Customer acquisition cost calculator
See what you're actually paying to acquire a customer, whether that cost is recovered on the first order, and how many purchases it takes to break even on your acquisition spend.
Enter your total marketing spend for a period, the new customers it produced, your average order value, and your gross margin. The calculator works out your CAC and shows the full first-order economics against it.
CAC calculator inputs and results
How this calculator works
CAC is total acquisition spend divided by the number of new customers it produced. Gross profit per order is average order value multiplied by gross margin — the amount each order actually contributes after the variable cost of fulfilling it. The difference between the two is your first-order economics: positive means you're profitable from the very first purchase; negative means you're relying on repeat purchases to make the channel viable.
Orders to recover CAC is CAC divided by gross profit per order, rounded up to the nearest whole order. For replenishment categories — consumables, subscriptions, pet food — a payback of two or three orders is usually fine if repeat purchase rates are high. For low-frequency or one-time purchase categories, a CAC that requires multiple orders to recover is a warning sign worth taking seriously.
About this tool
This tool calculates customer acquisition cost (CAC) for ecommerce businesses and models the first-order economics against it. Inputs: total ad spend, other marketing costs for the period, new customers acquired, average order value, and gross margin. Outputs: CAC, gross profit on first order, first-order profit or loss, and the number of repeat purchases needed to fully recover acquisition spend. Useful for evaluating whether a marketing channel or campaign is economically viable.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as "other marketing costs"?
Any spend that exists specifically to acquire customers — agency or freelancer fees, content production, influencer fees, PR, affiliate commissions, and marketing tool subscriptions directly tied to acquisition campaigns. Running costs like your email platform or loyalty software that mostly serve existing customers belong in overhead, not CAC. The goal is to capture the total cost of turning a stranger into a first-time buyer.
Should I include the salaries of my marketing team?
It depends on whether you want a fully-loaded CAC or a media-spend CAC. Fully-loaded CAC includes the cost of the people doing the work — salaries, contractors, benefits — and gives the truest picture of what acquisition actually costs. Media-spend CAC covers only out-of-pocket channel costs and is useful for comparing individual channel efficiency. Both are valid; just be consistent so you can compare apples to apples over time.
What does "orders to recover CAC" mean for ecommerce?
Unlike SaaS businesses where a customer pays monthly, most ecommerce customers buy intermittently. The orders-to-recover metric tells you how many times that customer needs to purchase before the cumulative gross profit from their orders covers what you paid to acquire them. It's the ecommerce equivalent of CAC payback period, expressed in purchases rather than months since repeat purchase frequency varies so much by category.
What if my first-order economics are negative?
It means you lose money on a new customer's first order even before accounting for acquisition cost — your gross margin doesn't cover CAC, let alone profit. This is only sustainable if repeat purchase rates are high enough to recover the deficit over time. Marketplaces and DTC brands with strong subscription or replenishment models can operate this way intentionally; for one-time purchase categories it usually signals either a CAC or margin problem.