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New Customer Opex is the operating expense Upstack subtracts when it calculates New Customer CM4. Only the per-order part is specific to first orders. Overhead such as payroll and rent is shared with returning customers by net revenue.

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Formula

NC Opex = Opex order fees on new customer orders + new customer share of Opex Recurring expenses (prorated) and Opex Variable costs (% of ad spend)

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Formula Components

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How It Works

Order fees belong to orders, so they can be segmented. Upstack counts an Opex order fee here when the order is a new customer order, meaning the earliest non-cancelled order it has for that Shopify customer. Recurring expenses and Variable costs don’t belong to any order. Opex gets their full amount. NC Opex gets a share in proportion to new customers’ net revenue for the same date (and the same breakdown values, if you split the report by a dimension), and RC Opex gets the rest. See how the split works. A Variable cost can be limited to Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or TikTok Ads spend. That filter changes how much is added. The result is then split the same way.

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Example

A 30-day month. The store has 1,300 first orders and 3,100 returning orders. New customers brought in $91,000 of the store’s $260,000 net revenue, a 35% share. Only $1,040 of NC Opex is tied to first orders directly. The other $5,512.50 is the 35% new customer share of shared Opex. It moves with the revenue mix, not with how many first orders you get.

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How to Interpret It

Divide the order-fee part by new customer orders to get overhead that truly scales with acquisition: here $0.80 per first order. The shared part is a revenue-based slice of total Opex, so it says more about your revenue mix than about acquisition. If NC Opex jumps month over month, check whether a recurring expense started, an effective date range began, ad spend rose (which raises any % of ad spend Opex), or new customers’ share of net revenue went up.

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Common Pitfalls

  • Expecting overhead in full. NC Opex carries only the new customer share of recurring and variable Opex. NC Opex + RC Opex adds up to Opex.
  • NC CM4 % and NC CM4 per Order only subtract the order-fee part of NC Opex.
  • Nothing configured. NC Opex is zero until you add Opex costs in Cost settings.

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FAQ

Upstack already splits recurring and variable Opex by net revenue. If you’d rather split by order count, take total Opex times your New Customer %, which is new customer orders as a share of all orders, or build a custom measure.
If it scales with orders, a Per Order fee in the Opex category keeps it tied to the orders that cause it, and it shows up correctly in NC Opex. A flat monthly contract fits better as a Recurring expense.
See all Contribution Margin metrics →