Put a link in the reminder email that opens a cart that's already filled, and add a "Buy again" button on every past order. On Shopify, that button probably already exists, in a customer account area few people visit. The link is the part you still have to build, and it's the one your customers actually see.
The benchmark
Open your latest reminder email on your phone, logged out of your store, and count the screens to checkout. Then measure the share of your repeat orders that contain exactly the same items as the previous one: the higher it is, the more the shortcut pays off.
Don't assume it's high. At a fragrance house we audited, each customer placed 1.3 orders on average, and three of the five products appearing most often in orders were free discovery sizes.
For that brand, a useful reorder link would offer the full-size bottle rather than the sample the customer already received.
The rule
Going through the whole journey again to rebuy a product people already know is a chore, and your most loyal customers are the ones who suffer it.
Aim for three screens at most between the reminder and the confirmation: open, check the cart, pay. The prefilled cart stays editable, because people rarely rebuy everything identically, and a quantity or a shade often changes from one order to the next.
The steps
- The customer account button. With Shopify's new customer accounts, a "Buy again" button appears on the orders page and on the order status page. You can turn it on or off from the checkout and accounts editor, under Settings > Checkout. Check that it's active before you commission a custom one.
- The email link. Shopify builds a cart from a simple URL: add variant IDs and quantities after `/cart/`. By default, this link goes straight to checkout, skipping the cart. The `storefront=true` parameter makes it land on the cart, where people can still change a quantity. Your email tool must be able to insert the variants from the latest order.
- The reminder timed to how long the product lasts. Start from the actual gap between two orders of the same product, as observed in your data, rather than your tool's default setting.
- Discontinued items and trial sizes. When a product has left the catalog, the link offers its replacement instead of an error page. After a discovery size, it promotes the full size.
- Express checkout. Wallets like Shop Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay spare people who have already bought from you from re-entering a card.
Copy this, then adapt it with your own variant IDs:
https://votre-boutique.myshopify.com/cart/12345678901:1,12345678902:2?storefront=trueRun the test tonight with your own latest order, then report the result to your leadership with a sentence like this:
"To rebuy a familiar product, our best audience now goes through X screens. A link in the reminder email brings it down to three."
The pitfall
The pitfall is a reorder link that lands on a login page. The person clicked to save time, and you're asking for a password they forgot long ago.
A cart link works without an account. If you do want to identify the person, Shopify's new customer accounts replace the password with a six-digit code sent by email, which is tolerable.
Also think about what this action replaces.
For a product rebought every month, we think it's often better than a subscription: it commits the customer to nothing, and that's what someone hesitating to subscribe is looking for.
