Customer Lifetime Orders Calculator

This projects lifetime revenue and order count; an LTV calculator applies your gross margin on top to show lifetime profit contribution. Use lifetime orders when planning operations — inventory depth, support load, packaging costs scale with orders — and margin-based LTV when setting acquisition budgets. The order count here times your margin per order reproduces LTV exactly.

From cohort data: purchase frequency is last year’s orders divided by unique customers, and years retained can be approximated as 1 ÷ annual churn rate. A store losing 50% of a cohort each year has a two-year expected lifetime. New stores should start with conservative placeholders — 1.5 purchases a year, 1 year retained — and revise as real cohorts age.

Because several real costs scale per order, not per dollar: pick-and-pack fees, shipping subsidies, packaging, payment fixed fees and support tickets. A customer worth $480 across 6 orders costs meaningfully more to serve than one worth $480 across 2 orders. Order-count projections also drive inventory planning — 6 lifetime orders of a consumable tells you exactly how much stock a cohort will consume.

Test the sensitivity right in this calculator, but for most stores retention wins: it multiplies every future year of orders, and small churn improvements compound. Frequency is usually the cheapest to move (replenishment emails cost almost nothing), while AOV lifts arrive instantly but do not compound. The best programs move frequency and retention together with the same lifecycle flows.