Frequently asked questions.

What is Retrics, in one sentence?

Retrics is the intelligence layer for repeat commerce — a customer- and product-intelligence workspace for D2C Shopify brands. It reads your store's own order history to learn who will buy again, what they'll buy, and when, and turns that into the next best action you review and export.

Retention — predicting repeat purchases and ranking the win-backs worth making — is the first live product built on that layer. Campaigns is in early access; more products ship as merchants ask for them.

Does Retrics contact my customers automatically?

No. This is the most important thing to understand about how Retrics works. Retrics picks the who and the when — you write the what. When a customer looks overdue or at risk, Retrics ranks the move by expected dollars, freezes the audience, and withholds a randomized control that is never messaged; the copy is yours. Nothing reaches a customer from Retrics at all: you approve the audience, export the campaign-safe CSV, and send it from your own email tool.

We built it this way on purpose. You know your brand voice, your promotions, and your inbox reputation better than any model does. Retrics does the pattern-finding; you keep the words — and the send button, which lives in your own platform, not in Retrics.

AI drafting is off today: Retrics won’t send model-written copy until it can mechanically prove a draft carries no discount, deadline or offer you never authorised. You write the message — the audience, the holdout and the campaign-safe export are unchanged.

What data does Retrics read from my store?

The base analytics connection requests read access to orders, customers, and products. Approved stores may separately grant read_all_ordersfor history outside Shopify's standard window. That imported order history is what the retention math runs on.

Only if you explicitly enable Shopify loyalty reward issuance does a separate OAuth step request write_discounts, used solely to create the discount codes you requested. Retrics does not read payment credentials or card numbers and does not write orders, themes, or checkout.

Does Retrics need my Online Store or POS?

No. Retrics uses the Shopify Admin API only. You do not need to install a theme app, add script tags, or connect Point of Sale. If your orders and customers live in Shopify, Retrics can work — whether those orders came from your online store, POS, wholesale, or a headless storefront.

Is Retrics embedded in Shopify admin, or a separate app?

Retrics runs as a standalone workspace at app.retrics.ai, not embedded inside the Shopify admin. You connect your store once through Shopify's OAuth, then work in the Retrics dashboard. Billing still runs through Shopify (see below), but the day-to-day happens in your own Retrics workspace.

How does Retrics compute churn or return probability?

For a customer with enough repeat history, Retrics learns a personal purchase cadence from their own orders — how often they typically come back. For one who does not have it yet, it falls back to the product’s median gap, or your shop’s. Either way it compares where they are now against that rhythm and against the store-wide natural-return baseline. A customer who is well past their own usual gap, in a store where few customers return unprompted at that point, scores as at-risk.

It is worth being precise about what this is: an observational, correlational estimate, not a causal one. Retrics measures who tends not to come back, given the patterns in your history. It does not claim to know that a given customer will churn, and it does not model the cause of any one person's silence.

What is the “natural-return floor”?

It is the rate at which lapsed customers come back on their own, with no message from you at all. In our own backtests that floor sits at ~2.7% for a typical window — meaning a meaningful slice of “won-back” customers would have returned regardless.

Retrics uses that fixed floor as the baseline for uncontrolled, observational results — audiences too small to hold a control back, which carry no control at all. Where a control is held back, the result is read against that holdout's own observed return rate instead, not against the fixed figure. Either way, a win-back is only worth counting if it beats what would have happened anyway.

What is the second-order window, and what does “3.2× lift” mean?

The second-order window is the period right after a customer's second purchase — the moment a one-time buyer is deciding whether to become a repeat customer. In a 12-month backtest of real Shopify orders, measuring flag precision rather than campaign uplift, customers flagged by the predictive model during this window returned at roughly 3.2× the rate of unflagged customers in the same window.

Read that carefully: 3.2× lift is a lift in the flag's precision — the flagged group is a much richer pool to focus attention on. It is not a promise that a message triples anyone's likelihood of returning. It tells you where to spend your effort, not what a campaign will earn. The uplift a campaign actually produces is a separate question, measured by holdout (below).

Are these predictions guarantees?

No. Risk scores, return probabilities, and revenue estimates are statistical instruments. We show the methodology — including the natural-return floor and holdout measurement — precisely so you can judge the numbers rather than take them on faith. Decisions about your business stay with you.

How does Retrics measure recovered revenue?

With a holdout. When you run an intervention — a win-back or an overdue nudge — Retrics can hold back a randomized slice of the eligible customers and send them nothing. Recovered revenue is the difference between what the messaged group did and what the untouched holdout group did. Only the gap above the holdout counts.

The figure is withheld today. The holdout is still carved and never messaged on every eligible send, so the evidence accumulates — but the treated side is currently derived from the frozen audience rather than from who a message actually reached, which includes anyone suppressed, unreachable or never sent to. That inflates the denominator by an unknown amount, so Retrics reports the ledger without a dollar figure until the comparison is rebuilt from recipient-level send evidence.

That is the honest way to do it. Attributing every subsequent purchase to your message would overstate the effect, because some of those customers would have come back on their own. A holdout nets that out with its own observed return rate rather than a fixed assumption; the fixed floor is only used where an audience is too small to carry a control.

Why can't Retrics just count everyone who came back after a message?

Because that would take credit for customers who were coming back anyway. Some lapsed customers return on their own schedule no matter what you send. Counting them as “recovered” inflates the ledger and makes it impossible to know whether your retention effort is actually working. The holdout is what separates real, incremental revenue from coincidence.

Do the predictive flags themselves need a holdout?

