Free tool
Set your gross margin and the markdown you are about to take. This shows how many more units you have to sell just to end up with the same gross profit dollars you had before, and what that does to your revenue and your margin along the way.
Full-price retail minus landed cost, as a percent of retail.
Off the full retail price.
The formula. Units required = d ÷ (m − d), where d is the discount and m is the gross margin, both as a percent of retail. Revenue required = m(1−d) ÷ (m−d) − 1. Margin left after = (m−d) ÷ (1−d).
What "below cost" means. When the discount meets or exceeds your gross margin, every unit sold loses money. No volume fixes that. Selling more makes it worse.
What this does not include. This is gross profit only. It ignores the labor, freight, packaging, payment fees and returns that the extra units generate, all of which scale with volume. Your real break-even is worse than the number above, usually by a lot.
Most retailers can tell me their markdown dollars to the penny and cannot tell me what percentage of their floor is on sale on a random Tuesday. The RetailLAB watches sell-through, size-curve health and markdown risk across every SKU, so the discount conversation happens before the margin is already gone.
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