The “active” customer metric is commonly used by ASX consumer or BNPL companies in their financial reports to show how well they are doing.

Here’s what that actually means.

 

What constitutes an active customer?

The word “active” may have you believe to qualify you’d have to be using ecommerce platforms and BNPL monthly or weekly. In reality, the criteria is very loose.

“An Active Customer is anyone that made a purchase within the last 12 months,” MyDeal (ASX:MYD) founder and CEO Sean Senvirtne told Stockhead.

Nevertheless, it’s not as if all of them buy one thing and don’t come back.

Yesterday MyDeal released half yearly results which showed orders from repeat customers grew 52.7 per cent compared to the prior corresponding period.

Its total active customers grew over 205 per cent in 12 months to 813,764 and Senvirtne thinks customers will keep coming.

“The online household goods market is about $6 billion but the broader market is $55 billion per annum so I think it’s very, very early days for this particular sector especially online,” he said speaking with Stockhead.

“The technology is getting better, there’s a whole bunch of new customers learning to shop online and I think they’re seeing the benefits of online shopping.”

Other ecommerce stocks may place more emphasis on merchants such as Redbubble (ASX:RBL) which in H1 of FY21 saw 572,000 artists make sales across its marketplaces.

But not all companies use the word “Active” and even then, each may have different criteria. MyDeal, for example, defines “Active Seller” as any merchant which made a sale in 90 days.

 

What about for BNPL companies?

BNPL companies, or regulatory bodies scrutinising them, use the term “active customers” too and sometimes allude to active accounts.

ASIC’s reports into the BNPL sector have the same threshold – as an account where at least one transaction has occurred during the financial year.

Zip Co (ASX:Z1P) claimed to have 5.7 million active customers as at 31 December 2020 whereas Afterpay (ASX:APT) had 11 million as at 31 October 2020.

Looking to the other BNPL stocks available in Australia, Humm (ASX:HUM) claimed to have 2.6 million customers, Openpay (ASX:OPY) has approximately 460,000, Laybuy (ASX:LBY) 687,000 and Payright (ASX:PYR) 42,300.