New Orders
How much of your order volume comes from people buying for the first time.
What it means
New Orders is a percentage, not a count. It's the share of orders in the period placed by someone who had never bought from you before, and the card renders it with a % sign. First-time status is judged on the customer's whole history with your store, not on the date range you happen to be looking at.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Orders from first-time buyers is every order in the period placed by someone with no earlier order anywhere in your store's history. The card divides that by your total order count and shows the result as a percentage.
The other side is Returning OrdersReturning OrdersHow much of your volume loyalty drives.35% or more is healthy, on the same card row. Every order belongs to one of the two, so between them they account for the whole order count.
Worked example. March takes 800 orders. 520 come from people ordering for the first time, so New Orders = 520 ÷ 800 = 65%. The remaining 280 orders are the 35% that reads as Returning Orders.
Those 520 first orders are the ones you paid to win. At an NCPANCPAWhat it costs to win a first-time buyer. of €30 that's €15,600 of acquisition cost sitting inside a month that looks, on the order count alone, like 800 orders.
It answers the question
How much of this month's volume did you have to go out and buy? A high share means the shop is running on new faces. A low one means it's running on people who already know you.
Why it matters
Every first order arrives with an acquisition cost attached and no history behind it. Somebody clicked an ad for it, so that cost has to come off before you compare it to a repeat order — which is why 2 shops with the same order count can end the month with very different profit. The card's own hover text sends you to NCPA for exactly that reason.
It's also the growth signal on that row. A shop where this slides quarter after quarter is being carried by its existing customers, which works until the base stops reordering. A shop pushing towards 100% is buying every order it takes, every month, forever.
What good looks like
These bands and the Returning Orders bands meet at exactly one point: 65% here means 35% there, which is the top of the band for both. Move either way and one of the two starts reading worse. Neither end is a target on its own — a shop 6 months old sits high because it has no base yet, and a refill business sits low because it does.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Move budget from retargeting to cold audiences | Shift a share of Meta and Google spend to prospecting for a fortnight and watch the split | New Orders up, total order count roughly flat at first | 2–3 weeks | Cold traffic costs more per order. NCPA rises and ROAS falls, because retargeting was flattering both. |
| Fast Give a first-time buyer an easy yes | Put a low-risk entry product or a first-order offer in front of people with no history | New Orders up within a send or two | 2–4 weeks | The discount comes off Gross Margin on exactly the orders you know least about, and some of it lands on people who would have bought anyway. |
| Slow Open a channel you don't already sell on | A new market, a new platform, or content aimed at people who've never heard of you | A structural lift rather than a spike | 1–2 quarters | The spend lands in Ad Spend months before the orders do, so every profit number gets worse before this one gets better. |
| Slow Widen the range so a stranger has somewhere to start | Add an entry-priced product to a catalogue that currently opens high | More first orders, at a lower average | 1–2 quarters | AOV falls with the entry price, and a cheap first order only pays for itself if the second one arrives. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A share moves when either half moves. Put it next to the order count and you can tell which half did.
Real acquisition
More orders, and more of them from people you hadn't sold to before. This is the only corner where the share improved by addition rather than by subtraction.
Improved by subtraction
The share rose while total volume fell, so repeat orders fell away underneath it. The percentage looks like progress and the shop got smaller.
The base is carrying it
Growth without acquisition cost behind it, which is the cheapest growth there is. It stops being good news the month the base runs out of reasons to reorder.
Both engines stalled
Fewer orders, and fewer of them new. Acquisition usually moves first here, because it's the half that responds to a budget change within days.
They split the same order count between them, so they always move in opposite directions and neither one can be read as a verdict on its own. The useful reading is which of the two is doing the moving: if New Orders climbed because first orders grew, the order count grew with it. If it climbed because repeat orders fell, the count didn't. Only the pair, next to the count, separates those.
AOV is gross sales minus discounts, divided by orders — so a first-order code lands in it directly. New Orders rising while AOV falls is usually the offer you used to buy those orders showing up in the average. Rising together is the shape you want: new buyers arriving without a discount doing the persuading.
Common misreads
It's a percentage. The card shows a share of your order volume, not a count of orders — 65 here means 65% of orders, not 65 orders.
The app grades higher as stronger acquisition, and it is. But every first order carries a cost you paid to get it. A shop at 90% is buying nearly all of next month again, and the same money spent on people who already bought would come back cheaper.
One counts orders, the other counts people, so they land on different numbers almost every period. A customer who orders twice in the range shows up once in % New Customers% New CustomersHow well you're bringing in new buyers.70% or more is healthy and twice in the order count.
Also called
First-time order rate · new customer order share · % New Orders
See yoursYour first-order share for the period, next to Returning Orders and the order count underneath both.
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