Understanding your products' impact on stickiness is essential to developing effective retention strategies, as it reveals which products keep your customers coming back to your brand and making repeat purchases.
What is stickiness?
Stickiness refers to the degree to which customers engage with your brand and products and how deeply they are integrated into their daily lives.
Typically, you should distinguish between product stickiness and brand stickiness:
Brand stickiness: This refers to how well a product keeps customers shopping with your brand, even when they buy different products the next time. It shows that the product helps build a strong overall connection to your brand.
Product stickiness: This refers to how much a product becomes a part of your customers' lives. It tracks how often customers return to buy the same product, indicating that they really like and rely on it. While this may not be relevant at the product level for all industries, such as apparel and fashion, it certainly is at the category level.
Some products are amazing at keeping people with your brand even if they switch SKUs next time, others become a personal ritual that customers reorder again and again.
How to measure Brand Stickiness
To understand the impact of your products on repeat purchases, You need to analyze all orders that contain the product in question and checks what happened after the purchase, meaning whether the customer came back for another or stopped shopping at your stor.
I've built two metrics for this in RetentionX:
Orders Leading to a Follow-Up The number of orders including the product under consideration that led to another purchase - no matter which products have been shopped afterwards.
Share of Orders Leading to a Follow-Up The percentage of orders including the product under consideration that led to another purchase - again, no matter which products have been shopped afterwards.
In the above example, the Liquid Energy Gel has been part of 45,972 orders over time - some of these orders may even contain more than one item of the product. By mapping all customer journeys, we know that 19,430 of these orders resulted in a repeat purchase, meaning that customers shopped again at the store. In percentage terms, this means that 42% of all Liquid Energy Gel orders made customers come back.
Although the Acai Pomegranate Power Gel was part of far fewer orders, we can see that its impact on brand stickiness is the highest, as 58% of all orders that included this product resulted in an additional order.
How to measure Product Stickiness
To understand how your products affect repeat purchases of the same product, you need to analyze all orders that contain the product in question and checks to see if the same product was purchased over and over again - again, regardless of the order in which the product was included, whether it was the first, fifth, or any other order.
The following two metrics are calculated based on this:
Follow-up Orders incl. the Product The number of orders including the product under consideration that led to another purchase of the same product.
Share of Follow-up Orders incl. the Product Percentage of orders including the product under consideration that led to another purchase of the same product.
We have already learned that the Acai Pomegranate Power Gel has been part of 27,041 orders over time and that 58% of these orders resulted in a repeat purchase. After checking which products were purchased subsequently, we see that 13,823 of all Acai Pomegranate Power Gel orders resulted in a repeat order of the same product - making 51% of all these orders brought your customers back to purchase Acai Pomegranate Power Gel again.
Stickiness cannot only be analyzed at product level. Analyzing the product categories can also allow exciting conclusions to be drawn about which product groups lead to loyalty
Examples
Let's take a look at some examples to get familiar with the math!
Example 1: Chris
So far, Chris has placed three orders to try different products. She first ordered the Liquid Energy Gel, purchased the Acai Pomegranate Power Gel in her second order, and chose the Vitamin Gel Shot in her most recent order.
If we were to calculate brand and product stickiness for the Liquid Energy Gel using only her data, it would look like this:
Orders incl. Liquid Energy Gel: 1
Brand Stickiness
Orders incl. Liquid Energy Gel leading to a follow-up: 1
Share of Orders incl. Liquid Energy Gel leading to a follow-up: 100%
Product Stickiness
Follow-up Orders incl. Liquid Energy Gel: 0
Share of Follow-up Orders incl. Liquid Energy Gel: 0%
Example 2: Will
Will has also purchased three times so far, but has stuck with the Acai Pomegranate Power Gel after purchasing it in his first order. Will seems to be satisfied with the product and has become loyal to it.
