Ask ten stores what discount works and you will get ten different answers — and they are all right, for their store. A 10% offer can feel generous at one shop and invisible at another. The number itself is not the strategy. What matters is the depth relative to what your customers already expect from you.

So before reaching for a percentage, the real question is not "how deep" but "deep compared to what?" And the honest answer depends entirely on where your store is starting from.

Start from your own baseline

Your customers are already trained to a certain level of discounting by everything you have done before. That baseline is your reference point:

  • If you rarely discount, you do not need to go deep. A modest offer feels special precisely because it is unusual coming from you. Going aggressive would only cheapen a brand that has earned full-price trust.
  • If you discount often or run frequent sales, a small offer barely registers — customers are anchored to your usual markdown and will wait for it. You either have to go deeper to stand out, or change the kind of discount you run (more on that below).
The right depth is not a number off a chart. It is whatever reads as a real, worthwhile offer relative to what your shoppers are used to seeing from you.

The trap: you condition customers to a number

Here is the specific danger of running the same store-wide sale over and over. Customers do not just learn that you discount — they learn how much. Run "20% off" often enough and your shoppers quietly recalibrate: 20% off becomes the real price in their heads. Full price stops being the reference point, and your sale price becomes the new baseline they refuse to buy above.

That is the trap, and it compounds. Once customers are anchored to a number, a smaller discount feels like a price increase, so you cannot dial it back without losing them. You are now locked beneath a floor you set yourself — every campaign has to clear the expectation your past campaigns created. The discount stopped being a lever you pull and became the price you are stuck at.

If you are already discount-reliant: ease up, do not quit cold

If that describes your store, the instinct might be to slam the brakes — stop the sales and reset expectations. Do not. Going cold turkey on a customer base conditioned to discounts usually just tanks your sales, because the discount was the reason many of them were buying. You have to wean, not cut.

The way out is gradual, and it is less about depth than about shape. Instead of one blanket markdown across the whole store, shift the same discount energy into offers that are narrower and more personal — a curated set of products per customer rather than a site-wide banner. The customer still gets the "I got a deal" feeling that keeps them engaged, but the deal is no longer something everyone gets on everything. Over time, that reconditions the expectation: deals become something you receive, not something the whole store is permanently on.

Here is what makes that exchange fair to the customer, not just convenient for you: instead of a single flat percentage, give each personalized offer a range — a little below and a little above your usual discount. Some products land below the old blanket number, but some land above it. So the customer is not simply losing their guaranteed sale; they are gaining the chance at a better deal than a flat percentage ever gave them. That upside is what turns "we are ending the store-wide sale" into "your deals just got more personal — and sometimes better."

Practically, that might look like: narrowing how much of the catalog is ever discounted, moving from always-on store-wide sales to defined campaign windows, and replacing blanket depth with personalized relevance. You are not removing the discount — you are changing who sees what, so the dependency on a permanent store-wide sale slowly dissolves.

Some of this is about your future customers, not your current ones

Be realistic about who you can recondition. Part of your existing base may simply be too far gone — customers who have only ever bought on a deep store-wide sale and will keep waiting for one no matter what you do. You can try to ease them over, but some will churn, and chasing them with ever-deeper discounts is throwing margin at a habit you accidentally trained.

That is not a failure — it reframes the goal. The reset is partly generational: every new customer you bring in is a clean slate who has not been taught to expect a blanket sale. If you stop conditioning new arrivals to that expectation from day one — giving them personalized, occasional offers instead — your healthier base grows underneath the old one. Over time the discount-dependent cohort shrinks as a share of your customers, and the customers who replace them were never anchored to a number in the first place.

You may not be able to un-train every existing customer. But you can stop training the next one — and that is where a sustainable discounting habit actually gets built.

The tradeoff to manage

Weaning off blanket sales pits two forces against each other:

  • Maintaining interest. Discounts are part of why your customers engage. Pull them back too fast and you lose the attention that was driving sales.
  • Reconditioning expectations. The long-term goal is customers who do not assume everything is always on sale — who buy at full price and treat a discount as a genuine occasion.

Move too aggressively toward reconditioning and you lose interest now. Stay blanket forever and you never escape the dependency. The balance is to keep the reward, change its form: personalized, occasional, relevant offers preserve the engagement while steadily teaching customers that deals are earned and individual, not a permanent store-wide state.

You do not have to choose between keeping customers interested and protecting your margins. You change the kind of discount — from blanket and expected to personal and occasional — and you get both, over time.

Where Randio fits

This is exactly what personalized catalogs are built for. Instead of a store-wide markdown, each customer receives their own unique selection at their own prices — which keeps the deal-driven engagement alive while removing the "everything is on sale" signal. For a discount-reliant store, it is the weaning mechanism: the offers keep coming, but they become personal and contained rather than blanket and permanent. For a store that rarely discounts, it is a way to run promotions at all without putting the whole shop on sale.

Either way, the depth question gets easier once the discount is personal: you are no longer marking down your entire catalog, so you can spend a sensible amount where it actually earns a sale — and let the personalization, not the percentage, do the heavy lifting.