Black Friday discount ideas that do not lose money: 7 ways to keep your margin

TL;DR

• • Find your floor. Landed cost per order is the number under which no sale price goes.
• • Mark down one hero, not the store. A store-wide 25% can take away more than half your profit on every order.
• • Every code gets a minimum and a cap. Then it only fires on carts worth having, and never gives away more than you meant.
• • Bundles and free delivery above a value grow the order; they are the cheapest offers in the table.
• • Buy 2 Get 1 depends on your cost ratio. Run the numbers before you switch it on. It is a Growth feature.
• • End by expiry, not by timer. The coupon’s Expires date closes the sale; you put prices back by hand.

The seven mechanics, side by side

Example figures only. “Per unit” compares with ₹349 on a full-price single; “per order” compares the whole order with that single.

Read the last column twice. The mechanics that cost you a few rupees per unit and leave you far more per order are the ones that make the order bigger. The one that looks most generous, Buy 2 Get 1, leaves the least in this example, because ₹380 of every ₹799 is product. Your ratio will be different; the profit margin calculator and the discount calculator will tell you which row you are in.

1. Know your floor before you pick a number

The floor is your landed cost: what one delivered order costs you in total. Product, box, bubble wrap, the courier if you pay it, the payment gateway’s cut, the extra charge on a cash-on-delivery order, and a share of returns if you take them. Write it down per product before Black Friday, because every mechanic below is measured against it. A sale price under the floor is a loss you paid a courier to make.

Two things people forget. The payment charge is a percentage of what the buyer pays, so it falls a little with the price, but the box and the courier do not. And a cash-on-delivery order that comes back costs you the courier twice and the product nothing; if a chunk of your orders are COD, the floor is higher than it looks. How to get customers to pay online instead of COD is worth reading before sale week, and the COD vs prepaid calculator puts a number on it.

2. Mark down one hero product only

Compare the second and third rows of the table. A store-wide 25% leaves ₹149 on every order. The same 25% on one hero product leaves ₹149 on that product and ₹349 on everything else, and everything else is what most people buy once the hero has brought them in. The hero is the headline; the catalogue is the margin.

Choose a hero buyers already know the price of, so the markdown is believed. On SitesPlaced, open the product and put the sale price in Price and the old price in Original price; the original shows struck through next to the price. Free on every plan. There is no scheduler, so on Tuesday you clear the Original price by hand. The cart shows live prices, so anyone holding Monday’s cart sees the new price when they return.

3. Put a threshold and a cap on every coupon

A percentage code with no rules is a discount on your smallest and your largest orders alike, and both hurt: the ₹299 order was not worth discounting and the ₹4,999 order gave away ₹750. Two settings fix both. The minimum order value means the code only works on a cart above a line you choose, so the buyer at ₹1,299 adds something to reach ₹1,499. The maximum discount is the most rupees the code can take off, whatever the cart.

In the table, “15% off, minimum ₹1,499, cap ₹200” gives away ₹200 on a two-unit cart and leaves ₹568, against ₹349 on a single. On SitesPlaced, under Settings → Discounts, create the code and open More rules: set Minimum order value and Max discount (the cap is for percentage codes; a flat ₹150 code is already capped). Coupons discount products only, never the delivery charge, and there is no total-uses cap, so these two rules and the expiry are your limits. Free.

4. Sell the discount as a bundle

A bundle turns a discount into a product. Three of your ₹799 item sold as one listing at ₹1,999 is a ₹398 saving the buyer can see, and for you it is three units in one box with one courier, leaving ₹789 per order in the table. The buyer did not type a code and you did not touch the price of the single. It also lets you move a slow item alongside a fast one, which a coupon cannot do. On SitesPlaced a bundle is simply a new product under Products with its own name, photo, price and stock; if the parts come in sizes, add them as options on the bundle. Free. How to increase average order value has more on what to put together.

