Canonical formula calculator
E-COMMERCE BUSINESSES — CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST
What it actually costs you to acquire one new customer, marketing and sales combined. For e-commerce businesses, the picture has its own shape — see the industry context below.
Total marketing spend over the period (ads, content, tools, agencies).
Salaries, commissions, tools, demos, anything sales-related. Enter 0 if you have no separate sales spend.
How many net-new paying customers you added in the same period.
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Add context for case suggestions
Optional — helps us match this calculation against relevant case studies (coming soon).
What this tells you
E-commerce CAC includes all paid media plus the share of organic content investment attributable to acquisition. Median DTC CAC sits between 30-45% of first-order AOV depending on category, with healthier brands paying back CAC inside 3 orders. Repeat purchase rate matters more for e-commerce than for SaaS because lifetime spend is the constraint on what CAC you can afford. CAC is what it costs you, in real dollars, to add one new customer to your business — counting both marketing spend and sales spend. It is one of the few numbers that separates businesses that grow profitably from businesses that grow themselves into the ground.
When to use it
Industry benchmark — Healthy DTC CAC vs. first-order AOV: < 40%. Calculate CAC monthly or per campaign. Watch the trend. Compare it to your gross margin per customer — if CAC is climbing faster than what each customer is worth, growth is destroying value, not creating it.
What it doesn’t tell you
CAC alone is meaningless without context. A $200 CAC is great if customers stay for years and spend thousands; it is a death sentence if customers leave after one purchase. Always look at CAC alongside customer lifetime value and payback period.
Coming soon
Cases, plays, and benchmarks for this metric will appear here as the Moonshot knowledge libraries grow. For now: log in to track your number over time and Moonshot will surface trend warnings when the substrate fills in.