Discount the product, not the postage: how codes treat delivery

The plan for the weekend is thirty per cent off. It sounds generous rather than reckless, because you have checked that thirty per cent of the product price still leaves you something. What most people do not check is the other line on the order. If the discount also swallows the delivery fee, then every parcel that goes out over the weekend costs you the postage twice: once in the discount and once at the counter. Whether that happens depends entirely on how the code is built.

Where the money actually goes on a discounted physical order

A physical order has two parts that behave differently. The product price is yours to set and yours to reduce. The delivery fee is a reimbursement for a cost you are about to incur at a post office counter, and that cost does not care about your promotion. A courier will not charge you less because you ran a sale. Treating both parts as one discountable total blurs a line that reality keeps sharply drawn.

The genuinely hard part is that percentages feel harmless. Thirty per cent off a GBP 25 item is GBP 7.50, which sounds fine until you remember that GBP 7.50 might be twice your gross margin on that item once the materials, the packaging and the postage are paid. Small physical products have thin margins by nature, and a percentage that would be comfortable on a digital file can be ruinous on something you post.

There is also a psychological trap. Discounts pull in buyers who were not going to purchase at full price, which is the point, but they also pull in buyers who would have. Over a weekend those two groups look identical on your dashboard. Only the postage receipts tell you what the promotion really cost.

Discounting the whole total against discounting the product

Plenty of sellers set up promotions that reduce everything on the order, sometimes without realising it. The store.fan behaviour is deliberately narrower: a code reduces the product, and the delivery fee you named survives it, still shown to the buyer before payment. You can read what else Pro includes on the pricing page, and the discount codes feature page covers how the codes themselves work.

Building a code that does not cost you money

Do the arithmetic on the item alone, then decide the percentage. The order below takes about twenty minutes and it is the difference between a promotion and a donation.

1. 1Write down what one unit costs you: materials, packaging and any consumables, ignoring postage for a moment.
2. 2Subtract that from the product price. What remains is the only money a discount can come out of.
3. 3Pick a floor: the lowest product price you would accept, and calculate the percentage that lands on it rather than the other way round.
4. 4In Dashboard, Discounts, create the code with that percentage or a fixed amount, whichever is easier to explain.
5. 5Check the buyer's view by applying the code to a test order and confirming the delivery line has not moved.
6. 6If you are running it as a deadline offer, pair it with a countdown campaign so the end date is visible rather than implied.
7. 7Announce it once, clearly, saying that the code applies to the item and delivery is charged as usual.
8. 8After the promotion, compare units sold and postage spent for the period against a normal week.

A worked example, with illustrative figures

Say a print sells at GBP 30 with a GBP 4 delivery fee. Materials and packaging come to GBP 9, and the postage costs you GBP 3.80, so the delivery fee is very nearly break-even by design. At full price your margin on the item is about GBP 21 before Stripe's card fee. Apply a twenty-five per cent code and the item earns GBP 22.50, leaving roughly GBP 13.50. Tighter, still comfortable, and postage remains funded because the GBP 4 did not move.

Now imagine the same code taking twenty-five per cent off the whole GBP 34. The buyer pays GBP 25.50, of which the postage still costs you GBP 3.80, and your margin drops by another pound on every single parcel at exactly the moment you are posting more of them. One pound sounds trivial. Across a busy weekend it is the difference between a promotion that funded your next print run and one that did not. These figures are illustrative, and the pattern is not.

The mistake most people make

The mistake is choosing a round number because it sounds like a sale. Thirty per cent, fifty per cent, half price on everything. Round numbers are chosen for their ring, not their arithmetic, and on physical goods the arithmetic is unforgiving. Start from the floor price you can live with and let the percentage be whatever it turns out to be, even if it is a slightly odd twenty-two. The second mistake is apologising for the delivery fee in the announcement. You do not need to. Explain it once, plainly, and buyers accept it, particularly if they saw the same number before the sale started. If you want a wider view of how promotions fit alongside your other products, the features overview is the place to start.

A promotion should risk your margin, not your postage. Keeping those two amounts separate is what lets you be genuinely generous on the thing you made without paying for the privilege of packing it.