Key takeaways
- Subscription churn = lost customers ÷ starting base; ecommerce “churn” is often no repurchase in 90–180 days.
- Logo churn and revenue churn diverge when mix shifts—track both for subscriptions.
- Blended churn hides channel quality: paid social cohorts often churn faster than email or wholesale.
- Churn is the leak in LTV and payback—model repeat before you scale CAC.
- Use the Ecommerce Simulator LTV endgame scenario to stress-test repeat assumptions.
Definition
Churn rate — the rate at which customers stop being active: subscription cancels, skipped replenishment, or—for many DTC brands—buyers who never place a second order within your repurchase window. It is the leak in the bucket that caps LTV.
Churn rate formula
Subscription logo churn (monthly): Customers lost ÷ Customers at start of month
Revenue churn (monthly): MRR or subscription revenue lost ÷ MRR at start of month (often net of expansion)
Ecommerce repeat “churn”: 1 − (Customers with ≥2 orders within 90 days ÷ New customers acquired)
Pick one definition and window. Comparing 30-day subscription churn to 180-day repurchase rate is how dashboards lie politely.
What churn hides
- Voluntary vs involuntary — failed payments look like churn but fix with dunning, not product.
- Cohort vintage — holiday gift buyers “churn” by design; separate acquisition months.
- Channel mix — prospecting cohorts churn faster; email reactivation hides paid weakness in blended rates.
- Pause vs cancel — pauses are not churn in finance but behave like churn in ops forecasts.
- Inverse framing — retention rate = 1 − churn only when the same window and population are used.
Worked example: subscription vs one-time brand
Subscription coffee: Start month with 4,000 active subscribers. 280 cancel, 40 fail payment permanently after retries. Logo churn = 280 ÷ 4,000 = 7.0%. Another 120 downgrade to a cheaper plan (−$600 MRR); revenue churn may differ from logo churn.
At 7% monthly logo churn, average subscriber life ≈ 1 ÷ 0.07 ≈ 14.3 months (simplified). If contribution is $18/month and CAC is $55, payback ≈ 3.1 months— viable if churn stays near 7%, fragile if it drifts to 10%.
One-time apparel: 2,000 customers acquired in March. By day 90, 520 placed order two → repeat rate 26%, implied “churn” 74% in 90 days. First-order contribution $19, CAC $48 → payback needs ~2.5 orders. At 26% repeat, most cohort never pays back— that is churn destroying unit economics, not a CRM problem alone.
For one-time purchase DTC, measure repurchase within 90–180 days by acquisition cohort—not SaaS monthly churn—before you scale paid CAC.
Source: Growthegy operator practice; retention framework (2026)
How to use churn in the Ecommerce Simulator
Open LTV endgame in the Ecommerce Simulator. Set first-order contribution and CAC, then move repeat purchase rate (the inverse of early churn) ±5 points. Watch 12-month LTV and LTV:CAC. If a realistic retention lift still leaves LTV:CAC below 3:1 on contribution, fix product-market fit and onboarding before lifecycle email theater.
Related guide
For playbooks that move churn and repeat, read the customer retention strategy framework, post-purchase experience optimization, and LTV, CAC, and payback store guide. Pair with retention stage metrics.
Related terms
- Customer retention rate — complement metric.
- LTV — rises when churn falls.
- MRR — subscription revenue base for revenue churn.
- Payback period — extends when churn is high.
Back to the ecommerce glossary. Churn is not a support ticket metric—it is the ceiling on how much each acquired customer is worth.