switch the metric (customers, retention rate, gross or net sales, average order value, amount spent per customer), the visualization (heatmap or retention curve) and the cohort definition, such as the first order’s sales channel. Save your version as a custom exploration to return to it.

Where does the cohort report fit with my other reports? It is one of Shopify’s customer reports, next to New vs returning customers, Predicted spend tier and RFM customer analysis. A tour of the whole Analytics area is in Shopify analytics, and the rest of our store guides sit in the running a store hub.