Promo Calendar Margin-Checker
Stack-Gap Tools
A discount changes your price, and your costs stay where they are. This projects the margin on every promotion before you commit to it, counts the orders you would have won anyway at full price, and tells you the deepest discount you can run before the math turns negative.
| Promo | Start | End | Type | Value | Orders | Would've bought anyway | Ad spend | Basket × | COGS × | Return % |
|---|
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| Promo | Days | Eff. discount | Promo AOV | Revenue | Margin / order | Contribution | CM % | Full-price counterfactual | Net incremental | Break-even orders | Max safe discount | Verdict |
|---|
How to read this. Contribution is revenue minus product, fulfillment, processing, and returns, minus the ad spend supporting the promotion. Full-price counterfactual is what the would-have-bought-anyway orders would have contributed at no discount, which is the margin the promotion gave away for nothing. Net incremental is the promotion's contribution minus that counterfactual, and it is the number that answers whether the sale was worth running. Max safe discount is the depth at which contribution per order reaches zero, before ad spend. These figures are a planning model, not accounting output. Every calculation runs in your browser, and nothing you enter is uploaded.
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Discount depth, offer structure, and the media behind it all move together. Spend 30 minutes with a Hawke Media strategist and leave with a promotion that holds its margin.
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Who this is for
This is for small and mid-sized business owners who set a promo calendar and learn how it went from the following month's accounts. It is also for ecommerce and DTC teams planning the annual sale cycle: spring events, mid-year clearance, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and end of season. Those decisions get made in a planning meeting, and the consequences arrive in Q1.
If someone in your business has proposed 40% off on the grounds that it worked last year, this tool defines what working means in dollars. Merchandising and finance get the most out of running it together, because the argument between those two teams is usually a disagreement about a number neither side has calculated.
Why promotions cost more margin than anyone expects
Three things go wrong, and they compound.
First, discounts come off revenue while costs stay fixed in dollars. Take 30% off an $86 order and you lose $25.80 of revenue, while your product still costs $27.50 to make, the box still costs the same to ship, and the person packing it still gets paid. On an order carrying roughly 50% contribution margin at full price, a 30% discount does not remove 30% of your profit. It removes about 60% of it.
Second, cannibalization. This is the number most promo reports leave out. Some share of the orders arriving during a sale would have arrived anyway. Those customers were already in the funnel, already had the item in the cart, and already intended to buy, and you handed each of them a discount for nothing. In a typical five-day promotion, a third to a half of the volume is not incremental. The report shows a record week and the P&L shows the truth a month later.
Third, discounts train behavior. A business that discounts predictably teaches its customers to wait, which lowers full-price conversion, which makes the next promotion feel more necessary. Days on promotion is the metric that catches this. Once you are discounting more than about a third of the calendar, you have not run promotions. You have changed your prices and left the old ones on the website.
Know one number before any planning meeting: your discount ceiling. It is the discount depth at which contribution per order reaches exactly zero, before a single dollar of ad spend. For a typical consumer-goods business it lands near 60%. That sounds generous until you notice that a promotion at 36% off already gives away about 60% of the margin on every order, including all the orders you would have won at full price.
Know your discount ceiling before the next planning meeting
Most promo calendars are set on last year's revenue numbers rather than last year's margin. Spend 30 minutes with a Hawke Media expert and get a clear view of what your offers can carry.
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What the tool does
You enter your full-price unit economics once, then lay out the calendar: each promotion's dates, discount type and depth, expected orders, the orders you would have won anyway, and the ad spend supporting it. For each promotion it projects margin per order, total contribution, and net incremental result, which is contribution minus what the cannibalized orders would have produced at full price. That figure answers whether the sale was worth running.
It also computes a maximum safe discount for each promotion, adjusted for basket lift, buy-one-get-one cost multipliers, and the higher return rates that discounted goods carry. It shows how many additional orders, ones that exist only because of the discount, you would need to break even against doing nothing, and it lays the year out in a color-coded calendar you can read in about four seconds.
How to use it well
Be honest about the cannibalization input, because the whole model rests on it. A workable estimate is your baseline daily order rate multiplied by the length of the promotion. If 200 orders a day is normal and the sale runs five days, roughly 1,000 of those orders were coming regardless. Model the return rate separately for discounted goods, since clearance and deep-discount purchases come back at noticeably higher rates than full-price ones.
Then use it as a planning gate rather than a post-mortem. Run every proposed promotion through it before the calendar is locked, and let it stop the ones that come back red. The promotion you decide not to run is worth more than the report you would have written afterward.
Every calculation runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored, or transmitted anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
How do I estimate how many orders would have bought anyway?
Start with your baseline daily order rate from a comparable non-promotional period and multiply it by the length of the promotion. If you normally take 200 orders a day and the sale runs five days, roughly 1,000 orders were coming regardless. Adjust for seasonality, since a Black Friday baseline is not a February baseline. For a more precise read, hold a customer segment out of the promotion and compare their conversion rate to the promoted group; the difference is your true incrementality. With no data at all, assume a third of promotional volume is cannibalized. That estimate is conservative and still uncomfortable, which is usually the right posture.
What is the maximum discount I can safely offer?
It is the depth at which contribution per order reaches zero, and it depends entirely on your unit economics. For a business with 32% COGS, about $9.50 of fulfillment cost, and 8% returns on an $86 order, the ceiling sits around 60%. That is the point of total ruin rather than a target. A practical guideline is to stay below half your ceiling on regular promotions and reserve deeper cuts for genuine inventory clearance, where you are recovering cash rather than earning margin. The tool calculates your specific ceiling and recalculates it per promotion, since buy-one-get-one structures and higher return rates move it substantially.
Why does a small discount cut my profit so much more than it cuts my price?
Because your costs do not discount. Product cost, shipping, packing, and returns handling stay the same in dollars whether the customer paid full price or 30% less. The discount comes entirely out of the margin layer sitting on top of those costs. On an order carrying 50% contribution margin, a 30% discount removes roughly 60% of the profit, and 40% off removes about 80%. This is why a promotion can drive record revenue and still leave you with less money than a quiet week at full price.
Should I include ad spend in the promo calculation?
Yes, for the spend that exists because of the promotion. Promotional campaigns typically run at higher budgets and higher CPMs, especially during competitive periods like Black Friday when everyone bids at once. If you would have run that budget anyway, leave it out. If it is incremental to the promotion, it belongs in the promotion's cost. The tool separates margin per order, which excludes ads, from total contribution, which includes them, so you can see whether a promotion is failing on price or on acquisition cost. Those are different problems with different fixes.
How many days a year should I be on promotion?
There is no universal answer, and the trend matters more than the level. Once you are discounting more than roughly a third of the calendar, you have repriced your catalog and your list price has become decoration. Full-price conversion falls, customers learn to wait, and each promotion has to work harder than the last. The tool reports days on promotion as a percentage of your planned span so this appears during planning rather than showing up as unexplained margin erosion twelve months later.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. Every calculation runs locally in your browser using JavaScript embedded in the page. Nothing you enter is transmitted to a server, saved to a database, or logged. Closing the tab clears it. To keep a record, use the CSV download or print to PDF; both are produced on your own device.