The fastest unit-economics health check in eCommerce. Enter your numbers, see if your customers are worth more than they cost — and how long it takes to get your money back.
Average order value, before discounts.
After COGS, packaging, shipping. Pre-ads.
Average orders per customer.
Average gap between purchases.
Total ad spend / new customers.
Above 3:1 is the rule of thumb for sustainable growth.
Gross profit per customer over lifetime.
Months until a new customer breaks even.
Below 3:1 is the danger zone. You're recovering CAC but barely funding growth. Most stores in this band have a hidden margin leak — check returns, shipping, or a spike in CAC.
LTV / CAC is the ratio between how much gross profit a customer brings you over their lifetime (LTV) and what you paid to acquire them (CAC). Above 1:1 you're profitable on each customer; above 3:1 you have room to grow; below 3:1 you're either burning cash or running an unsustainable promo treadmill.
LTV = AOV × gross margin × lifetime orders. CAC = total acquisition spend / new customers. Easy on paper. The trap: most founders use revenue, not gross profit, to compute LTV. That inflates the ratio by 2-3x and makes everything look healthier than it is. Your LTV is what's left *after* COGS, packaging, shipping, fees — pre-ads. Anything else is fiction.
A 5:1 ratio over 5 years is meaningless if you don't have the cash to wait 5 years. Payback period — months until a new customer's gross profit covers their CAC — is what dictates how fast you can scale. Healthy DTC brands target <12 months payback, ideally <6 for ad-funded growth. Beyond 18, you need outside capital or an unusually patient cap table.
Raise AOV (bundles, free shipping thresholds, upsells), increase lifetime orders (post-purchase flows, subscription, replenishment reminders), or reduce CAC (better creative, lower-cost channels, organic). Cutting prices to lift conversion almost always makes the ratio worse — you're trading margin for marginal volume.
After every major channel change, every quarter, and after any promo cycle. Black Friday traffic distorts CAC and LTV in opposite directions for months — re-baseline once cohorts mature.
Profit Tracker computes LTV, CAC, ratio, and payback per cohort, per channel, in real time — connected to your Shopify store and ad accounts.