The predictive flags validate on their own — the second-order window result above came from historical backtesting, not from a live intervention. But intervention flags, like overdue and win-back sends, are only trustworthy when measured against a holdout at send time, because that is the only way to net out what would have happened anyway. Retrics is built to keep those two things distinct.

Two facts that are easy to run together, so we keep them apart. The global control is excluded from contact on every send, at every audience size — those customers hear nothing from any campaign, which is what makes every other measurement mean anything. A control you can actually measure against is narrower: the audience has to be big enough to carry one, and its slice of that global control has to have caught somebody. Where it does not, the send is reported observationally rather than pretending to a control arm that is not there. Either way, the recovered figure is withheld until the comparison counts only the customers a message reached.

How do I actually send the messages?

You export the campaign-safe CSV and send it from your existing platform. Sending from Retrics is unavailable in this release: direct email, SMS, WhatsApp, scheduled delivery and the Klaviyo audience handoff are all switched off, and no plan, setting, connection or onboarding step turns them on. The campaign-safe CSV export works on every plan — the frozen audience with your global control already dropped and unsubscribed or bounced addresses excluded.

Four routes are built into the product and unavailable. What each would need:

• Email from Retrics — unavailable in this release. When it is not, it would need a domain you have verified — Retrics hands you the DNS records and checks them — so the reputation being spent would be your own, and every message would carry a one-click unsubscribe. A verified domain would open email only; SMS and WhatsApp do not ride it.
• SMS from Retrics — unavailable in this release. It would ride a carrier connection Retrics runs, with nothing for you to set up. Only customers with a phone number and a subscribed SMS marketing consent in Shopify would be texted; everyone else in the audience would be recorded as skipped.
• WhatsApp from Retrics — unavailable in this release. It would run on your own WhatsApp Business number and its approved template. Same consent floor as SMS.
• The native Klaviyo handoff — unavailable in this release. It would push the approved audience into a new Klaviyo list for you to send from there, and because Retrics would never hear back that you did, such an action is recorded as exported rather than sent. Today the Klaviyo-shaped CSV export is how the audience reaches Klaviyo.

Whichever route you take, you write the message: AI drafting is switched off while Retrics cannot mechanically prove a draft carries no discount, deadline or offer you never authorised.

Which email platforms does Retrics support?

Klaviyo is the one platform Retrics has a native integration for — it would create a named list in your account and import the approved audience into it. That native handoff is unavailable in this release, along with every other sending channel, and there is no connection to make or key to add that changes it. For every platform — Klaviyo included, and Mailchimp, Sendlane, Omnisend, Attentive, or anything that imports a list — the campaign-safe CSV export is the path. It works today on every plan, and the file is already shaped for a Klaviyo import.

Can I edit a message before I approve it?

Yes, always. The message waiting in the queue is your own copy — Retrics never writes it for you. Edit the wording, adjust the segment, or discard the move entirely. Nothing is locked, and Retrics sends nothing: approving authorises the campaign-safe export, which you send from your own platform.

How much does Retrics cost?

Three flat plans — $149, $299, and $1200 per month. The ladder is breadth, not usage: there are no per-customer, per-order, or per-message fees on any tier. The current details are on the pricing page.

Sending from Retrics is unavailable in this release on every plan, so there is no outbound allowance on any of them. Every plan composes the campaign, freezes the audience, withholds the control and exports a campaign-safe CSV; you send it from the platform you already run, under your own relationship with that platform.

Is there a free trial?

Yes — 14 days on every plan, and the full plan is available during it. Connect your store, see your own retention picture, and judge the numbers before you are charged.

How does billing work?

Paid plans are billed through Shopify's billing system, at the price shown on the pricing page when you subscribe. It appears on your regular Shopify invoice — no separate card entry with us.

How do I cancel?

Cancel any time from Shopify. Access continues to the end of the current billing period, and fees are non-refundable except where required by law. There is no cancellation call and no retention gauntlet.

Is my data secure, and where does it live?

Store data is processed and stored using the cloud infrastructure described on our service-provider page, with restricted production access. We honor Shopify's protected-customer-data requirements and its mandatory redaction and erasure webhooks. Full detail is in the privacy policy.

Do you sell my data or my customers' data?

No. We do not sell your data, your customers' data, or any derived audiences — ever. Your store's history is processed only to run the product for you. Only aggregated, non-identifiable statistics are ever used to improve or describe the service.

How do you handle customer emails and PII?

Customer email, name, phone, and coarse location may be stored for merchant-facing profiles and search, approved sends, and exports. An irreversible email hash supports suppression, audience, and cross-channel matching; retention math relates orders through internal customer and order IDs. Raw contact data is sent to a delivery channel only when you approve an action there. Model inputs and outputs from your store are not used to train models for other customers.

Are you GDPR and CCPA compliant?

We honor access, portability, and erasure rights where applicable. A verifiedcustomers/data_request delivery creates a count-only receipt and an encrypted case. An authorized owner/admin can compile the current matching Retrics-held records as a no-store download; Retrics does not automatically deliver it. Customer redaction is automated. The case deadline is 30 days, subject to the applicable legal process. See the privacy policy for the full path.

What happens to my data if I uninstall or delete my workspace?

These are three different actions. Disconnecting inside Retrics stops sync but retains imported history. Uninstalling in Shopify revokes access and leads to Shopify's later shop/redact request, which purges the exact disconnected installation. Requesting deletion of the whole Retrics workspace is a verified manual process with an operational target of completion within 30 days. Verified individual-customer redactions run automatically; access reports do not.

If your question is not here, write to support@retrics.ai. Related reading: the privacy policy, the terms of service, and pricing.