Shopify already tells you your repeat-purchase rate. It cannot tell you the reason behind it. This asks a first-time buyer what they think would make them order again — at the one moment in the relationship when they genuinely have a view.
Five named reasons and an Other that opens a box, so nothing has to be forced into the wrong bucket.
Nobody needs a survey to learn that customers like good products. What sits underneath it is a decision.
Each of the five options points at a different part of the business, and whichever one places second is effectively telling you where your next pound of retention spend should go:
The comparison gets sharper when you slice it. Because every answer carries its order, you can ask whether customers acquired through one channel value different things from another — and whether your higher-margin products attract the buyers who said brand rather than the ones who said price.
This needs saying because retention surveys get oversold. A tap on Product quality is what someone believes about themselves thirty seconds after paying, not a commitment. People systematically under-report price sensitivity and over-report high-minded reasons, so read the distribution as a ranking of what your buyers say they value— reliable in order, unreliable in magnitude, and not a forecast of anybody's second order.
The honest way to use it is as a hypothesis you later check against reality. Six months on you know who actually came back, and because these answers are attached to the customer record you can ask whether the reason they gave had anything to do with it. That is a far stronger claim than any survey can make on its own.
This tells you what buyers want more of. What almost stopped you tells you what nearly cost you the first order, and CSAT tells you whether this particular order earned a second one at all. The full template library is here, and every template is on every plan.
Not individually, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise — plenty of people who tap Product quality never order again. What holds up is the comparison: which reason gets picked most often, and how that differs between your product lines and acquisition channels. Treat it as a ranking of what your buyers value, not as a forecast of any one person's behaviour.
It is usually first, and the shape underneath it is the interesting part. A store where Fast or free shipping is a close second has a logistics lever; one where Price and value is second is more fragile than its owner thinks; one where The brand and what it stands for scores unusually high can charge more. The winner is predictable, the runner-up is not.
Because it is the only moment they have a fresh, specific opinion about you and nothing has faded yet. Ask the same person in six weeks and you are competing with everything that happened in between; ask at checkout and you get what they were actually thinking when they decided you were worth trying.
Yes, because every answer is stored against the Shopify order and customer rather than a session. Six months of responses and your own repeat-order data are joinable on the customer, so you can check whether the people who said shipping mattered were the ones who returned. That is the point of answers arriving welded to orders.
Other opens a free-text box, so it does not become a dead end. If a reason keeps appearing there — a subscription option, a missing size, a bundle — that is the signal to promote it into a real option, or to stop treating it as a survey answer and treat it as a roadmap item.
toldby is live on the Shopify App Store. Install free, publish the retention question, and find out what your second order depends on.
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