Customer acquisition keeps getting more expensive, and fashion brands have responded the way you would expect: they have gone where the customers already are. Nordstrom, Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Target have all opened curated marketplaces to Shopify brands in the last four years, and Target Plus alone had reached roughly $1 billion in GMV by early 2025.
The catch is that every one of those orders arrives without an email address. Your loyalty program never sees it. Your flows never fire. And when that customer buys from you again, there is a good chance you will never know.
This post is about that blind spot: how big it is, what it costs a retention program, and what fashion brands are doing about it.
How much of a fashion brand's repeat business is happening off-platform?
Start with the owned-store baseline. Bluecore's benchmark of 100+ enterprise retailers put apparel's repeat purchase rate at 20.2% in 2023, and smaller DTC datasets land between 10% and 17%. Call it 15-25% for a healthy Shopify fashion brand, with loyalty members well above that: Smile's own data shows program participants repeat at a rate 56% higher than non-members.
Now the marketplace side. Until recently there was no published number at all, because marketplaces do not share customer identifiers with sellers. Osello, which processes marketplace orders for Shopify fashion brands, analyzed 211,523 marketplace orders from 7 brands over 24 months and found that 12% of marketplace customers reordered from the same brand within 12 months. Measured within any single marketplace, the rate falls to just 3-6% (Nordstrom 6%, Bloomingdale's 5%, Macy's 4%, Target Plus 3%). Because marketplaces provide no email address, Osello matched repeat buyers by shipping name and phone number and excluded same-day duplicate orders, so treat those figures as floors. Even generously read, marketplace repeat runs at roughly half the owned-store baseline or less.
Read that gap carefully. It does not mean marketplace customers are disloyal. It means the loyalty is being captured by someone else.
Why does the marketplace keep the relationship?
Because the rules say so, and because the incentives line up.
Nordstrom's marketplace terms give sellers a customer's name and shipping address for fulfillment purposes only, nothing else. Macy's has been just as direct about who owns the relationship when a brand sells through its marketplace. Amazon's seller policies go further still, restricting sellers from directing marketplace customers to another website.
Meanwhile, the marketplace order does earn points: in Nordy Club, Star Rewards or Target Circle. Nordy Club members now drive nearly 70% of Nordstrom's sales. So a shopper who loves your jacket has every reason to buy the matching trousers on Nordstrom again, and no mechanism that nudges them to your store.
For a retention team, that is the equivalent of running a loyalty program with a hole in the bottom.
How many fashion brands even have a loyalty program?
Fewer than you would guess. In August 2026, Osello scanned the storefronts of 790 fashion, footwear, jewelry and accessories brands for the technical fingerprints of a loyalty program: platform scripts, rewards pages, on-page widgets. Of the 677 sites that loaded with usable data:
Roughly 3 in 4 fashion brands have no visible loyalty program on their own storefront. Among the brands that do run one, the most common platform in the cohort was Smile, and the dominant mechanic was a points program, usually paired with a refer-a-friend component, with VIP tiers as the most common additional layer. (The scan detects storefront-visible programs only, so the true share is somewhat higher, but not dramatically so.)
Hold those two findings together. Fashion brands are paying around $66 to acquire a customer, watching marketplaces absorb the repeat behavior those customers generate, and three-quarters of them have built no mechanism at all to capture loyalty on the one channel they fully control.
What does the blind spot actually cost?
Three things, in rough order of how often brands notice them.
Misattributed retention. If 30% of your units ship via marketplaces and none of those buyers can be identified, your repeat purchase rate, purchase frequency and CLV are all computed on a partial customer base. Smile's retention metrics guide is the right formula; the problem is the denominator.
Mispriced acquisition. Smile's data puts fashion CAC at around $66. Brands often justify marketplace fees of 15-25% by assuming the customer behaves like a DTC customer afterward. At a 3-6% on-channel repeat rate, the marketplace order has to pay for itself on first-order margin.
