Symptom
The distortion lives in the separation between acquisition cost systems and margin systems — CAC lives in marketing platforms while gross margin lives in Stripe and neither is required to face the other in the same report.
You asked
CAC is evaluated without accounting for gross margin differences — masking unprofitable customer segments behind an improving headline efficiency metric.
Symptom
The distortion lives in the separation between acquisition cost systems and margin systems — CAC lives in marketing platforms while gross margin lives in Stripe and neither is required to face the other in the same report.
Cause
Discount-driven and low-value channels acquire customers at below-average CAC while generating below-average gross margin — the acquisition metric improves while the Margin Coverage Ratio deteriorates toward and below breakeven.
Impact
Budget scales toward channels that appear efficient on CAC but are destroying margin on a per-customer basis — at 0.79× coverage every new customer acquired costs more than they return in gross margin.
CAC is evaluated without accounting for gross margin differences — masking unprofitable customer segments behind an improving headline efficiency metric.
The distortion lives in the separation between acquisition cost systems and margin systems — CAC lives in marketing platforms while gross margin lives in Stripe and neither is required to face the other in the same report.
Discount-driven and low-value channels acquire customers at below-average CAC while generating below-average gross margin — the acquisition metric improves while the Margin Coverage Ratio deteriorates toward and below breakeven.
Budget scales toward channels that appear efficient on CAC but are destroying margin on a per-customer basis — at 0.79× coverage every new customer acquired costs more than they return in gross margin.