Promotion profitability calculator for marketplace campaigns

The decision you make before the campaign starts

Marketplaces regularly invite sellers into campaigns at a set discount or price level. Joining can bring visibility and volume. It can also turn a profitable product into one that loses money on every unit, while the campaign report shows only rising sales.

The decision usually has to be made on a deadline, by one person, with a spreadsheet and partial data: the discount is known, but the true commission, shipping, return rate, ad support and current stock cover for that SKU are scattered across the marketplace panel, the ERP and the ad accounts. Promotion Calculator brings them into one answer for the question that actually matters: at this campaign price, how much do we keep per unit, and how many more units do we need to sell to come out ahead?

What the calculation combines

• Current price and proposed campaign price for each SKU and channel.
• Commission and shipping on the marketplace in question, whether Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Amazon or N11, or your own Shopify store.
• Product cost from the connected ERP: Logo Tiger, Netsis, Mikro or SAP Business One.
• Returns, because discounted orders still come back.
• Advertising support planned from Google Ads or Meta Ads to drive traffic to the campaign.
• Stock on hand and sales velocity, so a campaign is not accepted on a product that would sell out halfway through.

What a discount really costs

A 20% discount does not reduce contribution by 20%. In this example it cuts contribution per unit from 320 to 100, so the campaign has to more than triple unit sales just to stand still. That reframes the decision: is that uplift realistic for this product on this channel, and does the stock cover it?

Questions it answers

• Which SKUs can join this campaign and stay above our margin floor?
• How many extra units does the campaign need to deliver to beat our regular contribution?
• Do we have enough stock to run the campaign without a stockout, or would it accelerate one?
• Is the campaign better used to release excess stock than to discount a product that already sells well?
• Which channel's campaign is the better use of the same discount?

Our article on product prioritization with unified data describes the same logic: a top seller may need protection rather than promotion, while healthy excess stock may justify a targeted offer.

Try the arithmetic with the free calculator

If you want to test a single campaign price yourself, the free marketplace profit calculator lets you work through the numbers by hand. Promotion Calculator inside DataSync does the same reasoning on synchronized data, so the commission, cost, returns, ad spend and stock figures come from your connected systems instead of being typed in.

Who owns the campaign decision

A campaign invitation usually lands with the e-commerce or channel team, but its consequences reach further. Marketing may need to fund traffic to the campaign. Operations has to make sure the stock is in the right warehouse. Finance carries the margin that the discount gives away.

Because Promotion Calculator runs on the same synchronized model as the rest of DataSync, each of those teams reads the campaign from the same numbers. The channel manager sees whether a SKU can join and at what contribution. Operations sees which campaign SKUs are close to their stock threshold. Finance sees the total contribution at stake across every campaign the business is considering. Nobody has to rebuild the calculation in a separate spreadsheet, and the decision to join, skip or join with fewer SKUs is made once, on shared reasoning.

After the campaign: did it pay?

The calculation before a campaign is a forecast. Whether it worked shows up afterwards, in Order Profitability, where the actual campaign orders are read after every deduction, and in Remittance, where the payout is matched back to those orders. If the campaign price should become the new regular price, SmartPricing checks that change against margin and stock before it goes live.

Promotion Calculator is one of the DataSync add-ons, and every add-on is included in every plan. Margin floors and thresholds are set with your team during SYNC configuration, and SYNC AI can surface campaign risk to the people who own the decision.