Average CPA for ecommerce

The survey publishes no single ecommerce row. Its retail-shaped categories: shopping and gifts at $49.40, apparel at $97.51, furniture at $106.70 average cost per lead. The spread is the lesson: ecommerce CPA only means something relative to order value.

A $50 CPA is catastrophic on a $45 basket and trivial on a $600 sofa. Divide CPA by AOV: furniture's $106.70average against four-figure order values is a healthier ratio than gifts' $49.40 against $40 stocking-stuffers. The formal version is the margin-scaled ceiling: AOV × gross margin × (1 + repeat orders), the break-even CPA. First-order rule: if CPA exceeds AOV × margin on the first order, you are buying customers on the promise of repeats, so the repeat rate had better be measured, not hoped.

• Measured repeat rate: subscription-style consumables can pay 2-3× first-order break-even. Cohort data, not projections, justifies it.
• Channel mix: search captures gift-buyers cheaply; new-product discovery runs through Meta and TikTok where no published benchmark exists (the honest comparison).
• Amazon's share of the blend reports in ACoS, not CPA; translate via the ACoS mapping before averaging anything.

Survey scope: search campaigns, 2026 survey▸LocaliQ · 2026 survey. Full table on the benchmarks hub.