Skip to main content
New Customer Agency Fees is the agency cost Upstack charges against first-time orders when it calculates New Customer CM4. It includes a share of every recurring agency retainer, based on how much of your net revenue came from new customers.

​
Formula

NC Agency Fees = Agency Fees order fees on new customer orders + new customer share of Recurring expenses with category Agency Fees (prorated to the date range)

​
Formula Components

​
How It Works

The two parts are segmented differently:
  • Order fees follow the order. Upstack marks an order as a new customer order when it is the earliest non-cancelled order it has for that Shopify customer. Agency order fees on those orders count here; fees on later orders count in RC Agency Fees. Orders with no customer attached count in neither.
  • Recurring expenses are split by net revenue. A retainer has no order to belong to, so Upstack gives each segment a share in proportion to its net revenue for the same date (and the same breakdown values, if you split the report by a dimension). See how the split works.
The retainer is split, not copied, so NC Agency Fees + RC Agency Fees adds up to Agency Fees, apart from fees on orders with no customer.

​
Example

A brand pays an affiliate agency 4% of net sales (an order fee, % of Net Sales, category Agency Fees) and a $4,500 Monthly retainer to its paid social agency. You view a 30-day month. New customers brought in 40% of net revenue ($88,000 ÷ $220,000), so they carry 40% of the retainer. The segment columns add up to the $13,300 total.

​
How to Interpret It

Read NC Agency Fees as the agency cost first orders carry when the retainer follows revenue. The split doesn’t know what the agency actually works on. If the agency only does prospecting, you may want to charge the whole retainer to acquisition. With 1,100 new customer orders, that’s ($3,520 + $4,500) ÷ 1,100, about $7.29 per first order, against $4.84 with the revenue split ($5,320 ÷ 1,100). Add your preferred figure to CAC for a fuller cost to acquire. A jump in NC Agency Fees with a flat retainer means more first-order revenue, either flowing through percentage-based fees or pulling a bigger share of the retainer. Usually that’s good news.

​
Common Pitfalls

  • Expecting the whole retainer here. NC Agency Fees carries only the new customer share. The rest is in RC Agency Fees.
  • Percent-of-ad-spend agency fees aren’t here. Variable costs only take the Marketing or Opex category.
  • NC CM4 % and NC CM4 per Order include the order-fee part only, not the retainer.

​
FAQ

Not with a recurring expense. Upstack always splits it by net revenue. To charge agency cost only to first orders, enter it as an order fee (for example Per Order) with the Agency Fees category. Order fees can be filtered by order tags, source, or product, but not by customer type.
The retainer share follows net revenue. In a week where new customers bring in a bigger share of revenue, more of the retainer moves to NC Agency Fees, even though the contract is the same.
See all Contribution Margin metrics →