Why your delivery fee should survive every discount code you run
A generous code on a physical order can wipe out the postage as well as the profit. On store.fan the delivery fee holds, and that is deliberate.
The sale went well, which is what makes the maths afterwards so annoying. Thirty per cent off for a weekend, a decent run of orders, and then Monday morning spent working out why the payouts look thinner than the order count suggested. The discount did what you asked. It just also came off the postage, which was never yours to discount — it belongs to whoever carried the box.
Where the money leaks
A discount code is a promise about the product. When it is applied to a total that also contains postage, it quietly becomes a promise about the postage too. Nobody intends this. It happens because the total is one number and the code is one percentage, and the two meet without anyone asking whether they should.
The reason it hurts more than it looks is that postage is not a margin line. Your product has room in it: the price you charge sits above what the thing cost you to make, so a discount eats into a cushion. The postage has no cushion at all. Every penny you knock off it comes straight out of your pocket, because the carrier will charge you the same amount regardless of what code your buyer typed in.
The honest complication is that buyers are not doing arithmetic. Somebody who sees 30% off expects roughly 30% off what they pay, and a total that comes down by 24% instead can read as mean if you have not explained it. That is a copy problem, and it is a much easier problem than a margin problem.
What a code is allowed to touch
The behaviour on store.fan is that the delivery fee holds. You name a flat fee, it is shown to the buyer before payment, and a discount code reduces the product side while the postage line stays where you put it. The table below is the difference between that and the arrangement most people end up with by default. Codes, along with countdown campaigns, live on Pro — the details sit on the discounts feature page.
| Discount applied to everything | Discount applied on store.fan |
|---|---|
| The code reduces product and postage together | The code reduces the product; the delivery fee you named survives |
| Deep discounts turn shipping into a cost you fund twice | Postage is covered at the same level whatever the code says |
| Your worst-margin orders are the ones going furthest | Distance costs the same to you on a sale day as on a normal one |
| You avoid running codes on physical items at all | You can discount a print or a candle without dreading the payout |
| Margin per order changes depending on which code was used | Margin per order changes only by the amount you chose to give away |
Setting up a sale that does not cost you postage
The mechanics take about ten minutes. The thinking takes slightly longer, because the number you pick should be a floor you have worked out rather than a figure that felt generous on a Friday night. If you have not set a product up yet, start on the free plan and build a draft you never publish while you work through the sum.
- 1Work out your true cost per parcel first: item, packaging, consumables, postage and a replacement allowance. That is your floor.
- 2Check the delivery fee on the product covers the postage line of that sum for a typical destination, not the cheapest possible one.
- 3In the dashboard, create the discount code and set the percentage or the fixed amount you are willing to give up on the product.
- 4Test the code on your own storefront and read the payment step. Confirm the delivery fee is still sitting there at full value.
- 5Write the offer copy in terms of the product: "30% off every print" rather than "30% off everything", so the total matches the promise.
- 6After the sale, open your per-product analytics and compare units sold against the margin you actually kept.
The weekend sale, both ways
Take a £24 candle with a £4.50 delivery fee and a real cost to you of £11.60 including postage. At full price the buyer pays £28.50 and, after Stripe's card processing fee, you keep something close to £16 against that £11.60 of cost. Now run 30% off. Applied to the product only, the buyer pays £16.80 plus £4.50, and you have given away £7.20 — painful but chosen.
Applied to the whole total instead, the buyer pays £19.95 and you have given away £8.55. The extra £1.35 is postage you funded on top of the discount you meant to give. Across sixty orders that is £81 that went to the carrier out of your own margin rather than out of the buyer's payment. Nothing dramatic happened. It just leaked, one order at a time, which is how margin usually disappears. The numbers here are an illustration of the mechanism, not a claim about what any sale will do.
See how a delivery fee and a product price sit side by side at checkout before you run your first sale.
Create a free accountThe mistake most people make
Most creators set the discount depth first and check the margin afterwards, if at all. The better order is to decide the smallest amount you keep on a discounted order, then work backwards to the percentage that leaves it. If 30% off takes you below your floor once postage and packing are counted, the answer is not to hope for volume: it is 20% off, or a code that only applies to your digital products, where there is no parcel to fund. You can see what else sits behind the Pro plan on the features overview.
Yes. The fee you named is shown before payment and is not reduced by the code. Say "30% off the print" in your copy and the total will match what the buyer expects.
The delivery fee is a field on the product rather than something a code switches off. If you want a free-postage promotion, set the fee to zero for the period and put the postage cost into the product price, then change it back afterwards.
Yes, and that is often the cleaner place for a deep discount. A digital download costs you nothing to deliver, so the whole discount comes out of margin you actually have.
Analytics break down views, buyers and revenue per product, so you can compare a sale week against a normal one product by product. Full analytics are available from the Starter plan upwards.
A discount should be a decision you made, not a side effect of how a total was assembled. Keep the postage out of the negotiation, tell buyers exactly what the code applies to, and your sale weekends will stop producing that quiet Monday-morning surprise.
Set your delivery fee once, run sales on the product price, and keep the postage covered every time.
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