Most merchants pick a discount by feel: "twenty-five percent sounds right." It does sound right — but how it sounds has nothing to do with what is left over once the last day of the campaign closes.
Start from the margin, not the percentage
Before any campaign, know one number for each product: the gap between what you sell it for and what it costs you. Buy at 100, sell at 140, and your margin is 40 — roughly 28% of the selling price. A 25% discount takes that product to 105: five riyals of profit where there were forty. You haven't lost money, but you are working for almost nothing.
The working rule: never go past half your margin. At a 28% margin, the comfortable ceiling is around 14%. Every point beyond that needs a reason — a slow mover, stock about to expire, or an item that reliably pulls other items into the same basket.
A flat discount is the most expensive easy decision
One percentage across the whole catalogue is easy to apply and costly in outcome, because your catalogue isn't uniform. Some products carry 50% margins, others 12%. The same percentage means profit on the first and loss on the second.
The answer isn't to skip the campaign — it's to split it: a small group at a deep discount to draw attention, a wider group at a light one, and a group you don't touch at all. Three small campaigns run in minutes beat one campaign that eats a quarter's profit.
Set the price you will not go below
Before you hit apply, ask what the lowest acceptable price for this product is. That number is your floor. Any calculation that lands beneath it should stop there — not go through and surface later on a statement.
What happens after matters more than what happens during
The costliest mistake is rarely the percentage. It's forgetting to end it. A product left discounted for two extra weeks loses several times what the campaign earned — and worse, customers learn the lower price and stop buying at the original one.
Decide the end date at the same moment you decide the start date, not later.
