To help our merchants, Shopify set upon tackling the nontrivial problem of helping our merchants determine customer retention.

When a customer stops buying from a business, we call that churn. In a contractual business (like software as a service), it’s easy to see when a customer leaves because they dissolve their contract. By comparison, in a non-contractual business (like a clothing store), it’s more difficult as the customer simply stops purchasing without any direct notification...

To help our merchants, Shopify set upon tackling the nontrivial problem of helping our merchants determine customer retention.

When a customer stops buying from a business, we call that churn. In a contractual business (like software as a service), it’s easy to see when a customer leaves because they dissolve their contract. By comparison, in a non-contractual business (like a clothing store), it’s more difficult as the customer simply stops purchasing without any direct notification...