Lifetime value (LTV) — how much a customer spends with a brand over repeat purchases — has a larger impact on an Amazon seller's margins than nearly any other lever, including supplier cost negotiation, packaging optimization, or shipping cost negotiation combined. Moving a customer's average purchase frequency from once to twice per year outweighs the margin gains from those operational levers.
Amazon does not surface LTV or repeat-purchase data anywhere obvious in Seller Central; it must be found inside Brand Analytics and back-calculated. See LACoS (Lifetime ACOS) and Lifetime TACOS for the back-calculation method and Customer Loyalty Analytics (Brand Analytics Dashboard) for the source data.
Amazon's standard seller-facing metrics (ACOS, TACOS) treat every sale as a one-off, ignoring whether the buyer returns. Sellers who never back-calculate LTV are optimizing against an incomplete picture of their own economics.