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Automatically Generated — This event is created by Upstack backend services for Shopify customers. You do not need to fire this event manually.

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Overview

The nc_purchase (New Customer Purchase) event is generated when Upstack detects a purchase from a first-time customer. This event fires alongside the standard purchase event, enabling you to segment and optimize campaigns specifically for customer acquisition.

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How It Works

When a purchase occurs, Upstack’s backend analyzes the customer’s order history:
  1. Order received — Shopify sends a purchase webhook to Upstack
  2. Customer lookup — Upstack checks if this customer ID has any previous orders
  3. Classification — If this is the customer’s first order, an nc_purchase event is generated
  4. Forwarding — The event is sent to your configured destinations with proper attribution
The classification happens server-side using Shopify’s customer order history, ensuring accurate new customer detection even when cookies are blocked or the customer uses a different device.

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Properties

This event includes all properties from the original purchase event: No additional properties are added — the event is the purchase event with a different event name for segmentation.

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Destination Mapping

This event is forwarded to destinations as:

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Use Cases

  • Optimize for acquisition — Set up Meta campaigns optimizing specifically for new customer purchases rather than all purchases
  • Measure true CAC — Calculate cost per new customer acquisition more accurately
  • Exclude retargeting — Create audiences that exclude returning customers
  • A/B test acquisition strategies — Compare campaign performance on new customers only

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Why This Matters

Many brands find that optimizing for all purchases leads to over-indexing on returning customers who would have purchased anyway. By sending nc_purchase events to ad platforms, you can:
  • Train algorithms to find net-new customers
  • Reduce wasted spend on existing customers
  • Get clearer signals on acquisition campaign performance