Every new customer costs more than the last one, and a growing share of them are buying somewhere that keeps the data instead of you.

Customer acquisition cost has been climbing for years as ad auctions get more competitive and platforms compete harder for the same attention. McKinsey’s research is blunt about the fix: acquiring a new customer can run up to 5x the cost of retaining an existing one, and CAC alongside marketing ROI at the individual-customer level are the efficiency indicators a D2C brand actually has to manage.^[4] Most D2C brands still run acquisition and retention as two separate budgets, reported by two separate teams, with no shared view of which channel produced a customer worth keeping. The payoff for getting it right shows up at the top: companies with an established D2C business saw 30% higher year-over-year share-price growth than peers without one across 2012 to 2022.^[3]

One B2B and D2C brand managing more than 10,000 SKUs named streamlining quote to order as a core need, because that workflow currently spans several disconnected systems, costing them visibility into the sales pipeline and opportunities to improve conversion.^[13] That is the real cost of disconnected systems: not just higher overhead, but slower, less predictable revenue.

Unifying marketing spend and Salesforce customer data means CAC and retention get optimized together. The same record shows what a shopper cost to acquire and what they are actually worth over time, rather than two disconnected numbers reconciled by hand at the end of the quarter.

Amazon alone holds close to 40% of all US ecommerce sales, more than four times its nearest competitor, and takes in more than 79% of US retail-media ad spend.^[1] Shoppers have followed: 63% now say they prefer buying on a marketplace over a brand’s own website, with 47% using marketplaces for product discovery ahead of Google itself.^[2] In Australia, 69% of online shoppers use marketplace apps alongside retailer and brand sites directly.^[6] Every one of those transactions is a real sale, and a shopper whose email, order history and next purchase your brand never gets to see or influence directly.

The same brand also pointed to fragmented data as the blocker: customer data sits across different sales channels and platforms, so nobody can see the full picture, which in turn prevents confident decisions about inventory and customer engagement.^[13]

An owned storefront good enough to actually bring shoppers back to it, built on the same Salesforce data as the rest of the business, turns “sold through a marketplace” back into “a customer we know.”

Recurring revenue looks stable on a dashboard right up until churn quietly erodes it, and a meaningful share of that churn is not a customer who decided to leave. It is a card that failed to charge and was never recovered.^[8] Subscription brands that treat voluntary cancellation and failed-payment churn as the same problem miss the cheaper, more preventable half of it.

A subscription wine community described the challenge as complexity on three fronts at once: handling recurring billing, keeping members engaged through fresh content, and reducing involuntary churn from failed payments, all of it currently spread across disconnected systems and costing revenue that was never meant to leave.^[12]

Built-in recurring billing paired with payment recovery catches the involuntary-churn share before a lapsed card quietly becomes a lost subscriber.

An estimated 19.3% of online sales are returned, and once shipping, inspection, restocking, customer service and markdowns are counted, each one costs $20 to $40.^[5] But returns are not optional to skip: 82% of shoppers say free returns are an important consideration when buying online at all.^[5] Free shipping (75%), simple or free returns (60%) and loyalty programs (56%) are consistently the top three things that move a shopper from browsing to buying,^[7] and 86% of shoppers now buy across a mix of retailers, brands and marketplaces, so the comparison is always one click away.^[7] Cutting returns friction and cutting margin are, in practice, two versions of the same problem.

Pairing a smoother returns experience with a rewards program that gives shoppers a reason to keep the item, or come back for the next one, protects margin without becoming the friction point that costs the next sale.

Migration cost is commonly the real reason a brand stays on a platform it has outgrown. Estimates for moving off a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce run from around $5,000 for a simple store to $50,000 or more for a heavily customized mid-market build, with total first-year cost reaching $50,000 to $120,000 once platform, apps and agency support are counted.^[9][10] A meaningful share of merchants who would financially benefit from switching never do, because the switching cost, not a missing feature, is what stops them.^[9]

None of that has to be rebuilt here: existing payment providers and existing integrations stay connected rather than replaced when a brand moves onto StoreConnect.

StoreConnect is a product company. We build and support the platform; we do not run implementation delivery ourselves. Every deployment is delivered by a certified Salesforce implementation partner, with StoreConnect providing the platform, the product roadmap and direct technical support throughout.