There is no right discount. There is a right floor for your margin, a ceiling your customers will notice, and a setting between them that decides how the money is actually spent. This article gives you starting ranges for three kinds of store and the reasons behind each, so you can move them with your own numbers once you have some.

The three controls

A Randio discount is set per pool, as a fixed percentage or a range. A range has a minimum, a maximum, and Higher discounts: Even, Uncommon, Rare or Very Rare, which sets how often a customer's draw lands near the top. The range is never violated; the setting only moves the odds inside it.

That means depth is really two decisions. The range decides what the offer looks like. The setting decides what it costs. A range of 10–20% on Very Rare costs you close to 10% on average while some customers see 20%.

Starting ranges by kind of store

You rarely discount. A full-price brand, a maker, a store whose customers do not expect sales. Start at 10–20% with Higher discounts on Rare. The floor is enough to register as a personal gesture; the ceiling is low enough that nobody learns a new price for your products. The personal page does the work, not the number.

You run sales often. If your customers have learned to wait for 30% off, a 10% personal offer reads as nothing. Start at 15–30% with Higher discounts on Uncommon. The ceiling has to look like the sale they were waiting for, so some of them see it. The floor is where you make money back: most draws land in the lower half, which is already shallower than your usual sale. Each run, lower the floor or move the setting toward Rare, and watch whether orders follow. This is how a discount-reliant store eases off blanket sales without going silent.

You have stock to clear. Clearance belongs in its own pool, not in the main range. Put the products you need gone in a Limited pool at 25–40%, capped at the number of customers it takes to clear them, and keep the rest of the catalog shallow. The deep number is contained: it reaches a set number of people, on the products you chose, and nowhere else.

What moves the numbers

Three things you can read after a run or two:

  • Discount dependency, on the Analytics page: order volume by the discount applied. If orders cluster at the top of your range, the ceiling is doing all the work and the floor is just decoration. Narrow the range from the bottom, or move Higher discounts toward Even so more customers see the number that sells. If orders spread across the range, the floor is earning its keep; try lowering the ceiling.
  • Margin per pool. Because each pool has its own rule, the question is never "what is my discount" but "what is the discount on this pool". Deep ranges on low-margin staples are the common mistake; keep staples fixed and shallow.
  • The per-product limit. One discounted unit per product per catalog is the default, so a deep percentage is bounded by quantity as well as by the cap on a Limited pool.

Change one thing per run, by a step of about 5%, so the next Discount dependency chart tells you what did it.

What depth does not do

It does not make the catalog page load, the email arrive, or the product be in stock. A customer who does not open the email never sees the range. Before you go deeper, check the reach numbers on the campaign page and the funnel in Analytics; a shallower offer that more people see usually beats a deeper one that fewer do.

It also does not set your cost. A deeper discount lowers the line price the commission is charged on and does not change the outreach catalog count; the budget side is in Budgeting a month of Randio. The pool and limit mechanics that contain a deep number are in Designing a discount strategy.