¥80,000 a month to Hot Pepper. What does a customer actually cost?

When the monthly payment goes out, what most owners look at is the total — “another 80,000 yen this month.” But that number on its own tells you nothing. The question worth asking is how many customers who will come back that 80,000 yen bought you.

Split “customers sent to you” into two kinds

From a business point of view, platform customers are two entirely different groups:

• The one-timers — they come for the first-visit coupon and leave once it’s used. Their value is the gross profit on that single visit, no more.
• The returners — the first visit comes through the platform, and after that they call you directly or simply walk in. Their value is the sum of everything they spend from then on.

The problem is that most shops mix the two into a single “average acquisition cost” and conclude it looks acceptable. But the average hides the fact that matters most: what share of your money went to people who came once.

A worked example

On the surface, acquisition cost per customer is 80,000 ÷ 40 = ¥2,000. At ¥4,000 spend and ¥2,400 gross profit, it looks profitable.

Now look again. Of that 80,000, only 8 parties brought you a long-term customer. Charge the whole listing fee to them and the cost of acquiring one returning customer is 80,000 ÷ 8 = ¥10,000.

That is the figure to compare against “what a returning customer is worth over a year.” Six visits a year at ¥2,400 gross is ¥14,400 — still comfortably worth it. But if your return rate is only 10%, the cost doubles to ¥20,000 and the arithmetic has to be redone.

So these are the three numbers to watch

• Parties who came via the platform — usually visible in the platform’s own dashboard.
• How many of them return — most shops don’t track this, and it is precisely the decisive one.
• What a returning customer spends in a year — how often, how much each time.

The second is the key one and also the hardest. A customer arriving for the second time doesn’t announce “I found you through the platform last time.” Without a ledger, that number can never be worked out.

This isn’t an argument for leaving the platform

A platform’s job is to bring people who don’t know you to your door, and it does that better than you can alone. The question isn’t whether to use one, but whether you catch and keep the people it sends.

Where you fail to catch them is usually very concrete: nobody answers the phone at peak time, a booking email goes unread, a customer who came once hears from nobody three months later. None of that is the platform’s fault, but all of it shows up in your return rate — the very number that decides your acquisition cost.

Once the maths is done, the conclusion might be to spend more, or to spend less. But at least it will no longer be driven by the sting of “another 80,000 gone this month.”