2026 Global Ecommerce Report: Retention Benchmarks of High-Performing Brands

Executive Summary

The Rise of Retention-Led Ecommerce

Rising operational costs and higher customer expectations mean it takes more than luck, or even a great product, for ecommerce merchants to stay ahead.

The brands winning today share a common focus. Instead of chasing growth alone, they prioritize revenue retention. By recovering lost revenue and creating new value through the post-purchase experience, they are building resilience that helps them navigate uncertainty and protect margins.

The post-purchase experience, especially exchanges, refunds, and returns, plays a critical role in this strategy. Returns are not just operational moments. When handled well, they directly influence customer loyalty and whether revenue stays in the business.

Improving revenue retention helps offset rising customer acquisition costs, protect margins, and drive repeat purchases. The strongest merchants design returns intentionally, using them to reduce friction, build trust, and keep customers coming back.

In this report, we dig into what high-performing brands are doing differently by leveraging data, tools, and technology to turn returns into retention. You’ll see how streamlined, transparent processes; customer-centric design; and smart automation make revenue retention a repeatable advantage.

Loop is uniquely positioned to publish these benchmarks. As a leading commerce operations platform trusted by more than 5,000 Shopify brands, Loop supports merchants across both pre- and post-purchase moments. This end-to-end view provides rare insights into how top-performing brands retain customers and protect revenue at scale.

By connecting returns, exchanges, fraud prevention, order tracking, delivery promise, and analytics, Loop helps brands turn everyday commerce operations into growth levers. While this report focuses on retention through returns, the insights reflect a broader, full-journey approach to building durable ecommerce growth.

"Ecommerce is changing quickly, and customers are gravitating towards the brands who get them. These brands are gathering data and using it to operate smarter. They’re proactively sharing recommendations to their customers, automating the return and exchange process, and making customer service more delightful. The numbers in this report show the incredible revenue opportunities for brands that invest in the “boring” parts of their ecommerce businesses, which are really the parts that customers notice the most."

— Hannah Bravo, CEO at Loop

Loop by the numbers

• Active brands with $50M+ annual revenue
• Active brands with $10M+ annual revenue
• Total revenue retained in a year
• Total attributed tracking revenue in a year
• Of Shopify GMV
• Shopify stores using Loop products globally
• App store rating from 380+ reviews
• Unique return policies across all active brands

Methodology and Key Definitions

How we collected, analyzed, and categorized the data

This report uses Loop data from over 23.4 million returns from more than 4,000 Shopify merchants globally using Loop’s Returns Portal, spanning nine verticals, collected from November 1, 2024 to October 31, 2025. This data includes a set of metrics analyzed across several dimensions, including vertical and geographic region, as defined below.

Our metrics exclude any returns blocked before submission, including final sale items and those stopped by workflows. Counting blocked returns would artificially inflate reported performance metrics. We avoid that practice to keep our reporting transparent and ensure accuracy across all return-related measurements on returnable products.

Definitions of key metrics

• Repeat Purchase Rate: Measures whether shoppers who made a return went on to purchase again later.
• Variant Exchanges: A return outcome where a shopper exchanges an item for a different variant of the same product.
• Shop Now: Allows shoppers to exchange an item they bought for any other product in the store catalog.
• Shop Later: Allows customers to convert a refund into store credit, after the refund has already been requested.
• Average Revenue Retained per Shop: Total Revenue Retained ($) ÷ Total Shops.

Benchmarks and Key Findings

These benchmarks are designed to provide context. They show where strategies converge, where they diverge, and how high-performing brands approach policies, fees, exchanges, fraud prevention, and post-purchase flexibility across the full customer journey.

Across the board

Baseline trends across all merchants

• Returns are no longer refund-first: 73.6% of Loop merchants now offer exchanges.
• Fees are becoming targeted, not universal: 65.2% of merchants charge return fees on at least some outcomes.
• Fraud prevention is moving earlier in the process: 11.4% of return value is flagged as high risk.

Proactive Fraud Prevention

Returns fraud and policy abuse continue to represent a significant and growing challenge for ecommerce brands. Across the dataset analyzed, nearly 12% of return attempts were flagged as high risk.

How to use this data

1. Identify your peer group: Find the segments that most closely match your business across vertical and primary region.
2. Compare your returns strategy: Evaluate how your feature usage, return fees, and refund and exchange windows stack up against peers.
3. Assess risk and exposure: Review your fraud rate and the average value of flagged returns relative to peer benchmarks.
4. Prioritize intentional improvements: Identify which changes will have the greatest impact on retention, loyalty, or margin protection.

Best-in-Class Strategies

What top-performing brands do differently

Top-performing brands don’t treat returns as a necessary cost. They treat them as a moment of leverage.