Discounted price
$40.00
Free calculator
Type your price, cost, and discount percent. See the new margin and how much extra volume the discount requires just to match today's profit. No email, no gate, nothing leaves this page.
The calculator
The boxes start filled with an illustrative example, not a benchmark. Replace it with your own numbers.
What this unit costs you, landed. Not what you sell it for.
The percent-off you are considering for the sale.
Extra volume needed just to match today's profit
You'd need to sell 100.0% more units at this discount just to match today's total profit.
discounted price = price * (1 - discount / 100) original margin = (price - cost) / price * 100 new margin = (discounted price - cost) / discounted price * 100 original profit = price - cost new profit = discounted price - cost extra volume needed = (original profit / new profit - 1) * 100
This is the standard break-even-on-a-discount formula: because profit per unit drops, unit volume has to rise just to keep total profit flat, and it always has to rise by more than the discount percent itself.
See it on your own data Real numbers from your Shopify store, not a guess.
The extra volume figure above is the volume a discount would need to drive to match today's total profit, it is not a prediction that the discount will actually drive that much volume. Whether a sale drives real incremental demand, or just moves the timing of purchases people were going to make anyway, is a question about customer behavior, and this calculator has no visibility into it.
It also does not account for discount cannibalization: some share of the people who buy during a sale would have paid full price anyway. Every one of those sales lowers your profit with zero incremental volume to show for it, which makes the real breakeven bar higher than the number above.
Questions
Yes, mathematically, whenever margin percent drops. Because profit per unit is lower after the discount, you need more units sold just to reach the same total profit as before. This is arithmetic, not a prediction about your specific product, it holds true for any discount on any positive margin.
There is no universal number, it depends entirely on your starting margin. A higher starting margin can absorb a bigger discount before profit per unit gets uncomfortably thin. Use the calculator above with your own price and cost to see exactly where a specific discount level leaves you before deciding.
Because revenue usually does go up during a sale, and revenue is the number that's most visible day to day. Profit is a different, quieter number, and it can stay flat or even fall while revenue climbs, because each unit is contributing less to profit than it did before the discount.
The terms overlap and usage varies by retailer, but informally: a discount is usually temporary and reversible, meant to drive a short-term sales event. A markdown is often a more permanent price reduction, sometimes signaling the item is being phased down. Clearance usually implies the goal is to move remaining inventory out entirely, with margin being a secondary concern to freeing up cash or shelf space.
There is no universal safe number, it depends entirely on your starting margin. Type your own price, cost and discount into the calculator above to see the exact new margin and the exact extra volume it would take to break even for your specific numbers, rather than relying on a rule of thumb.
Next
Upstream reads real per-order cost, real per-SKU landed cost, and real per-order shipping straight from your store, and nets ad spend and returns against it too. It is the connected version of the calculator above.