If we were to calculate brand and product stickiness for the Acai Pomegranate Power Gel using only his data, it would look like this:
Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel: 3
Brand Stickiness
Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel leading to a follow-up: 2
Share of Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel leading to a follow-up: 66.67%
Product Stickiness
Follow-up Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel: 2
Share of Follow-up Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel: 66.67%
But let's say Will's journey was a little different and his second order was the Liquid Energy Gel instead of the Acai Pomegranate Power Gel.
If we were to calculate brand and product stickiness for the Acai Pomegranate Power Gel using only his data, it would look like this:
Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel: 2
Brand Stickiness
Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel leading to a follow-up: 1
Share of Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel leading to a follow-up: 50%
Product Stickiness
Follow-up Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel: 1
Share of Follow-up Orders incl. Acai Pomegranate Power Gel: 50%
Although Acai Pomegranate Power Gel was not part of two subsequent orders, the first order that included Acai Pomegranate Power Gel led to a later order that included the same product again.
Make it actionable
Once you've identified the products that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty, it's time to give them visibility and place them where your audience can easily see them.
Whether it's adding these products to ads, shopping feeds, featuring them in newsletters, or merchandising them to be front and center on your store, you want to make sure your customers are discovering and buying products that drive stickiness.
Often your bestsellers are not the products that really lead to customer loyalty. Validate that.
TIP: I know that’s a lot to take in! I’ve been in the same position—feeling overwhelmed about where to find the data, how to get started, and how to embed an LTV-driven mindset into my teams. That’s why we built RetentionX. As a brand operator, it has been my #1 internal tool to turn things around before launching it as publicly available software.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How would you handle this in categories with constant newness (fashion, drops)? Product-level repeat might be structurally low even if the brand is insanely sticky. What metric do you use so you don’t punish the right strategy?
In newness-driven categories, I use product family or category stickiness instead of SKU-level. The question becomes: do customers come back and buy the same type of item (denim, basics, outerwear), even if the exact SKU changes. You also track brand stickiness via second/third order rate and time between orders, plus discount depth on repeats. That way you reward healthy brand loyalty without expecting impossible SKU repetition.
Q: What’s the most common trap you see? My guess: brands over-invest in "ritual products" that don’t actually expand the basket or cross-sell, or they over-index on variety products that keep the brand but never create a habit.
You nailed it—two traps. First: treating a ritual SKU as “the whole business” and forgetting to build ladders into higher-margin or broader categories. Second: pushing endless variety when customers actually want a default, which kills habit and increases promo dependency. The fix is role clarity: some SKUs exist to create routine, others to expand AOV and category breadth. When you know which is which, your merchandising and lifecycle stops fighting itself.
Q: How do you quantify brand stickiness vs product stickiness in a simple way? Do you look at repeat rate with SKU changes, share of customers who repurchase same SKU, or something like an “attach rate” to other categories?
A simple split is: brand stickiness = % of customers who place a second order (any SKU), and product stickiness = % of customers who repurchase the same SKU (or SKU family) within a window. Then add one bridge metric: cross-SKU progression (what they buy next if they don’t rebuy the same item). That gives you three clean signals: do they come back, do they rebuy the item, and if not, where do they go. It’s enough to decide whether to push replenishment or guide discovery.
Q: Can a product be both?
Yes—those are the unicorns. They get repurchased frequently and they pull customers deeper into the brand (bundles, adjacent categories, upgrades). When you find them, they should dominate acquisition and onboarding because they manufacture high-LTV cohorts. But you still need supporting products around them so the relationship doesn’t become fragile. “Both” is the core engine, the rest is the portfolio.
Q: Operationally: how do you use this in lifecycle? Do you run different post-purchase flows depending on whether the first purchase was a “brand anchor” product vs a “ritual” product—e.g., cross-sell guidance vs replenishment timing?
Exactly. Ritual-first purchases should trigger replenishment timing + usage education + subscription/auto-reorder options (if relevant). Brand-anchor purchases should trigger curated discovery: “next logical item,” outfit/kit building, and category ladders to widen the relationship. If you send the same flow to both, you either annoy ritual buyers or waste the discovery moment for anchor buyers. The best lifecycle programs start by understanding what job the first product was hired to do.
