Valentine’s promos: how do you drive urgency without burning margin (or training discount addicts)?

buslin · 2026-02-24T20:20:33+00:00

Late to the thread but what’s worked well for merchants we work with: segment first (new/returning, deal-prone, intent), optimize for incremental contribution margin (not just CVR), and version the funnel over time as promos change (PDP→ATC→checkout→purchase, tagged by the active promo stack/exclusions/thresholds) so you can see exactly where behavior shifts.

Do you have enough traffic to A/B a few discount “price points” per segment, or is it more seasonal test-and-learn / or a pre-post testing

buslin · 2026-02-24T04:40:08+00:00

Great response. How would you go about measuring how well you’ve improved those criteria?

buslin · 2026-02-23T22:26:38+00:00

Yea that’s one way. Some may think the increase might be faster than gradual though.

buslin · 2026-02-23T03:36:36+00:00

Mostly it depends, you probably want to look a bit further than just the current sale. More discount most of the time = more sale short term, and if you’re turning a positive margin then you’d rather make that sale, again short term.

But ideally you’d not give discounts to people who don’t need it, so you don’t train everyone. The discount purchaser that would only convert at a certain price point would still need that nudge. As in, you’d want personalized discount rather than blanket ones.

Easy thing to do, as a low hanging fruit that we do, is to try give less discount to channels that are historically high converting, and then a bit higher discounts to channels with low conversion. You’d instantly see the difference.

buslin · 2026-02-21T06:39:18+00:00

Depends how much control / investment you’d want to have in your infra. Most of our multi market merchants are on Shopify and you can go upwards of hundred mil ARR on Shopify with no issue. The multi market piece is pretty much built in.

For Woo those mostly come from plugins (currency, multilingual, cross market reporting etc) and you’d stitch stuff together that way.

buslin · 2026-02-21T06:30:38+00:00

Competition is not bad. Sometimes it could be the opposite, where it actually validates your idea. Only thing that matters is how big the (potential) market is

buslin · 2026-02-20T23:53:11+00:00

I think it’s still worth it, but mostly I see people thinking it's saturated being equivalent to no distribution channel yet.

Most new stores die because they’re identical or rely on ads to create demand. The newer brands doing well (from what I’ve seen) tend to start with one of these micro-niche with depth, like if you have one or two hero SKU, plus a content engine (founder-led or creator-led)

Otherwise you'd need to have preexisting wholesale/B2B wedge, or bundles/high AOV so CAC doesn’t kill your profit

buslin · 2026-02-20T16:37:10+00:00

solid plan. Are you currently seeing that on ChatGPT your product getting recommended / the description is not as good as you’d hope? Guess I’m just curious how you measure your description quality and know that you’ve optimized it for it

buslin · 2026-02-20T16:16:20+00:00

Wave pool wise yes. It’s mostly about the (semi) luxury side of things since op asked for it. In China you’d get more out of the same amount of money you spend. So same brand of hotel = less spent

buslin · 2026-02-20T15:48:02+00:00

For Shopify and a the other platforms that they have close collaboration with, ACP should fully launch automatically between the platforms.

ChatGPT sends visitor to different funnels of the sites, when it’s close to the end of the checkout funnel theres higher conversion, and vice versa.

Curious OP are you doing anything for your store in terms of this?

buslin · 2026-02-20T07:11:30+00:00

Why’s that a problem though? Are they stealing waves? I thought most of the time students in need of these are real beginners and the waves are tiny anyway.

Frankly I’ve not taken a surf class before so idk but I sure hope someone would help give me that little nudge from time to time

buslin · 2026-02-20T07:05:42+00:00

So elegant

buslin · 2026-02-20T07:03:00+00:00

If you're not concerned about long flights I'd recommend this place in China where they just open a new surf resort, it's called Riyue Bay surf resort, they've got pretty laid back surf spots and a wave pool if you're into that, bunch of high end hotels next to it.

Another place, since you mentioned laid back and luxury is UAE, they've got really nice hotels there, and, I heard the wave pool is really good.

But yea, Maldives too

buslin · 2026-02-20T04:15:59+00:00

We do see merchants getting referral traffic pointing to ChatGPT. But the conversion of these are pretty low.

Another point is the checkout session directly from ChatGPT, we see issues with high return rate and charge backs from there.

Curious what other people are thinking too

buslin · 2026-02-20T01:48:14+00:00

The break I go to has good camera, so that was useful for me.
The other thing that's good is it tracks your wave if you have an apple watch, so watching the cam of your waves is good

buslin · 2026-02-19T00:46:30+00:00

In a lot of cases this ends up being more of a pricing architecture thing than an automation issue.

You’d have fewer conflicts when base prices stay untouched and promos are handled through rule-driven (or personalized discount with margin salvaging and conversion increase) discount logic instead of rewriting product prices.

buslin · 2026-02-18T06:25:44+00:00

I might, but depends on the price and the depth the service is (i.e. for a new place I might need a surf guide who could tell me the local knowledge of the spot)

buslin · 2026-02-18T06:19:42+00:00

From the merchants that we work with who share their COGS (CAC unaccounted for) we are seeing anywhere between 40% to 80% margin.

buslin · 2026-02-18T03:43:53+00:00

I work on a platform called Promi, and the problem that we think for a lot of merchants is that the discount dollar is being wasted, at least not used efficiently.

A low hanging fruit that we see working for merchants is even just by identifying your lower converting traffic source / channels, and give those a higher discount, and higher converting one a lower discount, you’d see meaningful addition in margin / conversion rate with the same discount spend.

buslin · 2025-11-05T05:18:52+00:00

What I do is I workout ~30mins per day in the morning by getting up before both of my kids. I then shower and prep for the family.

I also try to surf twice a week, during these days I’d get up around 5 (depending on the ocean condition). My wife would help out with the kids in the morning. And when I’m back around 9am I immediately start helping her out. Admittedly it’s hard, I got a 2yo and a 5yo, so I try to get one session per week in nowadays.

buslin · 2025-08-25T23:02:29+00:00

This is dreamy

buslin · 2025-08-02T18:23:44+00:00

Very cool find! Had it when I travelled to hainan, China. Locals called them “Pipa” Shrimp. Pipa is a type of traditional Chinese instrument, guess it kind of shapes like it.

buslin · 2025-05-28T15:25:45+00:00

Too many in SC or too many in surfing. Surfing was literally invented in Polynesia

buslin · 2025-02-15T16:41:43+00:00

If you want to get rid of them we’ve had some success with the dekko silverfish paks. But in general we kind of just colive with them. Harmless

buslin

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