An active customer is someone who continues to make purchases: their most recent purchase was made within a recent time frame. That time frame depends on your industry. At a supermarket, it might be one month; at a furniture store, it might be a year or more.

Active customers are the heart of your customer base. They are the people with whom you have an ongoing relationship and to whom you can sell today.

Why does it matter?

Counting active customers tells you whether your customer base is growing or shrinking—something that sales figures alone may not reveal. You might sell more in a given month thanks to a promotion, yet at the same time be quietly losing customers.

Tracking this metric month by month helps you detect early on when customers start to drift away and take action before they become inactive.

How is it calculated?

Formula: Active customers = number of unique customers with at least one purchase during the selected time period.

For example, if 4,000 different people have made at least one purchase in the last 12 months, you have 4,000 active customers, even if they have placed a total of 9,000 orders.

Story mode

An online sports store ends the year with strong sales. But when looking at active customers, it sees that the number has dropped: many customers who used to shop every season didn’t return. Sales held steady because a few customers bought a lot. With that data, the team puts together a campaign for customers who were about to fall out of the active customer window.

How to Use It with Data4Sales

• Life cycle updated daily: See how many customers are in the "First Purchase," "Repeat," "Frequent," "At Risk," or "Inactive" categories.
• Risk Alerts: The churn probability shows you which active customers are most likely to stop buying.
• Automated Actions: Repurchase and reactivation workflows that are triggered when a customer approaches the end of their window.
• Quick Questions: With Orbis Copilot, you can check, for example, how many active customers you have per channel.

Related terms

• Inactive customer
• Retention Rate
• Customer at risk
• Customer life cycle