Not sure if it’s just me, but CAC has been going up pretty aggressively lately.
I’m still getting customers through ads, but margins are getting tighter every month.
Curious how others are dealing with this right now, are you still pushing ads, trying to shift into organic, or leaning more on repeat customers now?
What’s actually working for you?
I know an app that takes all the work out of it!
You are not alone, rising ad costs are the biggest hurdle for the most merchant right now.
Since ads are still bringing in customers but margins are tight, the focus usually needs to shift from ‘more traffic’ to 'better efficiency.
Many are doubling down on Average Order Value think custom bundle or post purchase upsells to make each ad-click valuable.
Improving your store’s loading speed and mobile UX can also help lower CAC by preventing ‘bounce’ loss from the traffic you’ve already paid for.
Yeah, this has been a real problem for me too — what’s actually moved the needle is shifting spend away from cold paid traffic and leaning hard into email/SMS flows. Post-purchase sequences that drive repeat orders and referrals basically amortize that initial acquisition cost across multiple purchases.
The other thing that helped was focusing on AOV. Bundles, upsells on the cart page, free shipping thresholds — if you can push AOV up even 20%, suddenly that same CAC looks a lot more survivable.
got it, makes sense, thanks for sharing
out of curiosity, what’s your repeat purchase rate from those flows? If you don’t mind sharing a rough number
which one are you referring to?
yeah that makes sense, AOV and UX improvements definitely help
curious though, are you speaking more from working with stores, or running one yourself?
I’ve been digging into retention more lately, and some of the data around even small increases in repeat purchases having a big impact on profit kind of changed how I’m looking at this