68% of Your Discount Sales Are Going to the Wrong Customers - ft. Carla Penn-Kahn (ProfitPeak)

Episode Description

Most eCommerce brands run site-wide discounts to clear slow inventory and win new customers. Carla Penn-Kahn has the data, and it says they are mostly doing the opposite. Studying her own customer base alongside Klaviyo's, she found that the majority of orders placed during a discount event come from existing customers buying your best sellers, not the dead stock you are trying to move. Discount often enough and you do not grow faster. You train your best customers to wait.

Carla is the co-founder and CEO of ProfitPeak, a profit-intelligence platform for Shopify brands. Before that she scaled her own kitchenware brands from $3M to $30M across 25,000 SKUs, then exited to Kitchen Warehouse in 2023. She built ProfitPeak because the tools she had as an operator were not good enough to make real commercial decisions, and she now watches the same patterns repeat across hundreds of brands.

In this episode we get into the discounting trap and what to do instead, why the right marketing budget is set by the P&L and not the ad dashboard, and why agentic commerce is the shift most brands are completely unprepared for. Carla also offers listeners 50% off their first three months at ProfitPeak on an annual contract - just email through profitpeak.io and mention Profits on Purpose and the keyword Nate.

Key Takeaways

• The frequency is the problem, not the discount. Across ProfitPeak's data and Klaviyo's, 68% of orders during a discount event come from existing customers. The brands that discount most often grow the slowest.
• A sale moves revenue forward, it does not create it. After a discount period ends, revenue can fall up to 27% for the next two to four weeks, because the customers who would have paid full price already bought.
• Sequence discounts, do not blanket them. Segment inventory into winners, risers, underperformers, and genuine dead stock. Protect the winners, give underperformers visibility before cutting price, and discount real dead stock early at 20% rather than late at 60%.
• Your marketing budget is a P&L decision, not an ad-dashboard one. When the financials are not in the room, spend gets set by fear or by whoever is loudest. The CFO belongs in the marketing conversation.
• Welcome discounts train customers to never pay full price. The first price a customer sees is the one they remember. Segment discount-trained buyers from full-price buyers and market to each differently.
• Get your product data machine-readable before agentic commerce arrives. AI agents buy on fit, materials, shipping, and returns, not emotion. Move your data out of spreadsheets and into a real-time source of truth now.

See More:

• ProfitPeak - profit intelligence for Shopify brands
• Carla Penn-Kahn on LinkedIn
• Listener offer: 50% off your first three months on an annual ProfitPeak contract - email through profitpeak.io, mention Profits on Purpose, keyword Nate

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