On the third Sunday of October, someone walks into your store or your site, buys a gift for their mother, and does not show up in your base again until the same date next year. The marketing team counts it as a new signup, drops them into the usual welcome flow, and wonders sixty days later why that “new customer” never reacted to anything.
The buyer is not the one who uses the gift
In a regular purchase, buyer and user are the same person: what they bought predicts what they will need next. In an Argentina’s Mother’s Day gift, they are not. The person paying picks a product for someone else, with that other person’s own taste and size, and that second person (the one who could actually become a customer) never even lands in your CRM. The data you keep belongs to the buyer, but the product experience belongs to someone else you cannot message.
The ticket rose in pesos, not in purchasing power
Per CAME, Argentina’s 2025 Mother’s Day average ticket was $37,124 pesos, up 9.8% from 2024. Read on its own, that looks like a good date. But with that period’s inflation, the same ticket represented 16.7% less real purchasing power for gifts: the fourth straight year-over-year sales decline for the date (-3.5% at constant prices), even though 83.5% of retailers went out with promotions, discounts, and interest-free installments. The average ticket also inflates with installments on other dates on Argentina’s calendar: the mechanism here is different (inflation, not financing), but the reading error is the same, looking at the peso figure without adjusting it.
How to stop treating this buyer like a new customer
- Tag the purchase as an occasion gift, crossing date and product category, not just order value. You do not need a new checkout field if the pattern is already recognizable.
- Pull that buyer out of the standard win-back flow. They already met their goal: they are not coming back in 30 or 60 days because they never intended to buy again, they intended to gift once.
- If you can identify who received the gift (for example, with a welcome code in the packaging or shipment), give that person their own first touch, with no assumed purchase history.
- Measure the date in real terms, not just nominal ones. A ticket that rises in pesos but falls in purchasing power is not a better date than last year, it is a date that sold less gift for more money.
It is the same distinction we apply in growth in Argentina: an occasion buyer and a customer in a retention stage are not the same segment, and treating them the same spends win-back budget on someone who never had the intent the flow assumes.