Missed second orders. Smile's data shows a customer has a 27% chance of buying again after a first purchase, and 49% after a second. The second order is the hinge. On marketplace orders, the brand has almost no tools to influence it. Osello's data shows why the second order is worth fighting for: first-time marketplace buyers returned 51% of what they bought, while repeat buyers returned just 16%.
What can fashion brands do about it?
You cannot email a Nordstrom customer. You can still build a retention strategy around marketplace orders. The brands doing this well focus on four moves.
Make the brand search inevitable. A marketplace buyer who Googles your name a month later is a DTC customer with zero acquisition cost. Consistent brand naming across listings, packaging that names the brand (within each marketplace's insert rules), and a site that ranks for your own name are the whole game. Haus's analysis of hundreds of incrementality experiments found that for omnichannel brands, roughly a third of paid media's impact shows up on non-DTC channels like Amazon and retail rather than the DTC site being measured; the halo runs in both directions. And it works: in Osello's data, of customers who shopped a brand on both a marketplace and its own Shopify store, 91% placed their first order on the marketplace. The migration runs marketplace to DTC.
Give marketplace customers a reason to identify themselves. Warranty registration, fit guides, care instructions and style-matching tools are legitimate reasons for a marketplace buyer to land on your site and hand over an email. Once they do, they are eligible for points: points for creating an account are the obvious first reward, and the relationship is yours.
Reward the crossover explicitly. Several fashion brands now treat "bought us at Macy's, now joining our program" as a VIP-tier accelerator or a welcome-points bonus. The logic is simple: that customer has already paid full price once and cleared the fit hurdle. They are the highest-intent new member you will get this quarter.
Protect the repeat you already have. Marketplace repeat orders cluster in core styles and replenishables: in Osello's data, replenishables and basics repeated at 11% versus 4% for fashion and occasion pieces, and only 22% of repeat orders were for the same SKU. Repeat customers come back for something different, which makes assortment breadth and listing completeness retention work. A suppressed listing, a size run out of sync, or a stale price on core SKUs is a lost second order you will never see in a churn report.
Measuring it: a 30-minute exercise
Even without customer IDs you can estimate your own marketplace repeat rate. Export 12 months of marketplace orders, normalize shipping name plus phone number, and count how many customers appear twice, excluding same-day duplicates. Run the same thing against your Shopify export. The full method, and the benchmark to compare against, is in Osello's Marketplace Fashion Brand Loyalty Report. Then layer Smile's loyalty analytics on top to see how members compare.
Questions for your team this quarter
- What share of our orders now ship through marketplaces, and are those customers counted anywhere in our retention metrics? If they aren't, every repeat purchase rate and CLV figure in your dashboard is measuring a shrinking slice of the business.
- What is our on-channel repeat purchase rate on marketplace orders, measured rather than assumed? If no one can answer, the 30-minute exercise above is the place to start: the benchmark is 12% brand-level, 3-6% per marketplace.
- Do we have a loyalty program at all? Three-quarters of fashion brands don't, which also means a working program is still a differentiator, not table stakes.
- Are we pricing marketplace acquisition on first-order margin, or on a DTC-style lifetime value the channel may never deliver?
- What is the one concrete reason a marketplace buyer would visit our site and create an account? If the answer is "a 10% off banner," there is room to do better.
- Which core SKUs carry most of our repeat revenue, and are their marketplace listings live, in stock and priced correctly today? That is the cheapest retention check your team will run this quarter.
The customers you can't see are still your customers
The rise of curated fashion marketplaces is good news for Shopify brands: it is the cheapest distribution most of them will ever get. But the retention math changes the moment the order leaves your platform. Know the number, price the channel honestly, and build the bridge that lets marketplace buyers become loyalty members. The brands that do will be the ones whose repeat purchase rate actually means what they think it means.
Jay El-Kaake is the cofounder of Osello, which helps Shopify fashion brands list and maintain their catalogs on Nordstrom, Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Target Plus.
Ready to see how many of your marketplace orders are actually repeat customers? Talk to our team about how Smile helps mid-market and enterprise fashion brands turn marketplace buyers into loyalty members.