5. Buy X Get Y, and choose where the free item comes from (Growth)

Buy 2 Get 1 is the offer that most needs the table. It is a third off per unit, which on a ₹380-cost product sold at ₹799 leaves ₹388 on three units, barely more than one unit at full price. On a ₹120-cost product sold at ₹399, the same offer is a clear win. The rule of thumb: Buy X Get Y suits products where the cost is a small share of the price and buyers genuinely want three, such as socks, cables, soaps, cookies, candles.

On SitesPlaced it is part of the Growth plan (₹499 a month, or ₹499 once for 30 days with no autopay). Under Settings → Discounts → Offers, set Buy quantity and Get free, choose all products or one category, and then the setting that protects margin: Free item comes from. Same products as above makes the cheapest of the three free; Any product in the cart opens it up; A different category lets you give away a low-cost add-on, buy two hoodies and get a pair of socks free, which is the version that costs you least. The discount is worked out on the server at checkout.

6. Scope the code to a category, and decide what it does to sale items

Not every product can carry the same discount. Your own-brand t-shirts at a high margin can take 20%; the branded earbuds you resell cannot take 5%. A code that applies to the whole cart treats them the same. Under More rules, set Applies to → A category and the code discounts only products in that category; everything else in the cart is charged in full.

The second rule is the one sellers miss. If your hero product already has an Original price and a buyer types the sale code, does it get discounted twice? The Sale items rule on each coupon decides: Discount the sale price stacks the code on the markdown; Calculate on the original price gives the buyer whichever is lower, the sale price or the coupon price, never both; Not valid on sale items skips marked-down products entirely. For Black Friday, choose one of the last two, and tell buyers the code is “not on sale items” in the announcement bar. Free.

7. Limit the hours with a coupon expiry, not a timer

The last row of the table is a 20% code that works on Friday only, with a minimum and a cap. It leaves ₹618 on a two-unit order, and more to the point it ends. A discount that runs for a week is a price; a discount that runs for a day is a reason. SitesPlaced has no countdown timer, no flash-sale scheduler and no stock counter, and this is the honest way to run limited hours without one.

Set Expires on the coupon under More rules. The code works through the end of that day and is refused the next morning. Make a second code for the weekend with its own expiry of 30 November if you want a longer tail at a smaller discount. Put the end time in the announcement bar under Settings → Branding, edited by hand: “FRIDAY20 ends tonight at midnight.” If you need to stop a code early, untick Active and it is refused at once. The morning after, clear the Original price on the hero and change the announcement bar again. A sale that ends when you said it would is what makes buyers act on the next one.

Three habits that quietly lose money

• Discounting personalised and made-to-order items. The price is your labour; the sale is your busiest week. Keep them at full price and offer free gift wrap instead.
• Matching a marketplace’s price on a branded item. Their floor is lower than yours. Sell the accessory, the bundle or your own product, and let them have the branded single.
• Leaving a “sale” on for weeks. If the Original price is still showing in mid-December, buyers have learnt that your price is the sale price. End it, and start the Christmas offers fresh; they are in Christmas and New Year sale ideas.

Setting these up on SitesPlaced

Original prices, coupons with a minimum, a cap, a category, a sale-items rule and an expiry, bundles as products, the free-delivery bar and the announcement bar are all on the free plan: ₹0, 0% commission, UPI and cards through your own Razorpay, PhonePe or Cashfree account, cash on delivery and WhatsApp checkout. Buy X Get Y is part of Growth at ₹499 a month, or ₹499 once for 30 days with no autopay, or ₹4,990 once for a year. The sales boosters page lists what else Growth adds.

Starter, at ₹199 a month or ₹199 once for 30 days, gives you your own domain, removes the badge, adds store analytics so you can see which code was used on which order, and makes your store’s pages answer about 4× faster than on the free plan: about 75 ms instead of about 330 ms, measured on live paid stores on 28 September 2026. “Answer” means how soon the page starts arriving, before the photos load. The code FREE7 gives 7 days free on Starter or Growth when you set up autopay; cancel before the first charge and you pay nothing. The season’s plan is on the Black Friday page for sellers.

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