Enter spend and new customers by channel to see your blended CAC, paid-only CAC, per-channel CAC, and LTV:CAC ratio — instant results with marketplace ad presets.
Quick presets — click to load:
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Blended CAC (total spend ÷ total customers)
Your LTV:CAC ratio is the single best read on whether acquisition is sustainable. The 3:1 benchmark is the classic target.
| LTV:CAC Ratio | Verdict | What It Means & What to Do |
|---|---|---|
| Below 1:1 | Losing money | Each customer costs more than they are ever worth. Pause the worst channels and fix unit economics before spending more. |
| 1:1 – 3:1 | Thin / underwater | You recover acquisition cost but leave little to fund margin, ops, and growth. Lower CAC or lift LTV before scaling. |
| 3:1 | Healthy (the benchmark) | The widely cited target for sustainable ecommerce and SaaS. Customer is worth roughly 3× what you paid to acquire them. |
| 4:1 – 5:1 | Strong | Solid unit economics with room to scale spend. Test increasing budget on your best-performing channels. |
| Above 5:1 | Possibly under-investing | Great efficiency, but you may be leaving growth on the table. Consider spending more aggressively to capture market share. |
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost of winning a new customer — all the sales and marketing money you spent in a period, divided by the number of new customers that money brought in. It is the single most important number in growth: if you do not know what a customer costs to acquire, you cannot know whether your ads, your content, or your marketplace promotions are actually building a business or quietly burning cash. CAC sits at the centre of every paid acquisition decision on Meta, Google, TikTok Ads, Shopee Ads, and Lazada Sponsored Solutions, and it only becomes a profitability signal when you read it against your customer lifetime value (LTV).
The CAC formula is: CAC = Total Sales & Marketing Spend ÷ New Customers Acquired. For example, if you spent S$8,800 across all channels in a month and acquired 272 new customers, your blended CAC is S$8,800 ÷ 272 = S$32.35. The period you choose matters — most teams measure CAC monthly or quarterly, and you should always match the spend window to the customers that spend actually generated (a sale today may have come from ad spend two weeks ago). Include the real cost of acquisition: ad spend, agency or freelancer fees, marketing tools, and the loaded cost of the people running campaigns. The calculator above does the maths for you across every channel at once.
One CAC number hides more than it reveals, which is why the calculator reports three views. Blended CAC divides all acquisition cost (including organic and SEO investment) by all new customers — it is the honest, fully-loaded number you should report to a board or investor. Paid CAC strips out organic and SEO so you see what your advertising alone costs per customer — this is the number you use to judge whether to scale a paid channel. Per-channel CAC shows the cost per customer on each platform individually, and this is where the real decisions live: a Shopee Ads CAC of S$28 against a TikTok Ads CAC of S$45 tells you exactly where the next marketing dollar should go. Blended CAC almost always looks better than paid CAC because free organic customers drag the average down — confusing the two is one of the most common ways ecommerce teams over-estimate how efficient their paid spend really is.
Actionable Insight: Report blended CAC to leadership, but make budget decisions on per-channel paid CAC. The gap between your blended and paid CAC is a quick measure of how much of your growth is genuinely organic versus bought.
CAC means nothing in isolation — a S$50 CAC is excellent for a customer worth S$400 and ruinous for a customer worth S$40. The metric that matters is the LTV:CAC ratio, and the widely cited benchmark is 3:1: a customer should be worth roughly three times what you paid to acquire them. Below 3:1 you are likely too thin to fund margin and growth; above 5:1 you may be under-investing and leaving market share on the table. A related number is your maximum sustainable CAC — at the 3:1 rule, that is simply LTV ÷ 3, the ceiling you can pay per customer and still build a healthy business. Use our customer lifetime value calculator to model LTV properly (AOV × purchase frequency × lifespan × gross margin) and to see the CAC payback period — how many months it takes a new customer to repay what they cost.
There are three honest levers on CAC: spend less to get the same customers, get more customers from the same spend, or raise LTV so a higher CAC still works. Cut waste on weak channels — your per-channel CAC instantly shows which platform is overpaying; reallocate budget from the worst performer to the best. Improve conversion rate — every percentage point of extra conversion on the same traffic lowers CAC directly, so landing pages, product pages, and checkout flow are CAC levers, not just UX. Lean on organic and retention — content, SEO, email, and repeat purchases bring customers in at a fraction of paid CAC and pull your blended number down. Raise AOV and repeat rate — bundles, upsells, and post-purchase flows lift LTV, which raises the CAC you can profitably afford. Pair this with our ROAS calculator to keep your ad efficiency and your acquisition cost honest at the same time, and our profit margin calculator to confirm the margin that funds it all.
For sellers running Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Amazon, Temu and more side by side, CAC gets genuinely hard to measure, because a TikTok ad often drives a Shopee purchase days later, and a Google search can end in a Lazada checkout. Single-platform CAC systematically mis-credits your top-of-funnel channels and over-credits whichever marketplace closed the sale. The fix is to track new-customer counts and spend at the channel level, report both blended and paid CAC, and always read them against a properly modelled LTV. This is far easier when your orders, customers, and SKU-level margins from every channel sit in one place: OneCart connects Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Amazon and the rest so the customer and order data behind your CAC is unified rather than scattered across a dozen seller centres. Before you scale spend, confirm the unit economics underneath it with our break-even calculator so every new customer you buy is one you can afford.