How do I measure the impact of discounts and promotions with iDBQuery?
Ask iDBQuery 'Did last month's 20% promo actually lift profit, or just move volume?' It compares sales, margin, and units for discounted versus full-price orders, returns the net effect as a chart, and cites every figure back to the promotional and non-promotional rows behind it.
Discounts can grow volume while quietly shrinking profit. iDBQuery lets you measure the real impact of a promotion against your own orders instead of eyeballing a revenue bump.
- You'd ask iDBQuery: 'Compare discounted vs full-price orders last month: units sold, gross revenue, average discount, and gross margin, and tell me the net profit effect.'
- It filters your orders by promo flag or discount amount, computes each metric for both groups, and returns a side-by-side chart plus a table.
- Each figure is cited to its source rows, so 'the promo cost £14k in margin' is auditable against the actual discounted lines.
The key question is incrementality, and iDBQuery helps you frame it: 'How did discounted-week volume compare to the same weeks last year and to non-promo weeks?' It keeps the thread and pulls prior-period data from the same one live model. Because product cost may live in an ERP and orders in a store database, it joins them so margin is real, not assumed. You can save the analysis as a shareable report before the next promo, and let the Analyst agent flag which SKUs were discounted but showed no volume lift, wasting margin, complete with the rows that prove it.
Updated 2026-06-22