Erik is a co-founder of Graphiq, a B2B marketplace that connects designers with companies. He has built the whole business by using basic tools like Zapier and without crazy growth hacks.

In 2017, overall retail ecommerce sales surpassed $453 billion, up from $391 billion just the year before. Clearly, there’s no sign of the ecommerce market slowing down anytime soon. But this substantial growth also means competition is at an all-time high. In fact, 73 percent of first-time purchasers won’t make a second purchase from the same ecommerce brand. And considering how many options they’re faced with, that number is hardly surprising. Customer loyalty as we once knew it is practically a thing of the past, and customers aren’t necessarily tied to a brand just because they had one good experience shopping with them. In the hyper-competitive world of ecommerce, how can you attract loyal customers who will return to purchase from you time and time again? The key lies in engineering the repeat purchase. From defining what repeat purchase rate is, to maximizing it to benefit your business, we’ll cover it all in this guide. Plus, we’ll see how businesses like Tea Forte are seeing extraordinary results—and more loyal customers—by focusing on this key metric.

An introduction to product strategy with examples of north star metrics across industries The product north star is easily the most powerful and misunderstood product strategy framework in use today. More product teams are dealing with the consequences of not defining it at all or defining it the wrong way and leading their team down an unintended path. This article is our first deep dive in a series on the north star metric. We hope it serves as a guide to product leaders and managers around the world on why this metric matters, how to define it and how to use it to drive your long-term product strategy and growth.