Ecommerce Is Facing a Customer Acquisition Crisis

As the cost of winning a new customer climbs to unsustainable levels, a new Shopify platform is rewriting the economics of loyalty by having advertisers, not merchants, pay for rewards.

For most of the last decade, the growth formula for online brands was simple: buy attention, convert it into customers, and repeat next month. That formula has quietly stopped working.

The cost of acquiring a new customer has climbed 222 percent over the past eight years. The average brand now loses roughly $29 on every new customer it brings in, up from $9 in 2013. In 2025, a single Google Shopping click cost nearly 34 percent more, even as returns slipped. Privacy changes, platform saturation, and crowded ad auctions have pushed acquisition costs to the point that, for many merchants, growth no longer pays for itself.

Faced with that math, brands have pivoted toward keeping the customers they have. Retaining one costs a fraction of acquiring it, and repeat buyers spend meaningfully more than first-timers. The result is a loyalty boom: more than 90 percent of companies now run a loyalty program.

The trend reached a milestone this month. On June 16, Verizon unveiled a sweeping loyalty overhaul under its new chief executive, handing customers 3 percent back in Verizon Dollars every month and a weekly sweepstakes for marquee experiences, from World Cup tickets to festivals. When one of the country’s largest brands rebuilds its pitch around rewards, the message is clear: loyalty is now the battleground for retention.

But a structural problem hides within the boom, regardless of size. Every one of those programs, Verizon’s included, is funded the same way: the company giving out the rewards pays for them. Loyalty has become a near-universal expense rather than a differentiator, shifting the cost of growth from acquisition to retention without eliminating it. For a Shopify merchant on thin margins, every point issued is money out the door.

That is what makes the stakes so high. Shopify, which now powers more than 14 percent of U.S. ecommerce and grew merchant sales volume by nearly 29 percent last year, anchors a vast ecosystem of independent brands hit hardest by the acquisition crisis. Its own data shows how quickly the ground is shifting: traffic from AI search is up eightfold year over year.

Into that gap steps GetJacked, a Shopify loyalty platform with a deceptively simple premise: what if the merchant did not pay for the rewards at all? Instead of merchants funding loyalty, advertisers do. Gaming studios, streaming services, and digital brands spend heavily to acquire users; GetJacked routes a slice of that spend into shopper rewards on Shopify stores, so every point earned generates revenue for the merchant rather than eroding margin.

The model received its strongest validation this week when GetJacked announced an exclusive global partnership with adjoe, a leading user acquisition platform for mobile gaming. The deal channels roughly $2 billion in annual gaming ad demand into rewards on Shopify stores, at no cost to the merchant.

“This partnership rewrites the economics of e-commerce loyalty that has been stuck with for years,” said Ari Kassman, CEO of GetJacked. “Acquisition costs broke the old growth model, and merchant-funded rewards just move the expense around instead of removing it. We flip that: the advertiser funds the reward, the shopper earns far more than a typical program offers, and the merchant makes money on every point issued. Loyalty stops being a cost center and becomes a revenue source.”

What makes it work for all three parties is the company’s Progressive Rewards architecture. Rather than paying out in full for installing a game, GetJacked splits the reward: a small portion at install and the bulk, typically around 90 percent, only when the shopper reaches a real milestone, such as a set level within a set window. The reward stays real for the shopper, the studio gets an engaged user, and the merchant earns from the whole exchange.

The platform is already live. Its first integration runs on Lohnr, an everyday-luxury brand doing roughly $600,000 a month, and it sits in the Shopify App Store with five-star reviews. GetJacked says it integrates in minutes with no engineering and counts demand partnerships with Hulu, Paramount+, TikTok, Coinbase, and more than 100 other global brands.

“We have built something genuinely differentiated at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and commerce,” said Jared Goetz, Founding Investor of GetJacked. “Our Progressive Rewards model is designed around what actually works for shoppers, game studios, and merchants alike. The reward has to be real and reachable for the shopper, and the engagement has to be meaningful for the studio. We spent a year getting that balance right, and the result is a program that none of the three parties could have built on their own.”

Whether advertiser-funded loyalty becomes the default remains to be seen. But the acquisition crisis behind it is not easing, and a model that turns rewards from a cost into a revenue stream is a bet on where commerce is headed next.