Ecommerce Cohort Economics
Ecommerce Cohort Profit Beyond Day One
Customer profitability changes after the first transaction as repeat orders, cancellations, returns, fulfilment costs, payment fees, post-purchase offers, and subscription behavior accumulate. This interactive readout follows acquisition cohorts through day 1, 30, 90, and 120, then calculates the customer acquisition cost each offer can support. Explore our Retail Profit Recovery Practice for related work.
Cohort Maturity
Customer Value Changes After Acquisition
Each acquisition-month cohort is tracked at day 1, 30, 90, and 120. Net revenue per acquired customer includes purchases and recorded cancellations. Select one cohort or compare several to see how maturity changes the picture.
Younger cohorts have fewer days of exposure to repeat purchasing and should not be read against mature cohorts as if both had the same opportunity to compound.
First-Order Economics
The First Order Shapes 120-Day Value
Four observed first-order structures are compared from day 1 to day 120. This is the public-evidence equivalent of comparing a single-item offer against a multi-unit bundle and a mixed-product basket — not a claim about any specific promotion.
Net revenue per customer, day 1 versus day 120, across four first-order structures.
Contribution Economics
Each Offer Supports a Different CAC Ceiling
Day-120 net revenue from the offer comparison above becomes the starting point. Enter the cost inputs below to see customer profit at each stage, the maximum CAC an offer can break even on, and profit remaining after acquisition cost.
Cohort and offer figures are calculated from the UCI Online Retail II dataset, containing 1,067,371 transactions from a UK-based non-store retailer across two years, including customer identifiers, invoice timing, quantities, prices, cancellations, products, and customer countries.
The dataset's age means these figures demonstrate analytical depth rather than current ecommerce benchmarks. All cohort and offer-structure figures describe observed behavior within the source retailer, not a general market rate.
The public source contains no product cost, fulfilment expense, payment fees, shipping subsidy, marketing spend, or acquisition channel, so exact customer profit cannot be extracted from it directly. Those variables are transparent adjustable inputs in the CAC-capacity calculator above rather than invented figures.
Maximum break-even CAC is the day-120 customer profit before acquisition cost is deducted. CAC-to-profit ratio and profit after acquisition cost are calculated against the target acquisition cost entered above.
