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Returning Customer Total Cost is every cost Upstack charges against repeat orders, from product cost to overhead. Upstack doesn’t ship it as a single measure, but you can build it from the returning customer cost measures it does have.

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Formula

RC Total Cost = RC COGS + RC Other COGS + RC Shipping + RC Handling + RC Other Fulfillment + RC Gateway + RC Other Transaction + RC Marketing Cost + RC Agency Fees + RC Opex + RC Total Other Cost

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Formula Components

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How It Works

The components split into two kinds:
  • Order-level costs (COGS through Other Transaction, and the order-fee part of the last four) are stored on each order. They count here when the order is a returning order: any order from a Shopify customer after their earliest non-cancelled one.
  • Shared costs (Recurring expenses and Variable costs) have no order. Upstack splits them between the RC Marketing, Agency Fees, Opex, and Total Other measures and the new customer versions, in proportion to each segment’s net revenue. See how the split works.
Ad spend is not in any of these components. Add it yourself if you want the full cost stack.

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Build it as a custom measure

In a custom dashboard, open Custom Measures, set the format to Currency and the period total to Sum, then enter:
The returning customer share of recurring and variable costs is added to the last four operands automatically. See Custom Measures for the builder.

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RC Total Cost as a percentage of net revenue

For RC Total Cost %, wrap the same sum in parentheses, divide by orders.returning_customer_net_revenue and multiply by 100. Set the format to Percentage and the period total to Average, so Upstack divides period totals instead of averaging daily ratios. In the example below, that’s 50.09% ($72,632.50 ÷ $145,000).

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Example

A 30-day month for a store with $400,000 of net revenue, $145,000 of it from returning customers. That’s a 36.25% share, so returning customers carry 36.25% of the store’s $17,000 of shared costs: RC CM4 subtracts all of the store’s ad spend, not a share. Add the $120,000 of ad spend and the full stack is $192,632.50, which is exactly RC net revenue minus RC CM4 (−$47,632.50). RC CM4 is negative here only because it carries every ad dollar, including prospecting spend.

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How to Interpret It

Look at the order-level column on its own. That’s what serving repeat customers actually costs, and it should scale with RC net revenue. The shared column is a revenue-based slice of store overhead, so it tells you more about your revenue mix than about retention. Dividing the order-level part by RC net revenue gives your variable cost rate for repeat orders. It is 100% minus RC CM2 %, plus the marketing, agency, opex, and other order fees.

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Common Pitfalls

  • Adding NC and RC total costs. This works: shared costs are split, not copied, so the two add up to Total Cost. Ad spend is different, because NC and RC CM4 each subtract all of it.
  • Missing costs show up as zeros. Each component needs the matching setup in Cost settings.

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FAQ

No single measure. Use a custom measure as shown above, or read the difference between net revenue and CM4, which includes ad spend.
Check the shared column first. Payroll, rent, and agency retainers are charged in proportion to returning customers’ net revenue, so a store where most revenue is repeat business puts most of its overhead here.
See all Contribution Margin metrics →